Day: February 16, 2020

Thirty years ago, in February 1990, the Voyager 1 space craft had completed its primary mission and was about to shut down its imaging system. However, before it did so, and in response to lobbying from the late Carl Sagan, celebrated astronomer, teacher, broadcaster, writer, futurist and member of the Voyager programme’s imaging team, mission managers order the spacecraft to turn its imaging system back towards Earth to take a final photograph of its former home.

Captured on February 14th, 1990, the image revealed Earth as little more than a tiny blue pixel caught in a  streak of sunlight falling across the camera’s lens. Sagan immediately dubbed the image Pale Blue Dot, and it became his – and Voyager 1’s – Valentine’s Day gift to all of humanity; a last goodbye from the probe taken at a distance of 6 billion km (40.5 AU); 34 minutes later, its camera system was permanently powered down to conserve the vehicle’s power generation system.

From the moment it was published, the image became iconic: a representation of the sum total of humanity, something Sagan recognised at a time when the Cold War still dominated world politics.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

…It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

To mark the 30th anniversary of the original image, NASA issued a newly enhanced version of the image, carefully processed by a team led by software engineer and imagining specialist, Kevin M. Gill, seen at the top of this article. It once again reveals just how small and lonely our world really is. And while the Cold War has long since past, in this age of global warming and climate change, this new image of that tiny, pale blue dot and Sagan’s words remain as powerful a reminder of our fragile place in the Cosmos as they did more than two decades ago.

Betelgeuse: Extent of Dimming Revealed

I’ve previously written about the dimming of Betelgeuseas seen from Earth on a couple of occasions over the past few months (see: Space Sunday: a look at Betelgeuse (December 2019) and A farewell to Spitzer, capsules, stars and space planes (January 2020)). Now two images and a video have been released to show just how startling the apparent changes in the star have been over the course of a year.

As an irregular – and massive – variable star, Betelgeuse goes through cycles of dimming and brightening over time. However, what has occurred over the course of the past year is without precedent in the 125-year history of observations marking the star’s behaviour.

Overall, Betelgeuse’s apparently magnitude (brightness as seen from Earth) has fallen by a factor of 2.5 (or roughly 25-30%). This has prompted speculation that the star may have exploded into a supernova – its eventual fate – and we are currently seeing the light, which takes approximately 643 years to reach us, from the run-up to that cataclysmic event. While most astronomers do not believe this to be the case, the two images do present a stunning spectacle of a star in flux.

The images were captured by the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument attached to the Very Large Telescope (VLT, currently the most advanced visible light telescope in the world) operated by the European Southern Observatory Captured in January and December 2019, they not only show just how much  Betelgeuse has dimmed in that time, but also how it seems to have changed its shape.

Again, such changes of shape aren’t unusual for a pulsating variable star like Betelgeuse. The surface of such a star tends to be made up of giant convective cells that move, shrink and swell. However, while these pulses – referred to as stellar activity – have likely been responsible for past changes in Betelgeuse’s shape observed from Earth, they have never been anywhere as extreme as those indicated by SPHERE – although it has been acknowledged that they could also be exaggerated by a cloud of dust ejected by the star long enough ago to have cooled, and is now partially obscuring our view of Betelgeuse.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: A pale blue dot, and more on Betelgeuse” →