Telescope

• Beginning in late March, the museum will hand out limited supplies of solar eclipse glasses at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and its Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.
• Solar eclipse glasses are provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA.
• On April 8, the museum will host the " Solar Eclipse Festival on the National Mall " in Washington, D.C.
• The National Air and Space Museum is part of the Smithsonian Institution and has locations in Washington, D.C., and Chantilly, Virginia.

• A new planet starts its life in a rotating circle of gas and dust, a cradle known as a protostellar disc.
• My colleagues and I have used computer simulations to show that newborn gas planets in these discs are likely to have surprisingly flattened shapes.
• This finding, published in Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters, could add to our picture of exactly how planets form.
• Until now only three such young protoplanets have been observed, with two of them in the same system, PDS 70.

How planets start off

• Once a core of dust with enough massive forms, it draws gas from the disc to form a gas giant planet.
• In other words, they are too heavy to be maintained and so fragment into pieces, which evolve into planets.
• The appeal of this theory is that planet formation happens very fast, within a few thousand years, which is consistent with observations that suggest planets exist in very young discs.
• Our study focused on gas giant planets formed via the model of disc instability.

No flat Earths

• They are thought to form by slowly assembling dust particles to pebbles, rocks, kilometre-sized objects and eventually planets.
• But our study does support a role for disc instability in the case of some worlds in some planetary systems.
• The comparison between these theoretical models and observations is bringing us closer and closer to understanding the origins of our Solar System.

Dimitris Stamatellos receives funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

• And thanks to new technologies and public-private partnerships, these projects will open up new realms of scientific possibility.
• NASA’s commercial lunar payload services program, or CLPS, will use uncrewed landers to conduct NASA’s first science experiments from the Moon in over 50 years.
• Rather than NASA building the landers and operating the program, commercial companies will do so in a public-private partnership.

CLPS launches

• The first two CLPS payloads are scheduled to launch during the first two months of 2024.
• There’s the Astrobotics payload, which launched Jan. 8 before experiencing a fuel issue that cut its journey to the Moon short.
• Next, there’s the Intuitive Machines payload, with a launch scheduled for mid-February.

Radio telescopes on the Moon

• The Moon – particularly the far side of the Moon – is an ideal place to do radio astronomy and study signals from extraterrestrial objects such as the Sun and the Milky Way galaxy.
• On Earth, the ionosphere, which contains Earth’s magnetic field, distorts and absorbs radio signals below the FM band.
• The Moon has no ionosphere, and with about 2,000 miles of rock between the Earth and the far side of the Moon, there’s no interference.
• The same kind of discharge happens on the Moon from the charged gas, but it’s potentially more harmful to astronauts.

Solar and exoplanet radio emissions

• The Sun’s surface releases shock waves that send out highly energetic particles and low radio frequency emissions.
• We’ll use the radio telescopes to measure these emissions and to see bursts of low-frequency radio waves from shock waves within the solar wind.
• If we detect the same kind of radio emissions that come from Earth, this will tell us that the planet has a magnetic field.

Cosmology on the Moon

• The Lunar Surface Electromagnetic Experiment at Night, or LuSEE-Night, will fly in early 2026 to the far side of the Moon.
• LuSEE-Night marks scientists’ first attempt to do cosmology on the Moon.
• Since the far side of the Moon is uniquely radio quiet, it’s the best place to do cosmological observations.
• That process is going to start in 2026 with the LuSEE-Night mission, which is both a fundamental physics experiment and a cosmology experiment.

Jack Burns receives funding from NASA.

• Atlas Obscura , the media and entertainment company dedicated to inspiring wonder and curiosity about the world, today announced Ecliptic , its second festival celebrating the rare total solar eclipse, which this year falls on April 8.
• View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240116984236/en/
  Atlas Obscura’s Ecliptic Festival lineup (Graphic: Business Wire)
  The Atlas Obscura Ecliptic Festival will run from April 5 to April 8, welcoming 4,000 attendees to Hot Springs, Ark., for musical performances and events with renowned artists, philosophers, astronomers, and other speakers—along with unparalleled views of the astronomical wonder that is a full solar eclipse.
• Festival partners Low Key Arts have been producing the Valley of the Vapors festival for 20 years in Hot Springs.
• B&H is excited to partner with Atlas Obscura for their second Total Eclipse together.