Astro Wonders

2021-05-13 23:33:34 Zhurong Rover & Tianwen-1 Lander will attempt to land on Mars at UTC 11:00PM, May 14th. (IST 4.30AM, May 15th). It will land on the Utopia Planitia region 110.32°E & 24.75°N, according to the Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA).

If the rover landing and deployment are successful, China will be the second country to accomplish this feat, after USA. It will also be the third country to achieve a soft landing on Mars, after the USSR and the USA.

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2021-05-13 20:33:07 What you're looking at is a simulation of how light behaves as it passes through the warped space around a black hole.

A photon can have its orbit bent a little, by 180°, or bent into an actual circle. Each of these then get shot toward us, building up to make a series of rings of light around the black hole.

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2021-05-13 15:30:02 The beautiful Pillars of Creation, part of an active star-forming region within the Eagle Nebula. This image – from the Hubble Space Telescope in 2017 – is one of the most highly detailed to date!

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2021-05-13 10:31:09 ​​ΜAGNETAR

If any human ever got close to a magnetar, they would quickly find themselves in dire straits. Strong magnetic fields can start to do surprising things. At the atomic level, the strong magnetic field would move all of the positive charges in your body in one direction and the negative charges the other way, spherical atoms would stretch out into ellipses and soon they would start to resemble thin pencils.

That drastic change in shape would interfere with basic chemistry, causing the normal forces and interactions between atoms and molecules in the body to break down. The first thing you would notice is your entire nervous system, which is based on electrical charges moving throughout your body, is going to stop working, And then you basically dissolve.

But our local neighborhood — which is defined as a radius of a few hundred light-years around Earth — has been surveyed and certified magnetar-free. None of these exotic objects are approaching us, and none of the massive stars nearby are likely to turn into magnetars when they die. The nearest magnetar is a safe distance of tens of thousands of light-years away. So, at least for the time being, we can rest easy and take comfort in our planet’s own meager magnetic field.

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2021-05-13 05:30:00 A Meteor and the Gegenschein

Is the night sky darkest in the direction opposite the Sun? No. In fact, a rarely discernable faint glow known as the gegenschein (German for "counter glow") can be seen 180 degrees around from the Sun in an extremely dark sky. The gegenschein is sunlight back-scattered off small interplanetary dust particles. These dust particles are millimeter sized splinters from asteroids and orbit in the ecliptic plane of the planets. Pictured here from last March is one of the more spectacular pictures of the gegenschein yet taken. The deep exposure of an extremely dark sky over Teide Observatory in Spain's Canary Islands shows the gegenschein as part of extended zodiacal light. Notable background objects include a bright meteor (on the left), the Big Dipper (top right), and Polaris (far right). The meteor nearly points toward Mount Teide, Spain's highest mountain, while the Pyramid solar laboratory is visible on the right. Open / Comment

2021-05-12 20:30:00 TODAY: The golden mirror on the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope – opened for the last time on Earth.

Get the details about the James Webb Space Telescope from here:

What is JWST?

Features of JWST

PDF on JWST

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2021-05-12 17:30:14 The gold-coated primary mirror of the James Webb telescope

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