Strange Skies
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Galaxy

STEVE makes unusual summertime appearance, record breaking solar minimum update


Space Weather
Thu, 16 Jul 2020 21:09 UTC
STEVE
© Harlan Thomas on July 14, 2020 @ West of Calgary, AlbertaSTEVE/Picket Fence Aurora, NLC's and Comet NEOWISE
Even STEVE wants to see Comet NEOWISE. On July 14th, the geomagnetic phenomenon appeared over Canada, streaking the sky with mauve ribbons of light. Harlan Thomas of Calgary, Alberta, reports: "I was out shooting the comet when I noticed a mauve-looking cloud. Wow!" I thought. "STEVE has come to visit NEOWISE. How cool is that?"

STEVE is a recent discovery. It looks like an aurora, but it is not. The purple glow is caused by hot (3000°C) ribbons of gas flowing through Earth's magnetosphere at speeds exceeding 6 km/s (13,000 mph). It appears during some geomagnetic storms, often alongside a type of green aurora known as the "picket fence," also shown in Thomas's photo.

Statistics suggest that STEVE appears most often in spring and fall. What summoned STEVE in mid-summer? It may have been a CME that grazed Earth's magnetic field on July 13th. As our planet passed through the CME's magnetized wake on July 14th, hot currents and plasma waves rippled through Earth's magnetosphere. STEVE was the result.

Comment: If only all we had to worry about was an Ice Age, because discoveries like STEVE are just the tip of the ice berg when it comes to the unusual phenomena that reflects the shift occurring on our planet - and even further afield: Also check out SOTT radio's: And SOTT's Earth Changes Summary - May 2020: Extreme Weather, Planetary Upheaval, Meteor Fireballs



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Cloud Lightning

Red sprites appear in Mexico's sky after storm


Explica
Sat, 11 Jul 2020 16:28 UTC
Red sprites over Mexico
© Via Twitter @VladimirPozoC80
On Friday night, a strange phenomenon in the night sky known as sprites, caught the attention of the inhabitants of Villahermosa, Tabasco.

After the intense electrical storm that hit the capital during the afternoon, users on social networks shared photos and videos of a group of red lights in the sky of elongated appearance, as if it were sparks of fire:


Although speculation about its origin was immediately related to UFO sightings and other theories that lack scientific support, the explanation of meteorologists and specialists is that it is a luminous event that receives the name of sprites.
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Question

4 mysterious, unidentified circular objects discovered in outer space

Mara Johnson-Groh
Live Science
Thu, 09 Jul 2020 19:17 UTC
CSIRO's ASKAP
© CSIROAntennas of CSIRO's ASKAP telescope at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia.
There's something unusual lurking out in the depths of space: Astronomers have discovered four faint objects that at radio wavelengths are highly circular and brighter along their edges. And they're unlike any class of astronomical object ever seen before.

The objects, which look like distant ring-shaped islands, have been dubbed odd radio circles, or ORCs, for their shape and overall peculiarity. Astronomers don't yet know exactly how far away these ORCs are, but they could be linked to distant galaxies. All objects were found away from the Milky Way's galactic plane and are around 1 arcminute across (for comparison, the moon's diameter is 31 arcminutes).

In a new paper detailing the discovery, the astronomers offer several possible explanations, but none quite fits the bill for all four new ORCs. After ruling out objects like supernovas, star-forming galaxies, planetary nebulas and gravitational lensing — a magnifying effect due to the bending of space-time by nearby massive objects — among other things, the astronomers speculate that the objects could be shockwaves leftover from some extragalactic event or possibly activity from a radio galaxy.

"[The objects] may well point to a new phenomenon that we haven't really probed yet," said Kristine Spekkens, astronomer at the Royal Military College of Canada and Queen's University, who was not involved with the new study. "It may also be that these are an extension of a previously known class of objects that we haven't been able to explore."
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Cloud Lightning

Stunning 'jellyfish' sprites captured over French mountain range

Charlotte Edwards
The Sun
Mon, 06 Jul 2020 15:41 UTC
Red sprites over France
© Stephane Vetter
NASA has shared an image of rare 'red sprite' lightning that looks scarily similar to an alien invasion.

The red lightning can be seen branching out like jellyfish or fireworks over a French mountain range.

The amazing image was captured by photographer Stephane Vetter.

Nasa revealed it as there Astronomy Picture of the Day for July 4.

Nasa said: "A sensitive video camera on a summit of the Vosges mountains in France captured these surprising fireworks above a distant horizon on June 26.

"Generated over intense thunderstorms, this one about 260 kilometers away, the brief and mysterious flashes have come to be known as red sprites.

Comment: Last month more giant jellyfish sprites were recorded over Europe.

With the surge in sightings of red sprites in recent years (which are still considered 'rare' by some) it seems the electrical nature of our weather and changing atmosphere is becoming more apparent: For more, check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Earth changes in an electric universe: Is climate change really man-made?

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Cassiopaea

Two bright new supernovae light up nearby galaxies

Bob King
Sky & Telescope
Tue, 07 Jul 2020 19:20 UTC
Two bright new supernovae are now within the range of amateur telescopes in the western sky at nightfall.

Supernova 2020nlb
© Gianluca MasiSupernova 2020nlb in the galaxy M85 in Virgo was a 17th-magnitude blip at discovery but has grown brighter each night. Now at magnitude 12.2 (July 7th), it's bright enough to see in a 6-inch telescope. M85's supernova is currently almost a full magnitude brighter than the 13.1-magnitude field star immediately to its northeast. The supernova sits 1.0″ east and 43.2″ north of the core. North is up.
If you want to see a supernova in your lifetime, why wait around for Betelgeuse to blow up? If you have a 6-inch telescope and access to a dark sky, you can see one right now. Two actually. Both are visible in the western sky at nightfall in the neighboring constellations Virgo and Coma Berenices.

The first of the pair, dubbed 2020nlb, was discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) on June 25th in the 10th-magnitude galaxy M85. Located in Coma Berenices 60 million light-years from Earth, M85 is an elliptical galaxy a quarter again as large our Milky Way. The "M" stands for Charles Messier, an 18th century French astronomer who compiled a list of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae he stumbled on during searches for his favorite prey, comets.
Supernova 2020nvb
© Gianluca MasiLocated just 3.3″ west and 8″ north of the core, the bright supernova 2020nvb appears "stuck" to NGC 4457's bright nucleus. North is up.
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Cloud Grey

Major outbreak of noctilucent clouds (NLCs) over Europe


Spaceweather.com
Tue, 07 Jul 2020 04:24 UTC
Noctilucent Clouds on July 5, 2020 @ Budapest, Hungary
© Viktor VeresNoctilucent Clouds on July 5, 2020 @ Budapest, Hungary
Last night, July 5-6, a major outbreak of noctilucent clouds (NLCs) blanketed Europe. Electric-blue tendrils of frosted meteor smoke rippled over almost every European capital from Scandinavia to the Adriatic. "It was the most phenomenal display of NLCs I've seen in my life," says Viktor Veres, who photographed the outbreak from Budapest, Hungary.

"I was just getting ready for dinner when one of my friends, Alex, cried 'NLC party time!'," says Veres. "The electric-blue clouds were almost directly overhead. I sprinted to the car (partially dressing in the street) and drove up Gellért Hill for a view of the clouds over the most famous sights of Budapest--the Danube River, Chain Bridge, Buda Castle, and Parliament. And, yes, my dinner got cold."

Paris was also "overcast" by noctilucent clouds. "They were very bright," reports Bertrand Kulik, who shot them floating above the Eiffel Tower:

Comment: See also:

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Info

White dwarfs reveal new insights into the origin of life in the universe

Tim Stephens
UC Santa Cruz
Mon, 06 Jul 2020 21:37 UTC
Caroline's Rose
© Guillaume Seigneuret and NASANGC 7789, also known as Caroline's Rose, is an old open star cluster of the Milky Way, which lies about 8,000 light-years away toward the constellation Cassiopeia. It hosts a few white dwarfs of unusually high mass that were analyzed in this study.
A new analysis of white dwarf stars supports their role as a key source of carbon, an element crucial to all life, in the Milky Way and other galaxies.

Approximately 90 percent of all stars end their lives as white dwarfs, very dense stellar remnants that gradually cool and dim over billions of years. With their final few breaths before they collapse, however, these stars leave an important legacy, spreading their ashes into the surrounding space through stellar winds enriched with chemical elements, including carbon, newly synthesized in the star's deep interior during the last stages before its death.

Every carbon atom in the universe was created by stars, through the fusion of three helium nuclei. But astrophysicists still debate which types of stars are the primary source of the carbon in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Some studies favor low-mass stars that blew off their envelopes in stellar winds and became white dwarfs, while others favor massive stars that eventually exploded as supernovae.

In the new study, published July 6 in Nature Astronomy, an international team of astronomers discovered and analyzed white dwarfs in open star clusters in the Milky Way, and their findings help shed light on the origin of the carbon in our galaxy. Open star clusters are groups of up to a few thousand stars, formed from the same giant molecular cloud and roughly the same age, and held together by mutual gravitational attraction. The study was based on astronomical observations conducted in 2018 at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and led by coauthor Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.
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Info

New spot discovered on Jupiter


NASA
Thu, 02 Jul 2020 18:57 UTC
Clyde Spot
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSSFigure A
This image from NASA's Juno spacecraft captures several storms in Jupiter's southern hemisphere (Figure A). Some of these storms, including the Great Red Spot at upper left, have been churning in the planet's atmosphere for many years, but when Juno obtained this view of Jupiter, the smaller, oval-shaped feature at the center of the image was brand new.

The new feature was discovered by amateur astronomer Clyde Foster of Centurion, South Africa. Early on the morning of May 31, 2020, while imaging Jupiter with his telescope, Foster noticed a new spot, which appeared bright as seen through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of light where methane gas in Jupiter's atmosphere has strong absorption. The spot was not visible in images captured just hours earlier by astronomers in Australia.

On June 2, 2020, just two days after Clyde Foster's observations, Juno performed its 27th close flyby of Jupiter. The spacecraft can only image a relatively thin slice of Jupiter's cloud tops during each pass. Although Juno would not be travelling directly over the outbreak, the track was close enough that the mission team determined the spacecraft would obtain a detailed view of the new feature, which has been informally dubbed "Clyde's Spot."

The feature is a plume of cloud material erupting above the upper cloud layers of the Jovian atmosphere. These powerful convective "outbreaks" occasionally erupt in this latitude band, known as the South Temperate Belt (JunoCam observed another outbreak at this latitude back on Feb. 7, 2018).
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Map

Circumhorizontal arc, sun halo seen over Swiss Alps

Klipsi
News Flare
Fri, 26 Jun 2020 21:53 UTC
CZ and sun halo over Swiss Alps
© YouTube/Oliver Staiger
Multiple atmospheric phenomena were seen in the skies above the Swiss Alps on Les Diablerets near Sion on June 26.

The sightings of not just a solar halo but a circumhorizontal arc was a particularly special scene.

The filmer said: "A 22° solar halo is seen around the Sun, and below it, near the horizon, a bright portion of circumhorizon arc.

"The solar halo is rather common but the circumhorizon arc can only be seen in summer here when the Sun is high enough in the sky.

"The arc is some 46° below the Sun. "

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Info

Star's mysterious disappearance hints at new type of stellar death

Brandon Specktor
Live Science
Wed, 01 Jul 2020 19:30 UTC
Luminous Star
© ESO/L. CalçadaAn artist's impression of the the luminous blue variable star that mysteriously vanished. Image caption
In 2019, scientists witnessed a massive star 2.5 million times brighter than the sun disappear without a trace.

Now, in a new paper published today (June 30) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of space detectives (see: astrophysicists) attempt to solve the case of the disappearing star by providing several possible explanations. Of these, one twist ending stands out: Perhaps, the researchers wrote, the massive star died and collapsed into a black hole without undergoing a supernova explosion first — a truly "unprecedented" act of stellar suicide.

"We may have detected one of the most massive stars of the local universe going gently into the night," Jose Groh, an astronomer at Trinity College Dublin and a co-author of a new paper on the star, said in a statement.

"If true, this would be the first direct detection of such a monster star ending its life in this manner," study lead-author Andrew Allan, also of Trinity College, said in the statement.

The star in question, located about 75 million light-years away in the constellation Aquarius, was well studied between 2001 and 2011. The bloated orb was a superb example of a luminous blue variable (LBV) — a massive star approaching the end of its life and prone to unpredictable variations in brightness. Stars like this are rare, with only a handful confirmed in the universe so far. In 2019, Allan and colleagues hoped to use the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope to learn more about the distant LBV's mysterious evolution, only to discover that the star had seemingly completely vanished from its host galaxy.
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