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A comet has been captured on camera streaking across the skies over Stonehenge.
Comet Neowise has been spotted by stargazers across the UK and around the world as it heads past Earth.
It was discovered in late March and became one of the few comets in the 21st century that can be seen with the naked eye as it approached the sun.
Chinese scientists have published an analysis of a curious substance on the moon which generated widespread interest following its discovery by the Yutu 2 rover last year.
The discovery was made by a Yutu 2 drive team member in July 2019, during lunar day 8 of the rover’s mission, which is part of China’s Chang’e 4 mission to explore the far side of the moon. A report by Our Space, a Chinese-language science-outreach publication, revealed the discovery on Aug. 17 and described the substance using the term “胶状物” (“jiao zhuang wu”), which can be translated as “gel-like.”
Must watch astronomy events this month.
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Comet NEOWISE made July 2020 a memorable month. Here are the astronomy events that will occur in August 2020.
August 2: conjunction of moon, jupiter, and saturn august 3: full moon
August 9: The Moon will occult Mars
The Lunar Occultation of Mars on August 9 2020 is one of the key astronomy events in August this year. Moon will pass in front of Mars. It will eclipse Mars for some time. This occultation will be visible from the parts of South America. From the rest of the world, the Moon will appear to pass close to Mars in Pisces.
August 12: The Perseid meteor shower
The flagship astronomy event of August 2020, the Perseid meteor shower will peak on August 12. Just like the Geminids of December, the Perseids are one of the best meteor showers of the year. The Perseids can produce up to 150 meteors per hour under the dark skies.
In a Q&A, spacesuit designer Amy Ross explains how five samples, including a piece of helmet visor, will be tested aboard the rover, which is targeting a July 30 launch.
NASA is preparing to send the first woman and next man to the Moon, part of a larger strategy to send the first astronauts to the surface of Mars. But before they get there, they’ll be faced with a critical question: What should they wear on Mars, where the thin atmosphere allows more radiation from the Sun and cosmic rays to reach the ground?
Amy Ross is looking for answers. An advanced spacesuit designer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, she’s developing new suits for the Moon and Mars. So Ross is eagerly awaiting this summer’s launch of the Perseverance Mars rover, which will carry the first samples of spacesuit material ever sent to the Red Planet.
Scientists have traced mysterious radio signals detected on Earth to a dead star within our Milky Way galaxy.
The millisecond-long burst of radiation was emitted by a magnestar — a type of star with an extremely powerful magnetic field — roughly 14,000 light-years away, according to a study.
Known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), signals such as these have baffled scientists for years and typically originate from far beyond the Milky Way.
The St. Patrick Bay ice caps on the Hazen Plateau of northeastern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada, have disappeared, according to NASA satellite imagery. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) scientists and colleagues predicted via a 2017 paper in The Cryosphere that the ice caps would melt out completely within the next five years, and recent images from NASA’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) have confirmed that this prediction was accurate.
Mark Serreze, director of NSIDC, Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, and lead author on the paper, first set foot on the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in 1982 as a young graduate student. He visited the ice caps with his advisor, Ray Bradley, of the University of Massachusetts.
“When I first visited those ice caps, they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape,” said Serreze. “To watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me away.”
Geneva. At the 40th ICHEP conference, the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced new results which show that the Higgs boson decays into two muons. The muon is a heavier copy of the electron, one of the elementary particles that constitute the matter content of the Universe. While electrons are classified as a first-generation particle, muons belong to the second generation. The physics process of the Higgs boson decaying into muons is a rare phenomenon as only about one Higgs boson in 5000 decays into muons. These new results have pivotal importance for fundamental physics because they indicate for the first time that the Higgs boson interacts with second-generation elementary particles.
Physicists at CERN have been studying the Higgs boson since its discovery in 2012 in order to probe the properties of this very special particle. The Higgs boson, produced from proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, disintegrates – referred to as decay – almost instantaneously into other particles. One of the main methods of studying the Higgs boson’s properties is by analysing how it decays into the various fundamental particles and the rate of disintegration.
CMS achieved evidence of this decay with 3 sigma, which means that the chance of seeing the Higgs boson decaying into a muon pair from statistical fluctuation is less than one in 700. ATLAS’s two-sigma result means the chances are one in 40. The combination of both results would increase the significance well above 3 sigma and provides strong evidence for the Higgs boson decay to two muons.
Astronomers have made an exciting discovery using the Japanese Subaru Telescope. Scientists have discovered a new galaxy that has extremely low levels of oxygen present. According to the researchers, the galaxy has only 1.6% of the oxygen content of our galaxy.
What are some skywatching highlights in August 2020? 🔭
You can see the Moon posing with various planets throughout the month, and catch the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. Find out when and where to look up: https://youtu.be/fuuUbYjN9Oo
