Watch a double eclipse of the sun as seen from outer space

It's eclipse season for the Solar Dynamics Observatory, and it's kicking off with both the Earth and the moon passing in front of the sun.

Twice a year, around the time of the autumnal and vernal equinoxes, is the Solar Dynamics Observatory's eclipse season. From its vantage point in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth, the SDO's view of the sun is blocked once a day by the Earth.

And on the rare occasion, both the Earth and the moon pass between the SDO and the sun -- a rare double eclipse. One of these took place on September 1, when first the Earth, then the moon, were captured blocking out the sun as the SDO filmed the whole thing in hi-res.

It's not quite as dramatic as a solar eclipse take from the Earth, but it's still interesting if you know what you're looking at. Normally a solar eclipse seen from Earth, as the moon passes between the sun and us, has sharp crisp edges, but a lunar eclipse, where the Earth passes between the sun and the moon, is a little fuzzier. It's the same for the SDO eclipses, but write large.

This difference, NASA says, is because the Earth has an atmosphere and the moon doesn't; it's the sun's light shining through this atmosphere that gives the Earth fuzzy edges.

Here on Earth, viewers in most of Africa were treated by this particular lineup too, with an annular eclipse. This is when the moon is at its farthest point in its orbit around the Earth, and doesn't quite cover the sun, resulting in a spectacular "ring of fire" effect.

space message

A Message From Space or an ‘Alien’ False Alarm?

There has been much speculation about what the source of mysterious radiation that appears to come from star HD 164595 could be.

The group of Russian astronomers spotted something unusual. They were observing the rather innocuous star HD 164595, located in the constellation of Hercules 94 light years (or about 900 trillion kilometres) from Earth. It’s a sun-like star of a similar age to the Sun and is known to have at least one large planet orbiting it. So it was with some surprise that the astronomers at the RATAN-600 radio telescope, located in Zelenchukskaya and led by Nikolay Bursov, received a short but loud radio burst from the direction of HD 164595.

News of the signal broke in mid August this year – even though it was originally picked up on May 15, 2015. Given the possible origin of the radio signal, its frequency, and the signal strength there has been much speculation about what the source could be, including the possibility that it is a beacon signal from an advanced alien civilisation.

Such a short duration and bright radio burst is difficult to explain as a naturally occurring, if it is at the distances suggested by the direction it came from. The strength of the signal was 0.75 Janskys, which might not seem much given that a mobile phone at a distance of a kilometre has a signal strength of 110m Janskys. But at the distances involved (if it is coming from HD 164595) it is a very powerful signal indeed.

In response to the announcement, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (METI) institutes are turning the Allen Telescope Array and the Boquete Optical SETI Observatory towards the star. They hope that if this bank of radio telescopes built in part to look for alien life can recover the signal, they can learn more about its nature and origin.

Too powerful for aliens?

So is the mysterious signal likely to be a message from space? If it is a beacon signal, sent in all directions, the transmitter would need a hundred million trillion watts of power. This power consumption is about a hundred million times the entire energy output of all the power stations on Earth.

The power requirement could be reduced quite a lot by pointing the beam at the Earth, rather than broadcasting in all directions. This would reduce the power needed to just about the entire Earth’s output. However, at a distance of 94 light years, the radio signal from HD 164595 would have to have been sent years before the source received any of the radio signals that leak out into space from the Earth. Which raises the question why any alien civilisations would have targeted our planet.

The frequency that the HD 164595 signal was detected is in the military wave band and not at a frequency we would expect a “Hello” signal to be. We would expect such a signal to be broadcast at a frequency with little noise that astronomers, alien or human, would be using such as the 21cm hydrogen frequency. The detected frequency of the transmission and its strength mean it is more likely a military signal that has bounced off some space debris and into the Russian observatory than an alien signal from deep space. A local source such as this would explain both the short duration and the intensity of the signal. It is also telling that in the previous thirty-eight HD 164595 observations, no trace of any radio signal has been seen.

False detections have been made before. The most recent signal was found to be caused by a kitchen microwave being opened while it was still running. In the 1960s, the first pulsar was mistaken for an extra-terrestrial beacon, and even named Little Green Men 1, before being recognised as a rapidly rotating core of a dead star.

Unexplained signals

However, not all SETI signals have been explained. The most famous, the WOW signal of 1977, was both brighter and longer than the May 15 signal. And despite follow up observations, the WOW signal was never observed again and remains largely unexplained. Likewise, KIC 8462852, a star in the constellation of Cygnus, that appears to be changing in brightness in a strange way that currently cannot reasonably be explained. It might even be a mega structure being built around the star by an advanced civilisation.

Perhaps the most important thing that comes out of the HD 164595 signal is that there is still a lot of things out there we don’t yet understand and we need to keep looking.

Jupiter's Wild North Pole, Southern Auroras Photographed for 1st Time

NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured this image of Jupiter’s north pole on Aug. 27, from a distance of 120,000 miles (195,000 kilometers).Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

NASA's Juno spacecraft has beamed home the first-ever photos of Jupiter's north pole, and scientists can hardly believe their eyes.

Juno captured the images on Aug. 27, when the probe skimmed just 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloud tops during the first of three dozen close flybys of the solar system's largest planet.

"First glimpse of Jupiter's north pole, and it looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before," Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a statement. [Photos: NASA's Juno Mission to Jupiter]

This view of Jupiter's north pole — captured by NASA's Juno probe on Aug. 27, 2016, from a distance of 48,000 miles (78,000 kilometers) — shows storms and weather systems unlike any seen elsewhere in the solar system.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

"It's bluer in color up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms," Bolton added. "There is no sign of the latitudinal bands or zone and belts that we are used to; this image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter. We're seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features."

Saturn has a huge hexagonal storm swirling at its north pole. But Jupiter lacks such a vortex, the new photos show.

"There is nothing on Jupiter that anywhere near resembles that," Bolton said. "The largest planet in our solar system is truly unique. We have 36 more flybys to study just how unique it really is."

The $1.1 billion Juno mission launched in August 2011 and reached Jupiternearly five years later, on July 4 of this year. But Juno's instruments were turned off on this latter date, because mission team members wanted to focus on executing the make-or-break, 35-minute orbit-insertion burn.

NASA’s Juno probe took this image of Jupiter’s south pole on Aug. 27, 2016, from a distance of 58,700 miles (94,500 kilometers).Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

So the Aug. 27 approach marked the first opportunity for the Juno team to photograph Jupiter up close and make detailed measurements with its suite of eight science instruments. (The spacecraft is currently in a highly elliptical, 54-day orbit around the planet.)

One of these instruments, the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), captured views of Jupiter's north and south poles in infrared light, revealing hot spots that had never been seen before, mission scientists said.

Juno captured this infrared image of Jupiter’s southern lights on Aug. 27, 2016. Such views are not possible from Earth.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM

Like Earth, Jupiter has auroras — dramatic light displays that dance above the planet's north and south polar regions. JIRAM got unprecedented looks at the powerful Jovian southern aurora, Juno team members said.

"We were amazed to see it for the first time," JIRAM co-investigator Alberto Adriani, of the Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali (Institute of Astrophysics and Space Planetology) in Rome, said in the same statement.

"No other instruments, both from Earth or space, have been able to see the southern aurora," he added. "Now, with JIRAM, we see that it appears to be very bright and well-structured. The high level of detail in the images will tell us more about the aurora's morphology and dynamics."

Juno also managed to "hear" Jupiter's auroras, using the spacecraft's Radio/Plasma Wave Experiment (also known as Waves).

"Waves detected the signature emissions of the energetic particles that generate the massive auroras which encircle Jupiter's north pole," said Waves co-investigator Bill Kurth, a research scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Iowa. "These emissions are the strongest in the solar system. Now we are going to try to figure out where the electrons come from that are generating them."

Next month, Juno is scheduled to perform another engine burn that will shift the probe into a 14-day-long orbit. The spacecraft will continue gathering data — especially during its close flybys over the planet's poles — before ending its mission with an intentional death dive into Jupiter's atmosphere in February 2018.

These 10 images show Jupiter growing and shrinking in apparent size before and after NASA's Juno spacecraft made its close approach to the planet on August 27, 2016.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

Juno's observations should help scientists better understand Jupiter's composition and structure, including whether the giant planet harbors a core of heavy elements. This information should, in turn, shed light on the formation of Jupiter, the solar system and planetary systems in general, NASA officials have said.

Dwarf Planet Ceres Continues to Surprise

NASA's Dawn probe captured this high-resolution image of the Ceres mountain Ahuna Mons. Image width is 19 miles (30 kilometers).

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

The dwarf planet Ceres is a complex and active world unlike any other place in the solar system, new research suggests.

Observations by NASA's Ceres-orbiting Dawn spacecraft indicate that "ice volcanos" have erupted on the dwarf planet in the recent past and that Ceres' crust is an odd ice-rock mixture that has never been observed before, scientists reported in a series of six new studies published online today (Sept. 1) in the journal Science.

"When we got to Ceres, we were expecting to be surprised, and we have been in many ways," Dawn principal investigator Chris Russell, a professor of geophysics and space physics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), told Space.com. [Watch: An Ice Volcano on Ceres]

"Ceres has been active during its history inside; the interior has been changing, evolving, much like the Earth's interior changes with time," added Russell, lead author of one of the new Science papers and co-author on the other five. "It's in the transition between the smaller asteroids and the Earth, in that it changes, and has changed, over the years from the time that the material initially came together."
Eyeing the queen of the asteroid belt

Dawn launched in September 2007 on a $467 million mission to study the two largest objects in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — the 330-mile-wide (530 kilometers) protoplanet Vesta and Ceres, which is about 590 miles (950 km) across.

Dawn orbited Vesta from July 2011 through September 2012, when the probe departed for Ceres. The spacecraft arrived at the dwarf planet in March 2015, in the process becoming the first probe ever to orbit two different bodies beyond the Earth-moon system.

Scientists already knew a bit about Vesta, based on analyses of rocks that were blasted off the object long ago and have fallen to Earth as meteorites. Dawn's work confirmed suspicions that Vesta is basically "frozen in time," Russell said.

"It formed early and cooled off rapidly, and has just been a very solid body that was battered by impacts," he said.

Ceres was more mysterious, because no meteorite "family" is associated with the dwarf planet. But Dawn has discovered that Ceres is an altogether different beast than its asteroid belt neighbor, as the six new Science papers show.
An active world

For example, the surface of Ceres is much more diverse and complex than that of Vesta, possessing extensive linear structures, lobed features caused by flowing material and a 2.5-mile-high (4 km) mountain (in addition to numerous craters).

This massif, known as Ahuna Mons, resembles the dome-shaped mountains created by volcanism here on Earth, researchers reported in one of the new studies. And Dawn team members said they think Ahuna Mons was indeed created by a volcano, but one that spewed out cold, molten ice rather than hot, liquid rock.

The researchers — led by Ottaviano Ruesch, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland — said they aren't sure exactly what Ceres' "cryomagma" is made of, but they suggested it could be a mix of chlorine salts and water ice.

Furthermore, Ahuna Mons appears to be quite young, the researchers said. Analyses of crater counts suggest that the mountain formed in the last 200 million years or so, study team members said. (Like the rest of the solar system, Ceres itself formed about 4.56 billion years ago.)

In another one of the new studies, a team led by Debra Buczkowski,,of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, identified other dome-shaped features that also appear to be products of cryovolcanism (though not all of it as recent as the activity responsible for Ahuna Mons). Buczkowski and her colleagues also concluded that some of Ceres' linear features likely represent subsurface faults.

Ceres doesn't experience tidal heating; its insides are never churned and heated by another object's powerful gravitational pull, because Ceres never gets close enough to a giant planet. So the energy driving geological activity such as cryovolcanism must come from the dwarf planet's internal heat, Russell said — primarily the heat left over from the object's long-ago formation, with some contribution from radioactive decay processes.

"Ceres is cooling down, but it hasn't cooled down yet," he said.

Ceres is probably similar in this respect to Pluto, another dwarf planet that hasremained geologically active into the recent past. (The powerful ice geysers that blast from the south polar region of the Saturn moon Enceladus, on the other hand, are driven by tidal heating.)

Astronomers know, based on Ceres' measured density, that the dwarf planet harbors a large amount of water. Over the years, there's been some speculation that a subsurface ocean such as the one on Enceladus may exist on Ceres.

If Ceres ever had such an ocean, it's probably gone now, Russell said. But the dwarf planet may still be able to support life as we know it, he added.

"We now know that there is water, and there is enough heat in the interior that that water can be in liquid form," Russell said. "There's certainly water, or brine, that can flow through the system and reach the surface." [Dwarf Planet Ceres' Intriguing Features Seen in New Detail (Video)]
Ceres' odd crust

Before Dawn got to Ceres, most astronomers thought the dwarf planet's crust consists primarily of water ice. But another one of the new Science studies, which is based on a detailed analysis of Ceres' many craters, suggested that's not the case.

Water ice is fairly soft, at least compared to rock. So if Ceres had a primarily icy shell, the dwarf planet's craters would tend to "relax," or flatten out, on relatively short timescales: 10 million to 100 million years or so, the researchers said. But study leader Harald Hiesinger, of the University of Munster in Germany, and his colleagues didn't find the expected relaxation.

Instead, Ceres' crater morphology suggests that the dwarf planet's crust is a strange mix of perhaps 60 percent rock and 40 percent ice, Russell said.

"This is something that we haven't seen before," he said.

"It's a new material to us — something that, if you hit it really hard, it will melt and flow, but you don't have to warm it up to the temperature of lava," Russell added. "We have many, many different areas where the material has flowed across the surface after having been hit by perhaps a meteorite or something of that nature." [Take a Trippy Trip Over Dwarf Planet Ceres (Video)]
A thin atmosphere?

Another of the new studies, this one led by Russell, suggested that Ceres may possess a thin atmosphere; such an "exosphere" could explain Dawn's observations of the solar wind interacting with the dwarf planet, the researchers wrote.

One of the other Science papers reported the probable detection of water ice, likely unearthed by an impact or landslide, at the bottom of a crater named Oxo. Another paper concluded that Ceres' surface was likely substantially altered by water at some point in the past, based on the widespread distribution of clay minerals (which only form in water).

These two studies were led by Jean-Philippe Combe (of the Bear Fight Institute in Winthrop, Washington) and Eleonora Ammannito (of UCLA), respectively.

(The new papers don't touch much on Ceres' famous bright spots, which appear to be composed largely of carbonates, Dawn team members recently reported.)
More discoveries to come

Dawn should help astronomers refine their understanding of Ceres even more in the future; NASA recently extended the spacecraft's mission by an additional two years.

For the past eight months or so, Dawn has been studying Ceres from an altitude of just 240 miles (385 km). But on Friday (Sept. 2), the probe will begin spiraling out to a higher orbit, one that lies 910 miles (1,460 km) above the dwarf planet's surface.

The move will allow Dawn to save fuel, NASA officials said. In addition, Dawn should be able to make better targeted observations from the more distant orbit, Russell told Space.com.

During the remainder of the mission, the Dawn team will look hard for changes in Ceres' surface over time, to get a better handle on the dwarf planet's geological activity and processes, Russell said.

The team is particularly interested in better understanding how often material makes it from Ceres' subsurface onto the surface, he added.

"We know that there is liquid inside Ceres," Russell said. "Does it come out on a regular basis, or does it just leak out as vapor? Or are there outgassing events?"

A possible outgassing event occurred several years ago on Ceres: In January 2014, researchers reported that Europe's Herschel Space Observatory had detected a transient cloud of water vapor around the dwarf planet. Dawn is not equipped to detect water vapor directly, but the probe may be able to spot a plume by indirect means, Russell said.

The Herschel detection "suggested that there were times when there was more atmosphere than others," he said. "We would love to be able to check that out."

Are ALIENS monitoring NASA? Footage emerges of two 'UFOs' hovering near International Space Station 

• Two flashing lights can be seen near the International Space Station
• UFO enthusiasts believe they're alien craft monitoring the space station
• Some also think NASA have edited the footage to cover up the discovery

Could this be further proof that aliens are monitoring NASA?

Unearthly footage appears to show two UFO's hovering near the International Space Station - convincing many that life in outer space does indeed exist.

The clip, believed to be taken from a live NASA stream, was uploaded to YouTube by Streetcap1 and has been pored over by multiple UFO enthusiasts. 

It appears to show two flashing lights travelling around a progress capsule – which are used to supply the International Space Station.

UFO expert Scott Waring is certain the video proves that aliens are using the craft to monitor the space station.  

'The first UFO is smaller… which tells me it's father away than the second larger UFO,' he explains. 

Are ALIENS monitoring NASA? Footage emerges of two 'UFOs' hovering near International Space Station 

• Two flashing lights can be seen near the International Space Station
• UFO enthusiasts believe they're alien craft monitoring the space station
• Some also think NASA have edited the footage to cover up the discovery

Could this be further proof that aliens are monitoring NASA?

Unearthly footage appears to show two UFO's hovering near the International Space Station - convincing many that life in outer space does indeed exist.

The clip, believed to be taken from a live NASA stream, was uploaded to YouTube by Streetcap1 and has been pored over by multiple UFO enthusiasts. 

It appears to show two flashing lights travelling around a progress capsule – which are used to supply the International Space Station.

UFO expert Scott Waring is certain the video proves that aliens are using the craft to monitor the space station.  

'The first UFO is smaller… which tells me it's father away than the second larger UFO,' he explains. 

Are ALIENS monitoring NASA? Footage emerges of two 'UFOs' hovering near International Space Station 

• Two flashing lights can be seen near the International Space Station
• UFO enthusiasts believe they're alien craft monitoring the space station
• Some also think NASA have edited the footage to cover up the discovery

Could this be further proof that aliens are monitoring NASA?

Unearthly footage appears to show two UFO's hovering near the International Space Station - convincing many that life in outer space does indeed exist.

The clip, believed to be taken from a live NASA stream, was uploaded to YouTube by Streetcap1 and has been pored over by multiple UFO enthusiasts. 

It appears to show two flashing lights travelling around a progress capsule – which are used to supply the International Space Station.

UFO expert Scott Waring is certain the video proves that aliens are using the craft to monitor the space station.  

'The first UFO is smaller… which tells me it's father away than the second larger UFO,' he explains.