logo
Recognizing National Space Day, National Astronomy Day at MSU's Abrams Planetarium

Recognizing National Space Day, National Astronomy Day at MSU's Abrams Planetarium

Yahoo02-05-2025
LANSING, Mich. (WLNS)– Since 1997, National Space Day has been held on the first Friday in May.
This year, National Astronomy Day is the day after it — Saturday, May 3rd; two National Astronomy Days are held each year, in the spring and fall, in conjunction with the first quarter moon cycle.
Starting today and extending through the month, will have weekend showings of a series of shorts collectively called 'One Sky.'
Dr. Shannon Schmoll, director of Michigan State University's Abrams Planetarium, says they have activities to offer all the time, and not just on these special days.
The showtimes will include a live expert pointing out elements viewers can look up and find in their own night sky. The shorts feature themes on how different places and cultures around the world relate to the night sky and constellations like Orion's Belt.
The Planetarium also offers a subscription service for a Sky Calendar that describes what watchers can see in the sky each day of the month. The calendar is free in May for space and astronomy aficionados.
Coming up on Wednesday, May 7th is the centennial opening of the first planetarium in the world, which is located in Munich, Germany. Celebrations around the event will take place throughout the planetarium community.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

NASA's summer of discontent may be coming to an end
NASA's summer of discontent may be coming to an end

The Hill

time5 hours ago

  • The Hill

NASA's summer of discontent may be coming to an end

NASA has had a difficult early summer, between a proposed budget that would eviscerate the space agency's science programs and President Trump's sudden withdrawal of billionaire private space traveler Jared Isaacman from the nomination to be administrator of NASA. Even so, there are signs that NASA's fortunes may be looking up. The space agency has a new administrator — sort of. As Ars Technica reports, Trump has appointed Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy as interim NASA administrator, pending the nomination and confirmation of a permanent space agency head. Duffy is said to have a 'colorful background' since he was a cast member in a reality show called 'Real World Boston.' But his four terms as a member of Congress constitute more relevant experience. The careers of Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), another former House member, and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), a former senator, demonstrate that political experience can be an advantage when dealing with Congress, which funds and sets the direction of NASA. Duffy may be spread a little thin, having to run the Department of Transportation as well as NASA. It is also unclear what kind of power he will have to affect policy. Duffy could confine himself to trying to enact the White House's agenda, which involves draconian cuts to NASA's science programs and focuses on human space exploration of the moon and Mars under the Artemis program. On the other hand, someone who has ties to Congress and who can get Trump on the phone could make a good start in forming a space policy that is acceptable to both the White House and Congress. Duffy as a bridge between two branches of government could be useful because Congress is in open revolt against the executive branch's space agenda. Senate appropriators are rejecting the cuts to NASA's science programs and are developing a bill that more or less funds them. The bill also reflects ideas advanced in the Big, Beautiful Bill in that it funds the Space Launch System and the Orion spacecraft past Artemis III and the Lunar Gateway. The House appropriators are marking up a similar spending bill. Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), the chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies that funds NASA, made the reason pretty clear as to why the appropriators are sticking to the original Artemis plan for now. 'For NASA, the bill reflects an ambitious approach to space exploration, prioritizing the agency's flagship program Artemis, and rejecting premature terminations of systems like SLS and Orion before commercial replacements are ready,' he said. When and how those commercial replacements would be ready is not clear. Much will depend on how private sector launch systems and spacecraft evolve. The SpaceX Starship is one of those launch systems that might become the center of a commercial Earth to moon transportation system. Unfortunately, recent tests of the Starship have resulted in spectacular failures. The Blue Origin Blue Moon is another vehicle that could become part of a commercial lunar transportation system. A smaller, cargo version of Blue Moon is slated to launch on a New Glenn rocket perhaps as early as 2025. The larger crewed version is likely years away from flying. Progress on the Starship, Blue Moon and possibly other spacecraft will doubtless inform Congress' attitude about going commercial to the moon in the future. One possible fly in the ointment is Duffy's somewhat fraught relationship with Elon Musk. While Musk's Department of Government Efficiency did initiate hardware and software enhancements to the air traffic control system, Duffy clashed with Musk over an alleged attempt to fire air traffic controllers in the midst of a series of aircraft disasters. The acrimony between the two men may be a feature rather than a bug so far as President Trump is concerned. Trump withdrew the nomination of Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator partly over alleged personal ties with his fellow billionaire. Questions remain. Can Duffy help to turn NASA, reeling from proposed budget cuts and a leadership vacuum, around? Can he make peace with Musk and continue the NASA-SpaceX partnership that has so profited both organizations? Can Trump find a permanent NASA head in a timely fashion? Can the Senate confirm that nominee quickly? Can the White House and the Congress agree on a budget and a policy that makes sense for America's space ambitions? The answers to these questions should be forthcoming with all due speed. Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled ' Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? ' as well as ' The Moon, Mars and Beyond ' and, most recently, ' Why is America Going Back to the Moon? ' He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.

James Webb Spots Planets Forming Into Solar System in Real Time, Like an Organism's First Cells
James Webb Spots Planets Forming Into Solar System in Real Time, Like an Organism's First Cells

Yahoo

timea day ago

  • Yahoo

James Webb Spots Planets Forming Into Solar System in Real Time, Like an Organism's First Cells

Astronomers have spotted a planetary system being conceived from the swirl of gas and dust surrounding a star — giving us an unprecedented, real-time look at how our solar system would've formed some 4.6 billion years ago. The findings, published as a study in the journal Nature, are the first time we're seeing such an early stage of planets being formed anywhere in the cosmos. "We've captured a direct glimpse of the hot region where rocky planets like Earth are born around young protostars," lead author Melissa McClure at the Leiden Observatory told the Associated Press. "For the first time, we can conclusively say that the first steps of planet formation are happening right now." Inchoate planetary systems have been spotted before — but they were further along in their development. Instead, what's been captured here, using the James Webb Telescope and the ALMA telescope in Chile, is roughly the equivalent of an organism's first cells being formed. The baby star, or protostar, orchestrating the system's birth is HOPS-315, a G-type star like our Sun — though much younger — located some 1,370 light years away in the constellation Orion. HOPS-315 is surrounded by a hot, rotating circumstellar envelope of gas and dust called a protoplanetary disk. There, the astronomers spotted reservoirs of matter condensing together to form solid mineral grains. Over millions of years, the mineral grains will cool off and coalesce to form larger planetesimals, which serve as building blocks of a nascent planet — either going straight to being a rocky planet like Earth, or the solid core of a giant planet like Jupiter or Uranus. Crucially, the building materials the astronomers detected were silicon monoxide gas and crystalline silicate minerals, which are believed to have played a major role in our own system's birth. "This process has never been seen before in a protoplanetary disk — or anywhere outside our solar system," co-author Edwin Bergin, a professor at the University of Michigan, said in a statement about the work. Per the AP, the solid formation is taking place in a location equivalent to the asteroid belt in our own star system between Mars and Jupiter, where the leftover materials of our system's planet forming years can still be found. Asteroids are ancient planetesimals that never got a chance to make it big, still harboring stores of silicon monoxide and crystalline silicate that astronomers have dated to estimate the timeline of the solar system's formation. The silicon monoxode and crystalline silicate were first spotted by the James Webb, indicating the presence of a protoplanetary disk. But the data wasn't clear enough to determine the exact location they were originating around the star. Fortuitously, Nature noted, the disk was oriented in a way that allowed astronomers to see it unobstructed by HOPS-315's outflow, a highly energetic jet of material that fell onto the star before being blasted into space. Outflows tend to overpower the infrared spectrum that astronomers favor to inspect dense regions like a protoplanetary disk. Thanks to the disk's orientation, though, the ALMA telescope was able to pinpoint the mineral signal's origins to a location about 2.2 astronomical units away from the star, or about 2.2 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. "We're really seeing these minerals at the same location in this extrasolar system as where we see them in asteroids in the Solar System," co-author Logan Francis, a researcher at Leiden University, said in the statement. Many aspects of our solar system's origins remain a mystery, and astronomers can't confidently say how unique its formation is. Can we use it as a blueprint for how planetary systems form throughout the cosmos, or are we a relative oddity? HOPS-315 suggests we have at least a handful of peers. To know for sure, we'll have to check back on how it's doing in a few million years — or more realistically, the James Webb and ALMA telescope will spot more burgeoning systems for us to pry into. More on astronomy: James Webb Space Telescope Spots Stellar Death Shrouds Solve the daily Crossword

Astronomers See Planet Formation ‘Time Zero' in an Alien Solar System
Astronomers See Planet Formation ‘Time Zero' in an Alien Solar System

Yahoo

time4 days ago

  • Yahoo

Astronomers See Planet Formation ‘Time Zero' in an Alien Solar System

Peering through a cosmic keyhole at distant baby star, astronomers may have opened a new window on the deep past of our own solar system. Using combined observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, an international research team has glimpsed the earliest moments of planetary creation around the protostar HOPS-315, which lies in a giant star-forming region that is located about 1,400 light-years away in the constellation of Orion. Their findings appear in a study published on Wednesday in Nature. Weighing in at 0.6 solar mass, HOPS-315 should someday grow to become a star much like our own sun; this makes it a promising stand-in for studying the first stages of our solar system's history. For now, however, it's shrouded by a vast and obscuring envelope of inflowing material—baby food for a hungry stellar newborn. [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] But JWST's infrared and ALMA's radio observations have pierced this veil, peering through a gap in the envelope to probe other structures around HOPS-315 in unprecedented detail—most notably a whirling halo of hot gas and dust called a protoplanetary disk. Such disks are wombs for embryonic worlds; in them, clumps of rock called planetesimals coalesce and eventually build up into full-fledged planets. Yet no planetesimals can form without smaller grains of crystalline minerals first condensing within the disk, which occurs as the disk's gas cools. For generations, astronomers have been literally in the dark about this process, as the enveloping clouds that nourish a protostar typically obscure its intimate details. Planetary scientists studying our own solar system haven't fared much better because more than four and a half billion years lie between them and the birth of our own star and its retinue of worlds. What little evidence we have from that distant era mostly comes in the form of calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs) preserved in ancient meteorites. Precise radiometric dating has shown these to be the oldest solid objects to arise around the sun, suggesting CAIs may be the primordial seeds from which future planets would grow. Scientists set the clock for everything around the sun using CAIs, marking their emergence as 'time zero' in our solar system's history. Presumably the CAIs were formed by mineral grains showering from the slowly cooling disk of hot gas that must have once surrounded our infant sun. But exactly how, where and when they came into being, no one really knows. Short of having a time machine to go back and look, the only way to solve this mystery is to study what we can see of this process around other infant stars—which, until these observations of HOPS-315, hasn't been very much. 'Most of what we've seen is colder, older protoplanetary disks,' says the new study's lead author Melissa McClure, an astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands. 'The period [for the formation of mineral grains and CAIs] is really short, like 100,000 years. Blink, and you'll miss it. And these young protostars are still enveloped in dense molecular clouds, which are hard to see through.' HOPS-315, however, is not only very young but also tilted at a certain angle with respect to our solar system—a position that lets astronomers see deeper and closer to the protostar. 'This system is a unicorn,' says Fred Ciesla, a planetary scientist at the University of Chicago, who peer-reviewed the Nature paper and penned an accompanying commentary. 'It has a hot inner disk that's still going through this early phase, and it's oriented so we can actually see it. That makes it very special, and I expect we still have a lot to learn from it.' Another critical contributor was JWST; earlier observations by other facilities, such as NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, had flagged the system as a promising target yet lacked the capability for thorough follow-up. 'It was Webb's massive improvements in sensitivity and spectral resolution that allowed this to happen,' McClure says. With the stars literally and figuratively aligned, McClure and several colleagues observed HOPS-315 with JWST in March and September 2023. A painstaking analysis of the data revealed the molecular fingerprints of gaseous silicon monoxide, as well as a mix of crystalline silicates—all telltale signs of solid mineral grains condensing out as the hot gas in the protoplanetary disk cools. HOPS-315 is also burping up an outflowing jet of material as it feeds, however, which the researchers worried might be the source of those signals. Subsequent observations with ALMA in November 2023 helped to confirm the mineral grains were present not in the jet but rather in a region of the protostar's disk that spans twice the distance between the Earth and the sun—and that is located at the equivalent orbit around our star of our solar system's main asteroid belt. The churning of the disk or intense stellar winds from the growing protostar may help the grains accumulate there. Although the JWST and ALMA observations did not directly detect CAIs, the ratios of the detected minerals and their location around HOPS-315 are consistent with many models' predictions of the conditions for the emergence of CAIs at 'time zero' in the very early solar system. 'This new work strongly suggests that, for [HOPS-315], conditions suitable for CAI formation occur within about [one Earth-sun distance] at an early time—a fraction of a million years' after a protostar's formation, says Phil Armitage, a planet-formation theorist at Stony Brook University and the Flatiron Institute in New York City, who was not involved in the new work. This isn't necessarily surprising, he adds, although 'you could certainly imagine other possibilities' in which CAIs would form significantly earlier or later in a protostar's evolution. Consequently, 'it will be interesting to see if similar signatures can be detected in systems of different ages.' Ilaria Pascucci, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, who was also not part of the new study, emphasizes that the result is so fundamentally profound that it demands very careful investigation and follow-up. 'It would be extremely important to detect CAIs in protoplanetary disks because it would allow us to connect the evolution of these disks with that of the solar system,' she says. 'But in this paper, the authors clearly state they haven't detected CAIs; they've [instead] detected crystalline grains that could have formed in an environment where CAIs could form, too. It's a very interesting link.' Observations of protostars such as HOPS-315, she adds, can be very difficult to interpret. 'There is the star, the disk, the wind, the jet, the envelope—these are very complex objects,' she says. 'The authors have done a really nice job of teasing out all the information they can from their observations [of HOPS-315], but this is a challenging object, so we definitely need to find and look at more.' One protostar in particular, Pascucci notes, is HOPS-68. Other astronomers observed it with Spitzer in 2011 and found similar features in the lower-resolution data that was available then. At the time, they interpreted those features as part of the protostar's obscuring envelope rather than its inner protoplanetary disk, she says, yet this new result suggests it may be time to revisit that object with JWST for another, deeper look. As for HOPS-315, McClure speculates that the system may still hold surprises. Her team's JWST data, she says, show that the outflow jet that complicated their analysis is conspicuously depleted in silicon—which happens to be the most important element for making the silicates that serve as planetary building blocks. Perhaps, then, instead of feeding the jet, the silicon has been locked away elsewhere—such as in reservoirs of dust or even larger rocky objects that are deeper in the disk. 'Our estimates suggest that something like 98 percent of the silicon we'd expect relative to the carbon we see [in the jet] is missing,' she says. 'That may be a hint that planetesimals are already forming there in a similar way that they must have in our solar system.' Solve the daily Crossword

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store