Top News - scass.sharjah.ac.aescass.sharjah.ac.ae/en/Documents/Astronomy_Physics_News_Vol_7... · 3...

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Top News Russia’s Roscosmos may take part in creation of ‘Martian Town’ in Dubai LIGO Sees Smallest Black Hole Binary Yet Pluto’s hydrocarbon haze keeps dwarf planet colder than expected Closest temperate world or- biting quiet star discovered Orbital Path Podcast: The 11 Dimensions of Brian Greene New pulsar result supports particle dark matter Sky-sweeping Telescope Sees First Light What is dead may never die Scientists invent technique to map energy and momen- tum of electrons beneath a material’s surface Engineers create stable plas- ma ring in open air Is there (frozen) life on Mars? NASA detects solar flare pulses at Sun and Earth This Week’s Sky at a Glance, Nov. 18-24, 2017 Nov. 23, 2017: Sharjah Observatory Open House (18:00 - 19:00) Nov. 17, 2017: Special Trio Encounter: Crescent-Venus-Jupiter Nov. 18, 2017 Saffar 29, 1439 AH Volume 7, Issue 46 2 3 4 6 7 5 Special Read: Ozone ups and downs 8 9

Transcript of Top News - scass.sharjah.ac.aescass.sharjah.ac.ae/en/Documents/Astronomy_Physics_News_Vol_7... · 3...

Top News

Russia’s Roscosmos may take part in creation of ‘Martian Town’ in Dubai

LIGO Sees Smallest Black Hole Binary Yet

Pluto’s hydrocarbon haze keeps dwarf planet colder than expected

Closest temperate world or-biting quiet star discovered

Orbital Path Podcast: The 11 Dimensions of Brian Greene

New pulsar result supports particle dark matter

Sky-sweeping Telescope Sees First Light

What is dead may never die

Scientists invent technique to map energy and momen-tum of electrons beneath a material’s surface

Engineers create stable plas-ma ring in open air

Is there (frozen) life on Mars?

NASA detects solar flare pulses at Sun and Earth

This Week’s Sky at a Glance, Nov. 18-24, 2017

Nov. 23, 2017: Sharjah Observatory Open

House (18:00 - 19:00)Nov. 17, 2017:

Special Trio Encounter:Crescent-Venus-Jupiter

Nov. 18, 2017 Saffar 29, 1439 AH Volume 7, Issue 46

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Special Read:

Ozone ups and downs

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Russia’s Roscosmos may take part in creation of ‘Martian Town’ in Dubai

Mars Scientific City will occupy 1.9 million square feet

The United Arab Emirates are planning to create “Mars Scientific City,” an ambitious project that would simulate the conditions of life on Mars.

Russia’s space corporation Roscosmos will consult the United Arab Emirates Space Agency in the im-plementation of the Martian town project in Dubai, Roscosmos chief Igor Komarov told Sputnik.

“We have agreements that we shall provide consul-tations not only in preparation of UAE astronauts but also in the implementation of these projects ... I think that we shall take part as the relations develop,” Ko-marov said when asked about Russian experts taking part in the Martian town project.

In October, UAE Space Agency Director General Mo-hammed Ahbabi told Sputnik that the UAE and Ros-cosmos were planning to discuss the cooperation in the training of astronauts.

In September, Emirati media reported that the coun-try would build a district in Dubai dubbed Mars Sci-entific City in order to simulate the life conditions on the Mars.

It would occupy an area of some 1.8 million square feet and the construction would cost some $136 mil-lion.

On Monday, a representative of the UAE Space Agen-cy told Sputnik that the international researchers would work on the project focusing on preserving water, energy and food in the conditions similar to the Martian ones....Read More...

LIGO Sees Smallest Black Hole Binary Yet

This graph shows the five black hole mergers discovered us-ing gravitational waves, according to their mass in Suns. The LIGO and Virgo teams usually include a sixth potential event, LVT151012, in this graph, but because the signal’s strength was too weak to qualify as a “discovery” we have removed it from this version. The teams do include LVT151012 when calculating how common black hole mergers are in the universe, though.LSC / LIGO / Caltech / Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)

On November 15th, five months after the spacetime rip-ples jiggled LIGO’s instruments, astronomers announced the detection of their sixth gravitational-wave discovery, which is the fifth from the merger of two black holes. The event, GW170608, came from the union of the smallest black holes scientists have yet “seen” using this tech-nique.

The waves hit LIGO at 02:01:16 Universal Time on June 8th, during the project’s second observing run (November 30th to August 25th). Their passage triggered the alarm at the site in Livingston, Louisiana, but the detector in Hanford, Washington, was under routine maintenance and had its alert system turned off. Even with the ongoing tinkering, the Hanford interferometer detected GW170608, too.

Although Europe’s Virgo gravitational-wave observatory was still in its commissioning phase and didn’t observe the event, the Virgo team contributed to the analysis, which appears in a preprint paper on arXiv.org.

Based on the signal’s characteristics, the two teams infer that the initial black holes were roughly 7 and 12 solar masses and created an 18-solar-mass black hole, radiating away a Sun’s worth of energy in gravitation-al waves. The marriage happened more than a billion light-years away. With only two detectors, the team can only say that the signal came from somewhere in a huge, 520-square-degree swatch of sky in the Northern Hemisphere.

The spin of the final black hole is 69% of the maximum value it could be — once again matching the predicted 70% rate for black holes that have been created by the merger process. There’s also no sign that ...Read More...

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Pluto’s hydrocarbon haze keeps dwarf planet colder than expected

An artist’s impression of the view of the moon Charon through Pluto’s atmospheric haze layers above the mountain landscape of bedrock water ice covered partially with deposition of dark, reddish haze particles.

The gas composition of a planet’s atmosphere general-ly determines how much heat gets trapped in the atmo-sphere. For the dwarf planet Pluto, however, the predicted temperature based on the composition of its atmosphere was much higher than actual measurements taken by NA-SA’s New Horizons spacecraft in 2015.

A new study published November 16 in Nature proposes a novel cooling mechanism controlled by haze particles to account for Pluto’s frigid atmosphere.

“It’s been a mystery since we first got the temperature data from New Horizons,” said first author Xi Zhang, as-sistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz. “Pluto is the first planetary body we know of where the atmospheric energy budget is dominated by solid-phase haze particles instead of by gases.”

The cooling mechanism involves the absorption of heat by the haze particles, which then emit infrared radiation, cooling the atmosphere by radiating energy into space. The result is an atmospheric temperature of about 70 Kelvin (minus 203 degrees Celsius, or minus 333 degrees Fahrenheit), instead of the predicted 100 Kelvin (minus 173 Celsius, or minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit).

According to Zhang, the excess infrared radiation from haze particles in Pluto’s atmosphere should be detectable by the James Webb Space Telescope, allowing confirma-tion of his team’s hypothesis after the telescope’s planned launch in 2019.

Extensive layers of atmospheric haze can be seen in imag-es of Pluto taken by New Horizons. The haze results from chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere, where ultra-violet radiation from the sun ionizes nitrogen and meth-ane, which react to form tiny hydrocarbon particles tens of nanometers in diameter. As these tiny particles sink down through the atmosphere, they stick together to form ag-gregates that grow larger as they descend ..Read More...

Closest temperate world or-biting quiet star discovered

This artist’s impression shows the temperate planet Ross 128 b, with its red dwarf parent star in the background. This planet, which lies only 11 light-years from Earth, was found by a team using ESO’s unique planet-hunting HARPS instrument. The new world is now the second-closest temperate planet to be detect-ed after Proxima b. It is also the closest planet to be discovered orbiting an inactive red dwarf star, which may increase the like-lihood that this planet could potentially sustain life. Ross 128 b will be a prime target for ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, which will be able to search for biomarkers in the planet’s atmosphere.

A temperate Earth-sized planet has been discovered only 11 light-years from the Solar System by a team using ESO’s unique planet-hunting HARPS instrument. The new world has the designation Ross 128 b and is now the sec-ond-closest temperate planet to be detected after Proxi-ma b.

It is also the closest planet to be discovered orbiting an inactive red dwarf star, which may increase the likelihood that this planet could potentially sustain life. Ross 128 b will be a prime target for ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, which will be able to search for biomarkers in the planet’s atmosphere.

A team working with ESO’s High Accuracy Radial veloci-ty Planet Searcher (HARPS) at the La Silla Observatory in Chile has found that the red dwarf star Ross 128 is orbited by a low-mass exoplanet every 9.9 days. This Earth-sized world is expected to be temperate, with a surface tem-perature that may also be close to that of the Earth. Ross 128 is the “quietest” nearby star to host such a temperate exoplanet.

“This discovery is based on more than a decade of HARPS intensive monitoring together with state-of-the-art data reduction and analysis techniques. Only HARPS has demonstrated such a precision and it remains the best planet hunter of its kind, 15 years after it began opera-tions,” explains Nicola Astudillo-Defru (Geneva Observato-ry - University of Geneva, Switzerland), who co-authored the discovery paper.

Red dwarfs are some of the coolest, faintest - and most common - stars in the Universe. This makes them very good targets in the search for exoplanets ...Read More...

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Orbital Path Podcast: The 11 Dimensions of Brian Greene

World Science Festival / Greg Kessler

In this episode of Orbital Path, we hear from Brian Greene on the coming paradigm shift in physics as current theo-ries fail to adequately explain quantum entanglement.

It all started by counting on our fingers. You could keep track of how many cows you had, or how many how many apples to trade for a basket of eggs. Count up to ten, then place a marker and start over, and you could count the days for the Moon to come around to the same shape again or how many days until the weather turned colder. Mathematics is a simple human behavior. But it turned out that mathematics was also a journey, a road we began to walk along with no idea where it might lead. As Bilbo said to Frodo in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

At this moment in modern physics, we have been swept off to a universe that seems quite alien from the one we experience. We are aware of four dimensions of reality, there dimensions of space and one of time. But most phys-icists, for the last hundred years, have needed addition-al dimensions to account for the subtleties of gravity, or the complex interactions of the tiny particles that make up matter. Einstein hinted at higher dimensions when he described gravity as a bending of space and time. String theory, which, linked with quantum mechanics, is the most complete description of the behavior of elementary par-ticles, requires no less than eleven dimensions of space and time for the mathematics to work. A central tenant of string theory is that all the different elementary parti-cles we observe in our universe, from quarks to photons to positrons, all have an underlying common make-up. All can be visualized as strings, or sometimes membranes like the skin of a drum, that vibrate in different modes and fre-quencies. In some ways, every particle of the universe is made up of the same stuff, it’s just that the stuff is vibrat-ing differently. And why eleven dimensions? Simple: the equations needed that many terms, that many directions for the strings to vibrate, to make the predictions of the theory match reality. ...Read More...

New pulsar result supports particle dark matter

Gamma rays from the Geminga and PSR B0656+14 pulsars can-not account for the positron excess measured by satellites in Earth orbit. Courtesy Miguel Mostafa (Penn State)

New results from an unconventional observatory in Mex-ico are bringing scientists one step closer to solving the dark matter mystery. They lend credence to the idea that some strange non-light-emitting particle is responsible for about 85% of the universe’s mass. This new observation casts serious doubt on the more conventional of two fa-vored theories for the enigmatic excess of antimatter par-ticles in space, leaving dark matter particles as the most likely explanation. The origin of this mystery dates back to 2008, when the European PAMELA satellite first registered an unexpected-ly high number of positrons in near-Earth space. Positrons can be thought of as positively charged electrons, or the antimatter counterparts to electrons. More recently, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) experiment aboard the International Space Station has extended PAMELA’s finding, seeing roughly three to five times more positrons than scientists predicted. Theorists came up with two logical explanations for the excess positrons. The more prosaic explanation says that rapidly rotating neutron stars (pulsars) are violently throw-ing off positrons and other subatomic particles, some of which make their way to Earth. But other scientists pro-posed a more exotic alternative: that very heavy dark mat-ter particles pervading our galaxy mutually annihilate one another whenever they come into close proximity, self-de-structing into a cascade of positrons and other elementary particles. To test the pulsar hypothesis, an international team of scientists observed the sky with the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory. This is not your ordinary observatory with one or more astronomical telescopes. HAWC instead consists of 300 large water tanks stationed at an altitude of 13,500 feet in the southern Mexican state of Puebla.

HAWC indirectly picks up very-high-energy gamma rays, the highest-energy form of “light” yet ...Read More...

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Sky-sweeping Telescope Sees First Light

ZTF took this first-light image on Nov. 1, 2017, after being in-stalled at the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Ob-servatory. The full-resolution version is more than 24,000 pixels by 24,000 pixels. The image contains the horsehead, Flame, and Orion nebulae. Computers searching these images for transient, or variable, events are trained to automatically recognize and ig-nore non-astronomical sources, such as the vertical “blooming” lines seen here. Caltech Optical Observatories

The Zwicky Transient Facility has taken its first image, covering an area equivalent to 247 full Moons in a single shot. This beginning is part of an ongoing sea change in astronomy.

Pictures have long served as a foundation of astronomy. But very soon astronomers will be turning to videos. Hu-mans have always known that the seemingly eternal sky changes from night to night — Aborigines even incorporat-ed such changes into their mythology — but for the most part studying celestial transience has required a great deal of patience or a willingness to trawl the archives. Only in the 21st century, in the era of Big Data, has astronomy had the capability to truly step into the time domain.

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is a part of that sea change: It just took the first image of many, a 47-degree field of view equivalent to the area of 247 full Moons, captured in 24,000 by 24,000 pixels. The scene holds a chunk of Orion, showing the Orion, Flame, and Horsehead nebulae. This image precedes the facility’s science phase, which is set to begin in February 2018 and complete by 2020.

The ZTF is the sequel to the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), which employed three telescopes — the automated 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope, the automated 60-inch telescope and the 200-inch Hale Telescope — to triage the night sky. The Oschin Telescope acted as the discovery engine, then the 60-inch telescope followed up to help identify the sources. The Hale Telescope as well as others provided further detail for those objects ..Read More...

What is dead may never die

In this artist’s concept of a supernova, an expanding shell of dust and gas is blown outward, away from the star’s dense, white-dwarf core. Most supernovae explode just once, which ends their lives for good. However, iPTF14hls appears to have gone super-nova twice in just 60 years.NASA/ESA/STSCI/G. Bacon

To quote the first line of a letter published today in the journal Nature, “Every supernova so far observed has been considered to be the terminal explosion of a star.” In other words, when a massive star blows itself up, it should re-main dead. This is something astronomers have witnessed thousands of times before with absolutely no exceptions.

That is, until now.

For the first time, astronomers have discovered a star that has gone supernova more than once. This so-called “zom-bie star” — which exploded at least twice in the last 60 years alone — has baffled scientists by challenging many of the existing theories about how massive stars end their lives.

“This supernova breaks everything we thought we knew about how they work,” said the study’s lead author Iair Ar-cavi, a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California-Santa Barbara and Las Cumbres Observatory, in a press release. “It’s the biggest puzzle I’ve encountered in almost a decade of studying stellar explosions.”

The undying star, named iPTF14hls, was first discovered in September 2014 by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), a fully automated, wide-field survey designed to spot cosmic objects that vary in brightness over time — such as variable stars, transient objects, and, of course, supernovae.

When the international team of astronomers first spotted the explosion, a spectral analysis indicated it was just a run-of-the-mill, Type II-P supernova whose brightness would likely fade after about 100 days. Supernova iPTF-14hls, on the other hand, had a different plan.

Although Supernova iPTF14hls initially faded after its 2014 explosion, within a few months it began to mysteri-ously grow brighter again. Over the course of three years, iPTF14hls fluctuated between bright and dim at least five separate times. ...Read More....

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Engineers create stable plas-ma ring in open air

A torus of plasma, viewed from above. The ring is created by a jet of water striking a crystal plate. Credit: Mory Gharib/Caltech

For the first time, engineers at Caltech have created a sta-ble ring of plasma in open air—essentially capturing light-ning in a bottle, but without the bottle.

Matter can exist in four distinct phases: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Plasmas are made of charged particles—ions and electrons—and occur naturally on Earth as lightning, in the weather phenomenon called St. Elmo’s fire (in which glowing balls of light sometimes appear on pointed objects during storms), and in man-made objects such as fluores-cent light bulbs and plasma cutting torches.

Usually, plasmas do not have clearly defined shapes of their own. Lightning follows a path of least resistance through the air, creating wildly forking structures, while man-made plasmas are constrained by vacuum chambers or electromagnetic fields.

As such, Morteza (Mory) Gharib (PhD ‘83), the Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bioinspired Engi-neering at Caltech, says he was surprised when he and his team were able to generate a stable ring of plasma in open air using just a stream of water and a crystal plate. Their findings will be published in the Proceedings of the Na-tional Academy of Sciences the week of November 13.

“We were told by some colleagues this wasn’t even possi-ble. But we can create a stable ring and maintain it for as long as we want, no vacuum or magnetic field or anything,” says co-author Francisco Pereira of the Marine Technology Research Institute in Italy, a visiting scholar at Caltech.

The stream of water is an 85-micron-diameter jet blast-ing from a specially designed nozzle at 9,000 pounds per square inch that strikes the crystal plate with an impact velocity of around 1,000 feet per second. For reference, that’s a stream narrower than a human hair moving about as fast as a bullet fired from a handgun.

In their study, Gharib and his team experimented with both crystal plates of quartz and lithium niobate, each of which can induce the triboelectric effect—in which an electric charge builds up because of friction with another material. When the jet hits the crystal ..Read More....

Scientists invent technique to map energy and momen-tum of electrons beneath a material’s surface

Measured spectra. Credit: Science (2017). 10.1126/science.aam7073

For the first time, physicists have developed a technique that can peer deep beneath the surface of a material to identify the energies and momenta of electrons there.

The energy and momentum of these electrons, known as a material’s “band structure,” are key properties that de-scribe how electrons move through a material. Ultimately, the band structure determines a material’s electrical and optical properties.

The team, at MIT and Princeton University, has used the technique to probe a semiconducting sheet of gallium ar-senide, and has mapped out the energy and momentum of electrons throughout the material. The results are pub-lished today in the journal Science.

By visualizing the band structure, not just at the surface but throughout a material, scientists may be able to iden-tify better, faster semiconductor materials. They may also be able to observe the strange electron interactions that can give rise to superconductivity within certain exotic ma-terials.

“Electrons are constantly zipping around in a material, and they have a certain momentum and energy,” says Raymond Ashoori, professor of physics at MIT and a co-author on the paper. “These are fundamental properties which can tell us what kind of electrical devices we can make. A lot of the important electronics in the world exist under the surface, in these systems that we haven’t been able to probe deep-ly until now. So we’re very excited—the possibilities here are pretty vast.”

Ashoori’s co-authors are postdoc Joonho Jang and graduate student Heun Mo Yoo, along with Loren Pfeffer, Ken West, and Kirk Baldwin, of Princeton University. ...Read More...

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Is there (frozen) life on Mars?

Mars is a planet where harsh conditions abound, including frozen soil, low temperatures and pressures, and surface-level irradia-tion. ESA & MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Missions from above and on the surface have been search-ing for life on Mars for years. But there’s an important question worth asking, amidst this vital search: If life once thrived there, how long could even extreme microorgan-isms survive in Mars’ current harsh conditions? And where might they best survive? A group of researchers from Lo-monosov Moscow State University has just released their answer to those questions.

The paper, published today in the journal Extremophiles, focused on naturally occurring microbes in Arctic perma-frost sedimentary rocks, one of the best analogues we have to martian regolith here on Earth. The microbes were exposed to Mars-like conditions such as intense gamma ra-diation (10,000,000 rads [100 kilograys]), extremely low temperatures and pressures (-58 F [-50 C]; 1 Torr [133 Pascals]), and dehydration. The result? A high number of the microbes survived the harsh simulated climate of Mars, raising hopes that microbes on the Red Planet might also survive within the icy regolith well enough for searching rovers or — someday — human scientists to recover them.

The study was conducted using a constant climate cham-ber and, the authors stress, natural communities of mi-crobes, rather than pure cultures. Studying natural commu-nities allows for a better comparison with reality, allowing for greater biodiversity and increasing the similarities of the studied group to any microbes potentially on Mars.

“In a nutshell, we have conducted a simulation experiment that well covered the conditions of cryoconservation in Martian regolith,” said Vladimir S. Cheptsov, a post-gradu-ate student at the Lomonosov MSU Faculty of Soil Science, Department of Soil Biology, and an author on the paper, in a press release. “The results of the study indicate the possibility of prolonged cryoconservation of viable micro-organisms.” ...Read More...

NASA detects solar flare pulses at Sun and Earth

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured these images of an X-class flare on Feb. 15, 2011. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO

When our Sun erupts with giant explosions—such as bursts of radiation called solar flares—we know they can affect space throughout the solar system as well as near Earth. But monitoring their effects requires having observatories in many places with many perspectives, much the way weather sensors all over Earth can help us monitor what’s happening with a terrestrial storm.

By using multiple observatories, two recent studies show how solar flares exhibit pulses or oscillations in the amount of energy being sent out. Such research provides new insights on the origins of these massive solar flares as well as the space weather they produce, which is key information as humans and robotic missions venture out into the solar system, farther and farther from home.

The first study spotted oscillations during a flare—unex-pectedly—in measurements of the Sun’s total output of extreme ultraviolet energy, a type of light invisible to hu-man eyes. On Feb. 15, 2011, the Sun emitted an X-class solar flare, the most powerful kind of these intense bursts of radiation. Because scientists had multiple in-struments observing the event, they were able to track oscillations in the flare’s radiation, happening simultane-ously in several different sets of observations.

“Any type of oscillation on the Sun can tell us a lot about the environment the oscillations are taking place in, or about the physical mechanism responsible for driving changes in emission,” said Ryan Milligan, lead author of this first study and solar physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the University of Glasgow in Scotland. In this case, the reg-ular pulses of extreme ultraviolet light indicated distur-bances—akin to earthquakes—were rippling through the chromosphere, the base of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, during the flare.

What surprised Milligan about the oscillations was the fact that they were first observed in extreme ultraviolet data from NOAA’s GOES—short for ...Read More...

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Special Read:Ozone ups and downs

File image of the Ozone Hole over the south pole during September 2016.

Climate scientists studying three decades of ozone measurements from seven satellites see a positive trend in global recovery thanks to international efforts to curb ozone-depleting substances. The part of Earth’s atmosphere with high concentrations of ozone gas protects life on Earth from the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. However, pollutants can break down ozone, thinning this ozone layer and creating the infamous ozone hole.

The depletion of ozone in our atmosphere and subsequent increase in ultraviolet exposure causes skin cancer, cataracts and immune system damage in humans, and injures animals, plants and even microscopic phytoplankton. Starting in the 1970s, ozone in the stratosphere - some 11-50 km above Earth’s surface - began to decline worldwide. The largest drop was in the upper stratosphere, at 4-8% per decade. The trend was interrupted following international agreements on the reduction of ozone-depleting substances and the first signs of ozone recovery were seen by satellites.

Satellites provide good coverage but operate for a limited number of years. Meanwhile, climate scientists require read-ings spanning 30 years or more for analysing trends accurately. Ozone in particular varies depending on the season or solar activity, so decades are necessary to separate this natural variability from human-influenced change. To tackle this, scientists working under ESA’s Climate Change Initiative are harmonising measurements from different satellites to give us a long-term view of ozone variability.

The readings date back to 1995 for ‘total columns’ - meaning they show the total ozone of all layers of the atmosphere - and to 2001 for ozone profiles with high vertical resolution, meaning the separate layers can be identified. The record relies on five satellite sensors that provide measurements with high vertical resolution. These include the ones on ESA’s former Envisat mission, along with current information from Canada’s SciSat and Sweden’s Odin.

In a new development, measurements from NASA’s Earth Radiation Budget Satellite and Suomi NPP satellite have been folded in, further extending coverage back to 1984. “By merging the Climate Change Initiative’s data with NASA’s, we clearly see negative ozone trends in the upper atmosphere before 1997 and positive trends after,” concludes Viktoria Sofieva, Senior Research Scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute. “The upper stratospheric trends beyond the tropics are statistically significant and indicate an onset of ozone recovery.” Ozone measurements with high vertical resolution are essential to identify these ozone trends. The future Altius mission for ESA’s Earth Watch initiative will provide continuing measurements for long-term climate monitoring. ..Read More...

This Week’s Sky at a Glance: Nov. 18-24, 2017Nov 18 New Moon 15:42Nov. 20 First day of Rabi INov 21 Saturn 3.00 S of Moon 15:24Nov 21 Moon at apogee 22:52 (406132 km)Nov 24 Mercury at greatest elongation 04:00 (22.0 E)

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Nov. 23, 2017Sharjah Open House Observatory

18:00 - 20:00

Targets: 1. Crescent Moon 2. Mercury 3. Saturn 4. Open and Globular Clusters 5. Binary stars

Nov. 17, 2017 Special Trio Encounter: Crescent-Venus-Jupiter

A beautiful encounter of the rare kind: Waning Crescent - Venus (lower mid-dle) - Jupiter (Upper right).

Picture details: Canon OS 60D - f/5.6 - Exposure time: 1/10 sec - ISO 3200 - Nov. 17, 2017 , 06:15 am - Location: Sharjah University City - Credit: Ridwan Fernini