Category: Astronomy & Cosmology

One of the most rare of lunar eclipse events will be happening on September 27th and 28th, depending on where you are in the world, and hopefully you will be lucky enough to be somewhere to see it live. Neither a supermoon or an eclipse are rare events, according to a very informative article over on the NASA website. Supermoons happen every year when the moon is at its perigee, or the part of its orbit around the earth when it is closest. On those nights, the moon looks 14% larger than normal because it is closer. Eclipses happen about twice per year, so they are also pretty common.

But a supermoon lunar eclipse happens rarely, once every few decades. The last one occurred in 1982 and the next one isn’t predicted until 2033.

Now that’s rare! So be sure to get outside on the 27th and catch this maybe-twice-in-a-lifetime event!

From the article, here are the details on when the supermoon eclipse will be visible:

The total eclipse will last one hour and 12 minutes, and will be visible to North and South America, Europe, Africa, and parts of West Asia and the eastern Pacific. Viewers can see the supermoon unmasked after nightfall. Earth’s shadow will begin to dim the supermoon slightly beginning at 8:11 p.m. EDT. A noticeable shadow will begin to fall on the moon at 9:07 p.m., and the total eclipse will start at 10:11 p.m.

There are more details in the great article on NASA’s website, and here is a fun & informative video that they put together about this super-rare event:

Source: NASA.gov – “NASA Scientist Sheds Light on Rare Sept. 27 Supermoon Eclipse“

Video Credit: NASA’s Goddard Shorts HD podcast

Correction: The original version of this article had the incorrect month for the event, it is in fact happening on September 27th, 2015!

There has been some debate in the astronomical science community about Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons that has been closely studied for over 7 years.  The debate has focused on whether Enceladus has a global ocean, or whether the observations of amazing geysers of water around the south pole of the moon mean that there was simply a small ocean concentrated there.

An excellent article on Space.com spills the beans. After all those years of observations, they report that the startling conclusion to this very hard problem is thus:

The smoking gun is the very slight wobble that Enceladus displays as it orbits Saturn. This unsteady motion is effectively the result of water sloshing around inside Enceladus, and could not appear if the moon were made of ice all the way to its core. Instead, the moon must contain a complete ocean layer, according to new research that relied on more than seven years of images taken by NASA’s Cassini space probe.

“This was a hard problem that required years of observations, and calculations involving a diverse collection of disciplines, but we are confident we finally got it right,” Peter Thomas, lead author of the new work and a Cassini imaging team member at Cornell University, said in a statement from the Cassini imaging team.

Thomas and his colleagues studied images of Enceladus to precisely measure changes in its rotation, then ran several simulations to determine how the interior of the moon would affect those wobbles.

The article explains how Thomas and his team painstakingly analyzed the available data to come to their stunning conclusion that there is a global ocean underneath a thin, icy crust:

“If the surface and core were rigidly connected, the core would provide so much dead weight the wobble would be far smaller than we observe it to be,” co-author Matthew Tiscareno, a Cassini participating scientist at the SETI Institute in California, said in the same statement.

“This proves that there must be a global layer of liquid separating the surface from the core.”

There are more mysteries to be solved regarding this amazing discovery, but for now you can read all of the details in the excellent article on Space.com.

Source: Space.com – “An Ocean Flows Under Saturn’s Icy Moon Enceladus“

Featured Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

This awesome video shows the death of a comet as it speeds headlong into the Sun. Utterly fascinating to see its last moments, courtesy of Science.com:

This video was captured by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft, which has a special camera that occludes the solar disk so that the Sun’s corona can be researched. It has also been used to discover thousands of comets, many known as Kreutz sungrazers, which “graze” the Sun by coming within 500,000 miles of its surface. Occasionally, one of these sungrazers will plow directly into the sun, vaporizing within seconds. SOHO can be accessed on the internet by amateur comet hunters and just passed the “3000 comets discovered” mark on September 13, 2015.

Source: Science.com – “Death-Diving Comet Plunges Into Sun | Video“