A week of cosmic events!
On Wednesday, Aug. 12, some people will see our sun disappear and suddenly be in darkness. That’s because some areas like parts of Europe, the North Atlantic and North America will be able to see a solar eclipse as the moon moves between the Earth and the Sun.
Seth Mayo, the curator of science and director of the Lohman Planetarium in Daytona Beach, said that complete darkness only happens in the path of totality that spreads about 180 miles wide.
“If you're in that path, all of a sudden, your day turns to night,” Mayo said. “Crickets start chirping, the birds start to quiet down, and even the temperature goes down. It's a really amazing kind of life-changing thing to be in.”
In areas outside of the path of totality, viewers still have the chance to see a partial solar eclipse.
For a solar eclipse to happen, the moon needs to be in its new moon phase, leading to darker skies. That same phase is also helping another cosmic event: the Perseid meteor shower.
Onlookers could see up to a 100 meteors an hour when the Perseid meteor shower peaks Wednesday night into the early morning hours of Thursday.
It's called the Perseid meteor shower because it radiates near the constellation Perseus. However, the meteors are not formed from the constellation -- they come from a comet called 109P/Swift-Tuttle. The comet leaves behind a debris trail that interacts with our atmosphere, creating the meteors.
Mayo said the best time to see the meteors is between 2 and 4 a.m., as they enter Earth’s atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour
“They're going to streak across the entire sky,” Mayo said. “Really, the best thing to do is just lay back. Just take in the whole sky, and let your eyes adjust 5, 10 minutes if you're in a dark enough location, and just kind of wait for it to happen.”
The meteors should be easier to spot since moonlight will not affect visibility – a new moon phase that starts today will permit dark skies, making the meteors more visible.
“We have the best conditions for a meteor shower,” Mayo said. “Really the best time -- I know this is not convenient for most folks -- but like the 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. time period. That's because the Earth is kind of towards it, kind of going into it, and so we're getting a more direct hit by the meteors. Nothing to be alarmed by nothing to worry about. These are little, tiny little, microscopic pieces entering the atmosphere. ... It's just a pretty show.”
One telescope could change what we know about the universe
A new telescope is set to launch later this month to study some of space’s biggest mysteries.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch as early as Aug. 30 on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy Rocket. NASA’s Jeremy Perkins, the Roman Space Telescope’s Integration and Test Scientist, said the telescope first needs to get itself a million miles away from Earth, at Lagrange Point 2.
“It takes us a good three-plus months to get out there, and we're spending that time checking everything out and doing a whole bunch of calibrations and making sure everything is working the way we know it can,” Perkins said “It's basically like our time to kick the tires and just make sure that that the focus is right, the pointing is right. We do a lot of staring at the sky to get our first measurements of the sky.”
That destination gives the telescope good visibility and the ability to maintain a stable thermal temperature.
Perkins said at its core, Roman is a powerful survey mission. When Roman completes its planned survey of the Milky Way, he said it would take the Hubble Space Telescope 100 years to do the same thing.
“The real power is thinking about how to make these surveys useful to the broadest part of the scientific community as possible,” Perkins said. “So, there's been a lot of work, including having people write white papers and develop ideas to not only do the surveys that Roman was designed to do, but also think about how the community wants to use Roman.”
As Roman collects and processes data, Perkins said it could be released to the public in as little as 24 hours.
“The way I like to think about it is like Roman's database at the end of its prime mission after five years is going to be bigger than your standard music streaming platform,” Perkins said. “There's no way like I could dig into that and find new music without the tools and the algorithms that these streaming platforms give me.”
Roman’s main task along with surveying our skies are to detect and study things like dark matter and dark energy. According to NASA, dark matter acts as the glue that holds everything in our universe in place. In contrast, dark energy pushes things apart, and contributes to the expansion of our universe.
When it comes to dark energy, Perkins said “every time we've built something new to investigate it, or we've dug into the data further, it's behaving slightly different than we thought previously. I think what Roman learns about what dark energy is going to be very exciting because it could it could end up having us to rewrite the textbooks about what dark energy is.”
