ScientistPankaj: Happy perihelion! Earth is closest to the sun today

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

Happy perihelion! Earth is closest to the sun today

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January 4, 2022

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The Launchpad

James Webb Space Telescope completes tricky sunshield deployment

(NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez)

The James Webb Space Telescope has successfully deployed all five layers of its tennis-court-sized sunshield, a prerequisite for the telescope's science operations and the most nerve-wracking part of its risky deployment. The challenging procedure, which required careful tensioning of each of the five hair-thin layers of the elaborate sunshield structure was a seamless success today.

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Happy perihelion! Earth is closest to the sun today.

The sun is just a little bit closer in Earth's sky right now. Earth is at its closest to the sun Tuesday (Jan. 4) in its 365.25-day journey. This milestone, called perihelion, coincidentally happens near the start of the Gregorian calendar year observed by much of the world, including in North America.

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Spaceflight

Watch 'coronal streamers' streak off the sun in close-up video from Parker Solar Probe

(NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory)

A new video of solar streamers evokes the streaking stars seen during spacecraft hyperdrives in "Star Wars." The new NASA video from the Parker Solar Probe shows these mysterious sun structures up close for the first time, flowing past the spacecraft like interstellar fireflies. Previously, we could only catch a glimpse of streamers during solar eclipses.

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Last astronauts to visit Hubble Space Telescope sign coins for AMF fundraiser

As the world's eyes turn to the deployment of a new space telescope, the Astronauts Memorial Foundation (AMF) is shining light on the last astronauts to visit one. The foundation, which maintains the Space Mirror Memorial and operates the Center for Space Education, both at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, has revealed its latest fundraising effort, which combines history-making astronauts with U.S. Mint commemoratives. Now available for sale through the foundation's website are six-coin collections celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope and the STS-125 crew who were the last to upgrade the orbiting observatory more than a decade ago.

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Science & Astronomy

Toxic gas released by ancient microbes may have worsened Earth's largest mass extinction

(Dominik Hülse/UCR)

Algal blooms in coastal waters and toxic chemical exposures at oil facilities are modern problems. Their root causes, however, have a lot in common with the largest mass extinction in Earth's history 250 million years ago.

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'Cosmic monster' star spits energy with the force of a billion suns

A dense, magnetic star violently erupted and spat out as much energy as a billion suns — and it happened in a fraction of a second, scientists recently reported. This type of star, known as a magnetar, is a neutron star with an exceptionally strong magnetic field, and magnetars often flare spectacularly and without warning. But even though magnetars can be thousands of times brighter than our sun, their eruptions are so brief and unpredictable that they're challenging for astrophysicists to find and study.

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Some black holes are anything but black. We've found more than 75,000 of the brightest ones.

When the most massive stars die, they collapse to form some of the densest objects known in the Universe: black holes. They are the "darkest" objects in the cosmos, as not even light can escape their incredibly strong gravity. Because of this, it’s impossible to directly image black holes, making them mysterious and quite perplexing. But our new research has road-tested a way to spot some of the most voracious black holes of all, making it easier to find them buried deep in the hearts of distant galaxies.

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Technology

With James Webb Space Telescope's huge sunshield in place, focus shifts to big mirrors

(ESA)

We can all take a deep breath before the James Webb Space Telescope's next major deployment. On Tuesday (Jan. 4), Webb finished bringing its huge, five-layer sunshield up to the proper tension, wrapping up the most complex and tricky operation of the $10 billion observatory's lengthy deployment phase. The mission team can therefore now turn to the next big-ticket item on its to-do list: getting the telescope's secondary and primary mirrors into the proper configuration. But it'll take a while to check those boxes.

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Entertainment

'Space Force' Season 2 will land on Netflix in February

(Netflix)

Netflix has confirmed that the space-themed satire "Space Force" will return early this year — Friday, Feb. 18 to be precise. The streaming service hasn't given any clues away yet, not even a trailer, but it's more than likely to pick up from the ending of Season 1 with the threat of nuclear war hanging over everyone's heads, the arming, disarming and rearming of Habitat One, potential conflict with the Chinese and General Naird (Steve Carell) headed back to the Space Force to deal with the situation.

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