Atlas V rocket launches 2 surveillance satellites for US Space Force | Bad weather delays SpaceX Dragon's departure from space station to Saturday | NASA's gamma-ray observatory is in safe mode after a possible wheel failure
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A powerful United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket launched two "neighborhood watch" satellites for the United States Space Force on Friday (Jan. 21). The Atlas V lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 2 p.m. EST (1900 GMT) Friday, carrying two identical Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) satellites to orbit.
A SpaceX resupply ship will have to wait at least one more day before returning to Earth. The Dragon spacecraft, which had previously been scheduled to come home on Friday (Jan. 21), is now scheduled to undock from the International Space Station on Saturday (Jan. 22) due to a "forecast of inclement weather," according to a NASA blog post. You can watch the undocking live at Space.com or directly on NASA TV beginning at 10:40 a.m. EST (1540 GMT) Saturday.
NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has temporarily stopped its science observations while the mission team investigates an issue. On Tuesday night (Jan. 18), the observatory, a gamma-ray hunting space telescope originally called the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer, went into safe mode and paused all science work. This maneuver may have been in response to a reaction wheel failure, which the mission team continues to explore.
Our sun just had a medium-sized energy burp. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) caught a mid-level solar flare on Thursday (Jan. 20) with a peak at 1:01 a.m. EST (0601 GMT). You can see the flash on the limb, or edge, of the sun, thanks to SDO's powerful imaging.
Scientists have for the first time confirmed the merger of two highly eccentric black holes. Researchers from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the University of Florida studied GW190521 — the most massive gravitational wave signal observed from a binary black hole system — to determine if the two black holes had eccentric orbits before they merged.
Black holes can not only rip stars apart, but they can also trigger star formation, as scientists have now seen in a nearby dwarf galaxy. Astronomers have previously seen giant black holes shred apart stars. However, researchers have also detected supermassive black holes generating powerful outflows that can feed the dense clouds from which stars are born. Black hole-driven star formation was previously seen in large galaxies, but the evidence for such activity in dwarf galaxies was scarce.
In 2021, there was an upsurge in peculiar sightings reported, thanks to people with smartphones or other video gear that captured these strange glimmers in the sky. Could these unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) be satellites, technology deployed by foreign governments, falling space junk or maybe even floating specialty balloons or purposely faked unidentified flying objects (UFOs)? Or could they be, well, aliens?
Watch the sun set from a particularly dark patch of Earth and you may spot a triangle of what scientists call zodiacal light extending from where our star passed below the horizon. Zodiacal light in Earth's skies is created when sunlight bounces off the dust that fills the solar system, the remains of pulverized asteroids and flurry left by passing comets. And according to new research by a team of astronomers and high school students based in China, a similar phenomenon occurs in the skies of at least a few potentially habitable exoplanets.
If you are outside doing some stargazing in the Western Hemisphere this evening and are looking up at just the right time, you might catch sight of something that will appear quite strange: a small circular cloud of light that will rapidly expand to roughly the apparent size of a full moon, before finally fading away some minutes later. What you will have just seen is not some strange atmospheric phenomenon, but a fuel dump from a U.S. Space Force (USSF) mission that launched earlier today.
