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Coming Events Monthly Meeting Cancelled Until Further Notice

Public Observing Cancelled Until Further Notice

Club Officers President Rick Heschmeyer email

AlCOR William Winkler email

NSN Coordinator Howard Edin email

Faculty Advisor Prof. Bruce Twarog email.

Newsletter Editor Chuck Wehner email

Inside This Issue Giant gas bubbles Page 2

Drifting Titan Page 3

Titan cont Page 4

Habitable zone Page 5

James Webb delay Page 6

Vega Page 7

Books and Sprites Page 8

CERN super-collider Page 9

Electric blue nights Page 10

July night sky Page 11

Whats in the sky Page 12

Report From the Officers By Rick HeschmeyerWelcome to Summer! While the club’s outreach activities have been on hiatus this summer due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has still been plenty going on in the universe. It’s been a month since Space X successfully launched their Crew Dragon with two astronauts on board and docked with the International Space Station. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to get out since the docking and watch the ISS pass overhead. In less than a month the Mars 2020 mission with its rover Perseverance will launch for a February 2021 rendezvous with the Red Planet. On board Perseverance is the Mars Helicopter dubbed Ingenuity, which will search for possible future landing sites.

Saturn and Jupiter have both returned to the evening sky. Both reach opposition in July, Jupiter on the 14th and Saturn on the 20th. While they will both be visible for many months, they will be biggest and brightest in July.

Tenta&ve dates for this fall’s club mee&ngs have been set. As in the past, all mee&ngs will take place at the Baker Wetlands Discovery Center star&ng at 7:00 pm, followed by observing (weather permiFng). The dates for these mee&ngs are August 30, September 27, October 25, and December 6. Of course, we will con&nue to monitor the COVID-19 situa&on, and will adjust if necessary, to comply with all na&onal, state, and local health and safety guidelines.

Finally, for those of you who miss sharing the night sky and you’re telescopes with the public, I found an interes&ng ar&cle on keeping shared op&cs sani&zed from Nikon. There is a dearth of informa&on about this as it concerns telescopes. This ar&cle pertains to microscope, rather than telescope, eyepieces, but I think the same precau&ons would apply.

These are important considera&ons, along with face-masks, gloves, hand sani&zers that we will need to consider as we move forward into the “new normal”.

Keep your eyes to the skies!

The Celestial Mechanic The Official Newsletter of the Astronomy Associates of Lawrence

Mars Does Have a Magnetic Field of Sorts – And We've Finally Got Data to Map It By David NieldIScienceAlert, JUNE 1, 2020

Unlike Earth, Mars doesn't have a global magnetic field to protect it from the rigours of space weather – but it does have spots of local, induced

magnetism. →

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Now, researchers have been able to create an incredible, detailed map of the electric currents that are responsible for shaping these magnetic fields.

It gives scientists a much greater understanding of how Mars might have lost much of its atmosphere over the course of billions of years, as well as how interactions between the solar winds and Mars' magnetosphere are playing out today.

As you can see from the video embedded below, the team working with the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft have been able to produce some jaw-dropping visualisations from the captured magnetic readings. Previously hidden flows of energy are suddenly visible in full colour."These currents play a fundamental role in the atmospheric loss that transformed Mars from a world that could have supported life into

an inhospitable desert," says planetary scientist Robin Ramstad, from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

"We are now currently working on using the currents to determine the precise amount of energy that is drawn from the solar wind and powers atmospheric escape."

The team analysed five years of data from MAVEN to come up with their maps, which show electrical currents creating a nested, double-loop structure around Mars, wrapping all the way around both the day and night side of the planet.

These currents interact with the incoming solar wind, causing it to envelop Mars and flow around it like spaghetti noodles around a basketball. The findings build on the discovery of the planet's unique magnetic tail, spotted by MAVEN three years ago.

What's also interesting for the researchers is the detail of the interplay between the solar winds and the electric currents, and how energy is transferred between the upper atmosphere, the magnetosphere, and the solar wind.

"Mars' atmosphere behaves a bit like a metal sphere closing an electric circuit," says Ramstad. "The currents flow in the upper atmosphere, with the strongest current layers persisting at 120-200 kilometres (75-124 miles) above the planet's surface.”

"With a single elegant operation, the strength and paths of the currents pop out of this map of the magnetic field."

Besides making for some stunning visualizations, the map of electric currents that the researchers have put together should be able to tell us more about how the atmosphere of Mars continues to get stripped away, and how these interactions may have evolved over the course of the planet's history.

Scientists still have a lot of questions about what happened to Mars' once

thick, busy atmosphere – and about how we might one day make it habitable again.

There's lots more to come from this data, and from MAVEN.

Understanding the behavior of the magnetic field around the Red Planet has the potential to give us some big clues about why its atmosphere is now so different from our own – and indeed from Venus, which also has an induced magnetosphere.

"If you want to understand how the atmosphere of Mars and Venus are so different from the Earth's, and why they're different from each other despite both being non-magnetized , we need to understand their induced magnetospheres first," says Ramstad.

The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.✦

Click here to see video.

The Milky Way’s giant gas bubbles were seen in visible light for the first time The new technique could map the velocity of gas in the towering structures called Fermi bubbles.

By Emily ConoverSciencenews, June 8, 2020

Mysterious cosmic bubbles are being seen in a new light.

For the first time, scientists have observed visible light from the Fermi bubbles, enormous blobs of gas that →

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sandwich the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. The newly spotted glow was emitted by hydrogen gas that was electrically charged, or ionized, within the bubbles. Astronomer Dhanesh Krishnarao of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and colleagues described the finding June 3 in a news conference at the American Astronomical Society virtual meeting and in a paper posted at arXiv.org on May 29.

Originally observed in 2010, the bubbles spew high-energy light known as gamma rays. The towering structures, each 25,000 light-years tall, are thought to be relics of an ancient outburst of gas from the galaxy’s center (SN: 11/9/10). But scientists don’t know the source. The outflow could have been the result of the black hole at the center of the galaxy messily gobbling up matter, or emissions caused by bursts of stars forming.

Within the bubbles, gas is expanding outward, its motion altering the apparent wavelength of its light. Material closer to the solar system is traveling toward it, appearing bluer, and more distant gas is moving away, appearing redder.  The wavelength shift allowed the researchers to pinpoint the gas’s velocity at one location within the bubbles. Using the Wisconsin H-Alpha Mapper telescope, or WHAM, the researchers determined that the gas flowed outward at about 220 kilometers per second. The estimate agreed with an earlier measurement made using ultraviolet light.

By taking measurements in other locations, the researchers hope to more fully map out the velocity of the gas. “What that can tell us is how, over time, the energy output from the Fermi bubbles has changed. That’ll really be able to nail down more about the origin,” Krishnarao said. ✦

Saturn's Moon Titan Drifting Away Faster Than Previously Thought jpl.nasa.gov

The new research by scientists at NASA and the Italian Space Agency has implications for the entire Saturn system as well as other planets and moons.

Just as our own Moon floats away from Earth a tiny bit more each year, other moons are doing the same

with their host planets. As a moon orbits, its gravity pulls on the planet, causing a temporary bulge in the planet as it passes.

Over time, the energy created by the bulging and subsiding transfers from the planet to the moon, nudging it farther and farther out. Our Moon drifts 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) from Earth each year.

Scientists thought they knew the rate at which the giant moon Titan is moving away from Saturn, but they recently made a surprising discovery: Using data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, they found Titan drifting a hundred times faster than previously understood - about 4 inches (11 centimeters) per year.

The findings may help address an age-old question. While scientists know that Saturn formed 4.6 billion years ago in the early days of the solar system, there's more uncertainty about when the planet's rings and its system of more than 80 moons formed. Titan is currently 759,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from Saturn. The revised rate of its drift suggests that the moon started

Giant bubbles of expanding gas that surround the Milky Way have been seen in visible light for the first time. The gas’s motion shifts the light’s wavelength, as depicted in this illustration. Emission from gas moving toward the solar system (bright spot at middle right) appears slightly bluer, while gas moving away appears redder

Larger than the planet Mercury, huge moon Titan is seen here as it orbits Saturn. Below Titan are the shadows cast by Saturn's rings. This natural color view was created by combining six images captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on May 6, 2012. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute› Full image and caption

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out much closer to Saturn, which would mean the whole system expanded more quickly than previously believed.

"This result brings an important new piece of the puzzle for the highly debated question of the age of the Saturn system and how its moons formed," said Valery Lainey, lead author of the work published June 8 in Nature Astronomy. He conducted the research as a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California before joining the Paris Observatory at PSL University.

MAKING SENSE OF MOON MIGRATION The findings on Titan's rate of drift also provide important confirmation of a new theory that explains and predicts how planets affect their moons' orbits.

For the last 50 years, scientists have applied the same formulas to estimate how fast a moon drifts from its planet, a rate that can also be used to determine a moon's age. Those formulas and the classical theories on which they're based were applied to moons large and small all over the solar system. The theories assumed that in systems such as Saturn's, with dozens of moons, the outer moons like Titan migrated outward more slowly than moons closer in because they are farther from their host planet's gravity.

Four years ago, theoretical astrophysicist Jim Fuller, now of Caltech, published research that upended those theories. Fuller's theory predicted that outer moons can migrate outward at a similar rate to inner moons because they become locked in a different kind of orbit pattern that links to the particular wobble of a planet and slings them outward.

"The new measurements imply that these kind of planet-moon interactions can be more prominent than prior expectations and that they can apply to many systems, such as other planetary moon systems, exoplanets - those outside our solar system - and even binary star systems, where stars orbit each other," said Fuller, a coauthor of the new paper.

To reach their results, the authors mapped stars in the background of Cassini images and tracked Titan's position. To confirm their findings, they compared them with an independent dataset: radio science data collected by Cassini. During ten close flybys between 2006 and 2016, the spacecraft sent radio waves to Earth. Scientists studied how the signal's frequency was changed by their interactions with their surroundings to estimate how Titan's orbit evolved.

"By using two completely different datasets, we obtained results that are in full agreement, and also in agreement with Jim Fuller's theory, which predicted a much faster migration of Titan," said coauthor Paolo Tortora, of Italy's University of Bologna. Tortora is a member of the Cassini Radio Science team and worked on the research with the support of the Italian Space Agency.

Managed by JPL, Cassini was an orbiter that observed Saturn for more than 13 years before exhausting its fuel supply. The mission plunged it into the planet's atmosphere in September 2017, in part to protect its moon Enceladus, which Cassini discovered might hold conditions suitable for life.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter. ✦

To learn more about Saturn, zoom in and give the planet a spin. Use the search function at bottom to learn more about its moons - or just about anything else in the solar system. View the full interactive experience at Eyes on the Solar System.

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Is the Concept of a Habitable Zone Too Wide? Universe today

In our search for exoplanets, we have

found more than three dozen potentially habitable worlds. It’s estimated that there are 8 to 20 billion potentially habitable, Earth-like worlds in our galaxy alone. But there is a big difference between potentially habitable and actually habitable, and scientists are starting to narrow their definitions.

The classic definition of a potentially habitable world is a rocky planet that can sustain liquid water on its surface. That means it has a reasonably thick atmosphere, and its distance from a star puts it in the so-called habitable zone.

In many ways, this simple definition is both too broad and too narrow. Liquid water is considered a defining factor because it is central to life on Earth. There could be other forms of life that don’t require liquid. Saturn’s moon Titan has seas of liquid methane, and some researchers have studied how methane could play a role in alien cells similar to the role of water in terrestrial life. Even if we limit life to being Earth-like, being outside of the habitable zone doesn’t prohibit liquid water. Jupiter is far outside the zone but has at least two moons with liquid water under their icy surface.

At the same time, being in the zone is not enough. There are three rocky planets in the Sun’s habitable zone, but Venus is a toxic greenhouse world, and while Mars might have primitive life it is hardly the rich Eden of Earth. And both Venus and Mars had liquid surface water in their youth. Life may have gotten a toe-hold on both worlds, but may not have survived long enough to stay

habitable. This Gaian bottleneck may act as a Great Filter, killing off potentially habitable worlds early on.

Even if we just consider the habitable zone of a star, this says nothing about the stability of the star itself. Most potentially habitable worlds orbit small red dwarf stars since they make up nearly 75% of all stars. Red dwarfs are much cooler than our Sun, so their habitable zones are very close to the star. But red dwarfs often go through periods where they emit huge solar flares and bursts of x-rays. These would likely strip potentially habitable planets of their atmospheres.

All of this gives astronomers plenty of fodder for speculation, but for biologists, it all comes down to lipids. Lipids are built from fatty acids, and they form the building blocks of cellular membranes. For cells to function, cellular membranes need to be permeable, and permeability depends on the composition and pressure of the atmosphere. Recently, a paper in Scientific Reports examined this relationship and its effect on habitability. ✦

Life may play a necessary role in keeping a planet habitable. Credit: Chopra and Lineweaver

Conservative limits on habitable zones are more realistic. Credit: Ramses Ramirez

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Long Delayed James Webb Space Telescope is Again Delayed By George Dvorskygizmodo.com, June 11, 2020

We’re going to have a wait even longer for NASA’s next-generation James Webb Space Telescope to leave Earth, owing to delays caused

by the covid-19 pandemic.

Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s science directorate, broke the bad news yesterday during a virtual meeting for the Space Studies Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

“We will not launch in March, absolutely will not launch in March,” said Zurbuchen in reference to the previously scheduled launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2021. “That is not in the cards right now,” he said, in a transcription prepared by Space Policy Online.

For NASA and Northrop Grumman (the space agency’s principal contractor for the project), it’s yet another setback for a project already beset by setbacks. The postponed launch is the latest in a seemingly endless train of cost overruns and scheduling delays. This time around, however, the finger of blame is being pointed directly at covid-19 and the ongoing global pandemic.

“It’s not because [NASA and Northrop Grumman] did anything wrong,” said Zurbuchen. “It’s just not going to be in the cards, and it’s not a fault or mismanagement of some type,” he said, adding that the program had made great strides recently and the JWST was on course for a March 2021 launch aboard an Ariane 5 rocket. And indeed, engineers recently conducted a successful test of the system’s Deployable Tower Assembly.

“I’m very optimistic of this thing getting off the launch pad in ’21...because of the results I’m seeing, [but] there still is a lot of mountain to climb,” said Zurbuchen, saying NASA and its partners will need to learn the “new efficiency” of working in pandemic conditions and that a revised launch schedule won’t be assessed until July.

A tentative launch date in 2021, given everything that’s been going on, is actually quite encouraging, and we cannot wait to see this thing get off the ground. The JWST is the successor observatory to the 30-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. Once in space, the infrared telescope will “look much closer to the beginning of time and to hunt for the unobserved formation of the first galaxies, as well as to look inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are forming today,” according to NASA. The telescope will also be capable of scanning the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, representing a potentially huge leap forward for scientists on the hunt for habitable worlds.

But JWST is proving to be an exceptionally complex machine to build and test, as it features no less than 300 single points of failure, as Space Policy Online reported earlier this year. The telescope is currently in the integration and testing phase of its development, but the pandemic forced NASA and Northrop Grumman to slow things down. As SpaceNews reports, work did not halt completely at the Northrop facility in southern California; the company is now running five eight-hour shifts each week, as opposed to the usual 12 10-hour shifts.

The JWST was supposed to launch around 10 years ago (yes, really), at an initial price tag of $1 billion. But as Eric Berger reports in Ars Technica, the current cost estimate for its development has creeped up to $9.7 billion, which could still be on the low side. Sadly, the JWST project has cast NASA’s ability to manage flagship missions in doubt—a concern Zurbuchen was keen to address during yesterday’s meeting.

“NASA needs to do flagships. We need to learn how to do flagships,” he said. “Frankly, part of being a leader in space means that we need to do things that nobody has ever done before. In astrophysics especially, and also in some of the planetary sciences, but there’s other fields where some of these flagships are the only tools to move things forward.”

To which he added: “The challenge with flagships has been, and we’re spending a lot of effort and learning on it, is to manage them in a way that they don’t eat the neighborhood.”

In more positive news, NASA is still expected to launch its Perseverance rover to Mars in July, though the date was pushed back by three days due to an undisclosed issue. Fingers remain firmly crossed. ✦

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Summer Triangle Corner: Vega

By David Prosper and Vivian WhiteNight sky network, May 20, 2020

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere and look up during

June evenings, you’ll see the brilliant star Vega shining overhead. Did you know that Vega is one of the most studied stars in our skies? As one of the brightest summer stars, Vega has fascinated astronomers for

thousands of years.

Vega is the brightest star in the small Greek constellation of Lyra, the harp. It’s also one of the three points of the large “Summer Triangle” asterism, making Vega one of the easiest stars to find for novice stargazers. Ancient humans from 14,000 years ago likely knew Vega for another reason: it was the Earth’s northern pole star! Compare Vega’s current position with that of the current north star, Polaris, and you can see how much the direction of Earth’s axis changes over thousands of years. This slow movement of axial rotation is called precession, and in 12,000 years Vega will return to the northern pole star position.Bright Vega has been observed closely since the beginning of modern astronomy and even helped to set the standard for the current magnitude scale used to categorize the brightness of stars. Polaris and Vega have something else in common, besides being once and future pole stars: their brightness varies over time, making them variable stars. Variable stars’ light can change for many different reasons. Dust, smaller stars, or even planets

may block the light we see from the star. Or the star itself might be unstable with active sunspots, expansions, or eruptions changing its brightness. Most stars are so far away that we only record the change in light, and can’t see their surface.

NASA’s TESS satellite has ultra-sensitive light sensors primed to look for the tiny dimming of starlight caused by transits of extrasolar planets.Their sensitivity also allowed TESS to observe much smaller pulsations in a certain type of variable star’s light than previously observed. These observations of Delta Scuti variable stars will help astronomers model their complex interiors and make sense of their distinct, seemingly chaotic, pulsations. This is a major contribution towards the field of astroseismology: the study of stellar interiors via observations of how sound waves “sing” as they travel through stars. The findings may help settle the debate over what kind of variable star Vega is. Find more details on this research, including a sonification demo that lets you “hear” the heartbeat of one of these stars, at: bit.ly/DeltaScutiTESS

Interested in learning more about variable stars? Want to observe their changing brightness? Check out the website for the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) at aavso.org. You can also find the latest news about Vega and other fascinating stars at nasa.gov.

Vega possesses two debris fields, similar to our own solar system’s asteroid and Kuiper belts. Astronomers continue to hunt for planets orbiting Vega, but as of May 2020 none have been confirmed. ✦

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Astronomy Books space.com

'Einstein's Unfinished Revolution' (Penguin Press, 2019)

Although many believe that the quantum-mechanics revolution of the 1920s is settled science, Lee Smolin wants to disrupt that assumption. Smolin, a theoretical physicist based at the Perimeter Institute in Toronto, argues that quantum mechanics is incomplete.

The standard quantum model only allows us to know the position or trajectory of a subatomic particle — not both at the same time. Smolin has spent his career looking to "complete" quantum physics in a way that allows us to know both pieces of information. Smolin's very engaging new book, "Einstein's Unfinished Revolution," offers this unique perspective honed through four decades at the forefront of theoretical physics. ~ Marcus Banks

"The Girl Who Named Pluto" (Schwartz & Wade, 2019)

By Alice B. McGinty, Illustrated by Elizabeth Haidle

How did an 11-year-old English schoolgirl come to name Pluto? In "The Girl Who Named Pluto: The Story of Venetia Burney," Alice B. McGinty recounts one child's history-making turn on a fateful morning in 1930. Although the book is aimed at kids ages 4 to 8, there's plenty for older children to connect with as well. And the vintage-flavored illustrations by Elizabeth Haidle make the experience a visual delight. 

Venetia had connected her love of mythology with her knowledge of science to christen the new planet after the Roman god of the underworld, refusing to let her age or gender to hold her back. 

McGinley says she hopes Venetia's tale inspires her readers — girls, in particular. "I hope girls read it and feel empowered to be part of the scientific process," she said. "I hope boys read it and feel empowered, too, and understand how important girls are to science." ~Jasmin Malik Chua

GIANT JELLYFISH SPRITES OVER EUROPE: spaceweather.com, June 4, 2020

Sprite season is underway in Europe. On June 13th, Czech photographer Daniel Ščerba-Elza recorded these giant jellyfish over a mesoscale convective thunderstorm:

"My camera was set up in the Jeseniky mountains," says Ščerba-Elza. "The sprites were more than 200 km away, across over border with Slovakia." Considering the distances involved, the jellyfish must have been nearly 50 km tall, measured from heads to tentacle-tips.

"The storm was very active," continues Ščerba-Elza. "During my observing session, I observed more than 30 clusters like this."

This kind of hyperactivity may be boosted by Solar Minimum, happening now. During this low phase of the solar cycle. cosmic rays from deep space flood into the inner solar system, allowed in by the sun's weakening magnetic field. Some models hold that cosmic rays help sprites get started by creating conductive paths in the atmosphere. That would make the summer of 2020 a good time to look for jellyfish in the sky.

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CERN makes bold push to build $24-billion super-collider nature, June 19, 2020

European particle-physics lab will pursue a 100-kilometre machine to uncover the Higgs boson’s secrets — but it doesn’t yet have the funds.

CERN has taken a major step towards building a 100-kilometre circular super-collider to push the

frontier of high-energy physics.

The decision was unanimously endorsed by the CERN Council on 19 June, following the plan’s approval by an independent panel in March. Europe’s preeminent particle-physics organization will need global help to fund the project, which is expected to cost at least $24 billion and would be a follow-up to the lab’s famed Large Hadron Collider. The new machine would collide electrons with their antimatter partners, positrons, by the middle of the century. The design — to be built in an underground tunnel near CERN’s location in Geneva, Switzerland — will enable physicists to study the properties of the Higgs boson and, later, to host an even more powerful machine that will collide protons and last well into the second half of the century.

The approval is not yet a final go-ahead. But it means CERN can now put substantial effort into designing a collider and researching its feasibility, while pushing to the backburner research and development efforts for alternative designs for LHC follow-ups, such as a linear eletron-positron collider or one that would accelerate

muons. “I think it’s a historic day for CERN and particle physics, in Europe and beyond,” CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti told the council after the vote.

This is “clearly a branching point” for the lab, says former CERN director-general Chris Llewellyn-Smith. Until today, several other options were on the table for a next-generation collider, but the CERN Council has now made an unambiguous, unanimous statement. “This is a major step, to get the countries of Europe to say ‘Yes, this is what we would like to happen’,” says Llewellyn-Smith, who is a physicist at the University of Oxford, UK.

Two stages The decision comes in a document approved today, called European Strategy for Particle Physics Update. It outlines on two stages of development. First, CERN would build an electron-positron collider with collision energies tuned to maximize the production of Higgs bosons and understand their properties in detail.

Later in the century, the first machine would be dismantled and replaced by a proton-proton smasher. That would reach collision energies of 100 teraelectronvolts (TeV), compared with the 16 TeV of the LHC, which also collides protons and is currently the most powerful accelerator in the world. Its goal would be to search for new particles or forces of nature and to extend or replace the current standard model of particle physics. Much of the technology that the final machine will require has yet to be developed, and will be the subject of intensive study in coming decades.

“This is a very ambitious strategy, which outlines a bright future for Europe and for CERN with a prudent, step-wise approach,” said Gianotti.

“I think certainly this is the right direction to pursue,” says Yifang Wang, who heads the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. CERN’s proposed new machine is similar in concept to a proposal that Wang has spearheaded for a Chinese colllider, in the wake of the LHC’s discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. Like CERN’s now-official strategy, Wang’s proposal also included the possibility to host a proton collider in a second stage, following the LHC’s model (the 27-kilometre LHC ring occupies the tunnel that housed CERN’s Large Electron-Positron Collider in the 1990s). CERN’s decision “is confirmation that our choice was the right one”, Wang says. →

The Future Circular Collider (FCC) is a proposed particle accelerator that would follow the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

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While fully endorsing a CERN circular collider, the strategy also calls for the organization to explore participation in a separate International Linear Collider, an older idea that has been kept alive by physicists in Japan. Hitoshi Yamamoto, a physicist at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, says the endorsement is encouraging. “I believe that the conditions for ILC to move to the next step in Japan and also globally are now firmly in place.”

Funding tour CERN’s strategy envisions 2038 as the beginning of construction for the new, 100-kilometer tunnel and the electron-positron collider. Until then, the lab will continue to operate an upgraded version of its current collider called High Luminosity LHC, which is currently under construction.

But before CERN can start building its new machine, it will have to seek new funding beyond the regular budget it receives from member states. Llewellyn-Smith says that countries outside of Europe including the United States, China and Japan might need to join CERN to form a new, global organization. “Almost certainly it will need a new structure,” he says.

The costly plan has detractors — even in the physics community. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, has emerged as a critic of pursuing ever higher energies when the scientific payback — apart from measuring the properties of known particles — is far from guaranteed. “I still think it’s not a good idea,” Hossenfelder says. “We’re talking about tens of billions. I just think there is not enough scientific potential in doing that kind of study right now.”

The new collider will be in uncharted territory, says Tara Shears, a physicist at the University of Liverpool, UK. While the LHC had a clear target to look for the Higgs boson as well as theorists’ well-motivated reasons to believe that there could be new particles in the range of masses it could explore, the situation now is different. “We don’t have an equivalent, rock-solid prediction now — and that makes knowing where and how to look for answers more challenging and higher risk.”

Still, she says, “We do know that the only way to find answers is by experiment and the only place to find them is where we haven’t been able to look yet.”

In closing the meeting, which most members attended remotely, CERN Council president Ursula Bassler said, “The big task now is in font of us, putting this strategy into reality.” She then popped a bottle of champagne before ending the teleconference. ✦

SUMMER NIGHTS ARE ELECTRIC BLUE spaceweather.com July 22, 2020

The weeks after summer solstice are usually the best times of the year to see noctilucent clouds (NLCs). In this respect, summer is off to a good start. Gunjan Sinha photographed an all-night display over Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on June 21st:

"There is no better way to spend the summer solstice night than watching bright noctilucent clouds," says Sinha. "They appeared at 11pm, when it got dark enough, and continued until 3:30am as the day started to break."

NLCs are Earth's highest clouds. Seeded by meteoroids, they float at the edge of space 83 km above the ground. The clouds form when summertime wisps of water vapor rise up to the mesosphere, allowing water to crystallize around specks of meteor smoke. Because NLCs form most easily around the poles, they are usually seen at high latitudes.

Recently, NLCs have been spreading. Sinha's sighting was at latitude +52o N. Just last week they were spotted over Bend, Oregon, at +44o N; and last year the clouds descended all the way to Joshua Tree, California, at +34o N. Sky watchers at all northern latitudes should therefore be alert for electric blue. It is summer, after all.

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“TO POLARIS” THE NORTH

STAR

M83

M87

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SKY M

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HOW

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LOOK

S

EARL

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10

PM

LATE

JUL

9 PM

SKY

MAP

DRA

WN

FOR

A LA

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mer Tria

ngle.

From northern latitudes, stars appear to rotate around the North Celestial Pole (NCP).

Deneb is one of the most luminous stars known, being 60,000 times brighter than our Sun.

Use the Big Dipper (or Plough) to find Polaris, the North Star.

Sky

Cale

ndar

– J

uly

2020

1 M

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t in

feri

or c

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3:30

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t opp

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Sun

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8h

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obs

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larg

est

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et in

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sol

ar

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at

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ares

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Mor

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link

s at

htt

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aps.

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in U

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USA

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Volume 46 Number 7 July 2020

The Celestial Mechanic Page of 12 12

About Astronomy Associates The club is open to all people interested in sharing their love for astronomy. Monthly meetings are typically on the last Sunday of each month and often feature guest speakers, presentations by club members, and a chance to exchange amateur astronomy tips. These meetings and the public observing sessions that follow are scheduled at the Baker Wetlands Discovery Center, south of Lawrence. All events and meetings are free and open to the public. Periodic star parties are scheduled as well.

Because of the flexibility of the schedule due to holidays and alternate events, it is always best to check the Web site for the exact Sundays when events are scheduled.

Copies of the Celestial Mechanic can also be found on the web at newsletter.Annual Dues for the club are: $12 for regular members; $6 for students Membership forms can be accessed at the club website form.

What's in the Sky - July 2020 telescope.com July 2020

Get ready for summer stargazing! With weather warming up, July is a great time of year to enjoy relaxing evenings under starry skies with your telescope or astronomy binoculars. Here are a few of Orion's top picks for July stargazing:

Gas Giants at OppositionJupiter and Saturn both reach opposition one week apart this year, making July the perfect opportunity for planetary viewing! Opposition is when the Earth passes directly between a planet and the Sun. This coincides with the planets closest approach to Earth, providing an excellent opportunity for great views in a telescope. Both planets are easy to find in the Southern sky, about 7 degrees apart from each other. Jupiter reaches opposition on July 14th, and Saturn about a week later on the 20th. During opposition Saturn’s rings will be inclined at 21 degrees towards Earth, close to their maximum angle of 27 degrees. Combined with the planet's close approach to Earth, this makes July an excellent time to observe Saturn and its rings!

Grab a high magnification eyepiece or a Barlow lens, and check out the gas giants during opposition!

New MoonJuly 20th is the darkest night of the month and therefore the best time to observe the more faint objects like galaxies and star clusters. Grab your observing gear and enjoy!

Hercules almost directly overhead and ScorpiusWith constellation Hercules almost directly overhead and Scorpius to the south, there's plenty to see in July skies as summer continues. Check out globular star clusters M13 and M92 in Hercules, and explore Scorpius to find numerous deep-sky objects including

open clusters M6 and M7, and globular clusters M4 and M80.

The Summer Milky WayFrom a dark sky location in mid-July, the glorious Summer Milky Way shines as a band of light that stretches from the southern horizon to nearly overhead. As the night progresses, the Milky Way will arch across the entire sky. From a dark observing site, scan the Milky Way with 50mm or larger binoculars or a wide-angle telescope to explore some of the hundreds of open star clusters, emission nebulae and planetary nebulae that lurk among the star clouds.

July Challenge Object — Hercules Galaxy ClusterAbout half a billion light years from Earth in the constellation Hercules, not far from the star Beta Hercules in the southwest corner of the "keystone" asterism, lies the "Hercules Galaxy Cluster." This association is a group of 200-300 distant galaxies, the brightest of which is NGC 6050 at about 10th magnitude and can be seen with an 8" reflector like the Orion SkyQuest XT8 Classic Dobsonian under very dark skies with good seeing conditions. A larger aperture, 14"-16" telescope like the Orion SkyQuest XX14g GoTo Truss Dobsonian will begin to show about a half-dozen or more galaxies in one field-of-view. How many can you see in your telescope?