Howdy Stargazers, and welcome to this episode
of Star Trails. Drew here, and I'll be your guide
to the night sky for the week starting June the
22nd through the 28th. This week a new moon offers
up darker skies, Mars dances with Mercury, and
we look at the weird world of blazars. particle
accelerators from galaxies far, far away. Whether
you're tuning in from the backyard, the balcony,
or just your imagination, I'm glad you're here.
So find a cozy spot, let your eyes adjust, and
let's see what the sky holds for us this week.
Let's kick things off with the moon. A new moon
arrives on June the 25th, which means dark skies
all week long. perfect for spotting galaxies,
nebula, and those elusive, faint stars. But the
moon's not taking the whole week off. On the
morning of June 23rd, look low in the eastern
sky before sunrise. You'll catch a slender crescent
moon hanging just above Venus, which is glowing
brightly at magnitude negative 4. It should look
great through a pair of binoculars. Then, after
sunset on the 26th and 27th, the crescent moon
returns, cozying up with Mercury, and even Castor
and Pollux, the twin stars of Gemini, just above
the western horizon. Look for this enchanting
grouping just as twilight fades. And here's something
rare. On the nights of June 28th and 29th, the
moon slips between Mars and Mercury, with the
bright star Regulus nearby. If you're in the
right part of the world, the moon will actually
pass in front of Mars, which is a lunar occultation,
just after midnight, Coordinated Universal Time,
on the 30th. Keep in mind, midnight in UTC time
is actually the night of the 29th here in North
America. For example, for those of us on Eastern
Daylight Time, we're four hours behind UTC time.
Be sure to use an astronomy app or an online
resource like Stellarium Web for the exact time
of the occultation in your area. I just checked
my location and while the moon will come very
close, it won't be covering Mars from my point
of view. Perhaps it will in your area. Even if
you don't catch the occultation itself, the trio
will make for a brilliant visual cluster. Speaking
of planets, here's who's on stage this week.
Venus is that blazing morning star, best seen
in the early dawn, rising in the east. Mercury
is just starting to show up after sunset, hugging
the western horizon. Mars is tagging along with
Regulus, the heart of Leo the lion, and they'll
be putting on quite a show in the western sky.
Saturn is your pre -dawn companion, glowing steadily
in the southeast before sunrise. Jupiter is slipping
out of view now, setting shortly after the sun.
If you're into deep sky observing, this is your
week. With no moon to compete, the core of the
Milky Way in Sagittarius and Scorpius is at its
best. From a dark location, you'll see it stretch
across the sky, and tucked inside it, things
like the Lagoon Nebula, the Trifid, and bright
open clusters like NGC 6633n Ophicus are all
waiting to be explored. One more thing to watch
for, the June Bo 'otids meteor shower peaks around
June 28th. This is usually a quiet one, but it's
been known to surprise, so keep an eye out for
slow, graceful meteors drifting through the sky.
And for those of you up north, keep your eyes
peeled for noctilucent clouds. These shimmering
electric blue wisps can appear just after sunset
or before sunrise, glowing way up at the edge
of space. They're composed of icy dust particles
that reflect sunlight even when the sun is well
below the horizon. They're most common in summer
at high latitudes, and they're as eerie as they
are beautiful. This week we're heading into the
wild frontier of deep space to meet one of the
universe's most extreme objects, the blazar.
Now, if you've been listening for a while, you've
heard me chat about pulsars and quasars before.
So, what's a blazar, and how is it different
from all these other space -r's? A blazar is
a special type of active galactic nucleus. That's
the energetic heart of a distant galaxy, where
a supermassive black hole is actively feeding
on gas and dust. Now, when a black hole is gobbling
up matter fast enough, it doesn't just sit quietly.
The whole area around it heats up and glows with
incredible brightness, sometimes outshining the
galaxy itself. Some of that material gets caught
in magnetic fields and is blasted out of the
galaxy's poles in two narrow beams called jets.
These are streams of particles and energy being
launched at nearly the speed of light. When one
of those jets is pointed almost directly at us
here on Earth, That's what we call a blazar.
These jets are moving so fast, they're categorized
as relativistic. That just means they're blasting
out at speeds close to the speed of light. At
those speeds, the rules of physics get weird.
Time slows down, mass changes, and light bends.
That's Einstein's theory of relativity kicking
in. So when we say a blazar is pointing a relativistic
jet at us, we mean we're in the direct line of
fire of one of these high -speed energy beams.
That makes blazars look incredibly bright and
variable to us, even if they're billions of light
-years away. Now, here's where things get even
stranger. In 2017, scientists using a detector
buried deep in the ice at the South Pole called
the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory, and yes, that
really is its name, spotted a very special kind
of subatomic particle, a neutrino. Neutrinos
are often nicknamed ghost particles because they
barely interact with anything. Trillions of them
are passing through your body right now, and
you don't even feel it. They're difficult to
detect, but in this case, Ice Cube caught one.
And when astronomers traced it back to its source,
it lined up with a flaring blazar called TXS
0506 plus 056. It's located around the left shoulder
of the constellation Orion. This was the first
time we'd ever linked a neutrino to a known object
outside our galaxy. IceCube isn't a telescope
in the traditional sense. It's made up of more
than 5 ,000 sensors frozen in a cubic kilometer
of Antarctic ice. When a neutrino occasionally
hits a molecule of ice it produces a tiny flash
of blue light. IceCube watches for those flashes
and helps determine the direction the neutrino
came from. Other observatories like KM3NET in
the Mediterranean are doing the same thing but
underwater. These detectors are opening up a
new kind of astronomy where we study the universe
not just with light, but with particles. This
is what astronomers call multi -messenger astronomy.
We're not just looking at starlight anymore,
we're listening to the universe in new ways through
particles, waves, and everything in between.
Here's the big picture and why scientists find
blazars so fascinating. Blazars are natural particle
accelerators. You've probably heard of the Large
Hadron Collider, that massive underground ring
in Europe where scientists use magnets and superconductors
to smash particles together to study what the
universe is made of. Blazars are doing the same
thing, but on a cosmic scale. They're accelerating
protons and other particles to energies millions
of times higher than anything we can do here
on Earth. These particles then travel across
the universe, sometimes for billions of years,
and some of them reach Earth. By detecting these
particles, we're learning what's happening in
the hearts of galaxies, how black holes interact
with their surroundings, and what kind of extreme
environments the universe is capable of creating.
Somewhere out there in a distant galaxy, a black
hole is hurling particles into space at nearly
the speed of light, and one of them might just
pass silently through you, carrying a message
from the edge of the universe, telling us what
conditions are like near these black holes, how
matter behaves in extreme gravity, and how the
most energetic phenomena in the cosmos operate.
If the stars spoke to you this week or if a question's
been on your mind, I'd love to hear it. Visit
our website, StarTrails .Show, where you can
contact me and explore past episodes. Be sure
to follow us on Blue Sky and YouTube. Links are
in the show notes. Until we meet again beneath
the stars, clear skies everyone.