Hundreds of fibers, arranged by hand, capture light at the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys New Mexico telescope.

By Daniel CleryFeb. 3, 2021 , 3:25 PM

It was one of the stranger and more monotonous jobs in astronomy: plugging optical fibers into hundreds of holes in aluminum plates. Every day, technicians with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) prepped up to 10 plates that would be placed that night at the focus of the surveys telescopes in Chile and New Mexico. The holes matched the exact positions of stars, galaxies, or other bright objects in the telescopes view. Light from each object fell directly on a fiber and was whisked off to a spectrograph, which split the light into its component wavelengths, revealing key details such as what the object is made of and how it is moving.

Now, after 20 years, the SDSS is going robotic. For the projects upcoming fifth set of surveys, known as the SDSS-V, plug plates are being replaced by 500 tiny robot arms, each holding fiber tips that patrol a small area of the telescopes focal plane. They can be reconfigured for a new sky map in 2 minutes. Other sky surveys are also adopting the speedy robots. They will not only save valuable observation time, but also allow the surveys to keep up with Europes Gaia satellite, the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, and other efforts that produce huge catalogs of objects needing spectroscopic study. Its driven by the science of enormous imaging surveys, says astronomer Richard Ellis of University College London.

COVID-19 has delayed the SDSSs robotic makeover. The surveys northern telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico began to take SDSS-V data in October 2020 using plug plates. It aims to switch over to the robots by mid-2021. The southern scope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile will follow later in the year. Its bananas, says SDSS-V Director Juna Kollmeier of the Carnegie Observatories, but were seeing the end of the tunnel.

The robots mark a new chapter for the SDSS. For 10 years much of its time went to the study of dark energy, the mysterious force that is accelerating the universes expansion. The SDSS prised apart the light of millions of galaxies to determine their distance, via a redshifta Doppler shift in their light due to the expansion of the universe, like the wail of a receding siren. Results from the galaxy survey, released in July 2020, traced the universes expansion back through 80% of its history with 1% precision, confirming the effects of dark energy, perhaps the biggest mystery in cosmology. Cracking it will require looking further back in time to fainter galaxies, which is beyond the capabilities of the surveys 2.5-meter telescopes.

Instead, the scopes will carry out three new surveys. Milky Way Mapper will gather spectra from 6 million stars, probing their composition to find out how long theyve been burning and forging heavy elements. Stars are all clocks, Kollmeier explains. With age estimates, astronomers can work out when parts of the Milky Way formed. Subtle shifts in composition can also reveal whether a group of stars originated in another galaxy or star cluster that has been subsumed into oursan unwinding of Milky Way history called galactic archaeology.

In a second survey, Black Hole Mapper, the optical fibers will gather light from bright galaxies to learn about the supermassive black holes they harbor. Doppler shifts in the spectra of glowing gases surrounding these black holes could reveal how fast they fling this material aroundand thus how heavy they are. Shifts in the spectra could trace how they gobble up and spit out streams of this gas. By tracking the gases over time, Kollmeier says, astronomers may learn how the black holes grow, seemingly in concert with their galaxies.

The third survey, Local Volume Mapper, will bunch fibers together like a multi-pixel detector to get spectra from clouds of interstellar gas within nearby galaxies. Were mapping a whole galaxy in exquisite detail at one time, Kollmeier says. By determining the motions and composition of the gas clouds, the SDSS team hopes to identify why some collapse into stars and others dont.

Meanwhile, the dark energy quest pioneered by the SDSS will move to the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, a 5000-fiber robotic spectrograph on a 4-meter telescope in Arizona. It will soon begin to track the distances to tens of millions of galaxies in the remote universe.

To speed up the ability to split light from thousands of stars at once, sky surveys are turning to robot-controlled optical fibers.

In the coming months, the William Herschel Telescope, a 4.2-meter telescope in the Canary Islands, will join the robot revolution by sending light to a 1000-fiber spectrograph called the WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE). Instead of using robots to hold fibers in place, WEAVE has two of them working offline, picking and placing magnetic fiber ends onto a metal plateautomating what the SDSSs plate pluggers did. One of WEAVEs goals is to gather Doppler shifts from the billion stars Gaia has mapped, nailing down their full 3D motions. Then, We can run the clock backwards and see where they came from, says project scientist Scott Trager of the University of Groningen. Its another way to do galactic archeology.

Next year, the European Southern Observatorys (ESOs) 4-metre Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope in Chile will be fitted with yet another robotic technology. Its 2400 fibers will be fed through controllable spines that stick up into the telescopes focal plane and can be made to move, like wheat stalks in a breeze. Like WEAVE, it will follow up on sources identified by European spacecraft, including Gaia and Euclid, an upcoming dark energy mission.

It and other fiber spectrographs will also help with studies of fast-moving cosmic events such as supernovae or the violent collisions that produce gravitational waves. The Rubin Observatory will spot many of them. From 2023, its expected to detect 10 million fast-changing objects every night. For the thousands that demand scrutiny, spectra are really critical for understanding what a source is, says Eric Bellm of the University of Washington, Seattle, who is the science lead for Rubins alert stream.

Even some of the worlds largest scopes, in the 8-meter range, are adding robotic spectrographs. Japans Subaru and ESOs Very Large Telescope are both developing systems that will vacuum up spectra from faint, distant objects. Ellis says a fiber spectrograph combined with Subarus 8.2-meter mirror would be able to pick out spectra of individual stars in the Andromeda galaxy, the Milky Ways nearby twin. With a big telescope, we can do galactic archaeology in our nearest neighbor, he says.

*Correction, 5 February, 3:10 p.m.:An earlier version of the table in this story misstated the total number of fibers for both of the SDSS-V telescopes.

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Astronomy surveys aim to up the pace with army of tiny robots - Science Magazine

Astronomers have been watching planetary systems form around sun-like stars for decades. And now, new observations with the ALMA telescope reveal the same process playing out around the smallest, but most common, stars in galaxy.

The smallest stars in the universe, red dwarf stars, are known to have planetary systems, as shown by the famous examples of Proxima b and the TRAPPIST-1 system. But to date, astronomers have never seen one of these stars in the process of actually forming those planets.

But also to date, astronomers havent had ALMA, currently one of the most powerful telescopes in the world. ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) is jointly operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), and by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ).The wavelengths of its observations are especially good at observing young planetary systems in the process of forming.

So thats exactly what Nicolas Kurtovic, a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany, did, mapping and analyzing six protoplanetary disks around young very low-mass stars (VLMS), which are no bigger than 20% of the mass of the sun.

Despite the tremendous progress in understanding planet formation during recent decades, we dont know much on how the planets of the most common stars form, Kurtovic said.

The observations showed the characteristic ring-like gaps in the disks around some of the young stars, which is a telltale sign of planet formation.

This pilot study was a challenging task because the VLMS disks are small and possess relatively little material, resulting in feeble signals that are very hard to detect, said Dr. Paola Pinilla. Pinilla leads a research group at MPIA titled The Genesis of Planets in which Kurtovic is a member.

These are crucial and very lucky observations, because the dust an essential ingredient for seeding the formation of planets tends to migrate inwards towards a young star, where its obliterated (and isnt much use in building planets). For VLMS, this process can happen up to twice as fast as a sun-like star, shutting down planetary formation before it even starts.

However, these observations show that its still quite possible, leading to systems like Proxima b and TRAPPIST-1.

We still do not know how common planets around red dwarf stars are, Kurtovic conceded. However, the longevity of red dwarf planetary systems is intriguing concerning habitability and hypothetical civilizations, he added.

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Astronomers are now Finding Planetary Disks Around the Smallest, Least Massive Stars - Universe Today

Astronomers have detected what they believe to be one of the earliest instances of "galactic cannibalism" when one galaxy consumes one of its smaller neighbors in an ultrafaint dwarf galaxy called Tucana II. The findings stem from the discovery of an ancient dark matter halo, located in a galaxy 163,000 light years from Earth.

Tucana II is just one of dozens of dwarf galaxies surrounding the Milky Way. Theyare thought to be artifacts left over from the first galaxies in the universe and Tucana II is among the most primitive of them.

In a new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, astrophysicists report detecting nine previously unknown stars at the edge of Tucana II, using the SkyMapper Telescope in Australia and the Magellan Telescopes in Chile. The stars are shockingly far away from its center but remain in the small galaxy's gravitational pull.

The configuration of stars provides the first evidence that the galaxy contains an extended dark matter halo a region of matter three to five times larger than scientists originally believed in order to keep a gravitational hold on its distant stars. The findings suggest that the earliest galaxies in the universe were much more massive than previously believed.

"Tucana II has a lot more mass than we thought, in order to bound these stars that are so far away," one of the authors of the study, MIT graduate student Anirudh Chiti, said in a statement. "This means that other relic first galaxies probably have these kinds of extended halos too."

Every galaxy is believed to be held together by a halo of dark matter, a type of hypothetical matter thought to make up over 85% of the universe, MIT News explains. But the new findings represent the first time one has been detected in an ultrafaint dwarf galaxy.

"Without dark matter, galaxies would just fly apart," Chiti said. "[Dark matter] is a crucial ingredient in making a galaxy and holding it together."

Scientists also found that these far-flung stars are older than the stars at Tucana II's core the first evidence of such an imbalance in this type of galaxy. Their discovery points to the possibility that the galaxy could be the product of one of the first mergers between two galaxies in the universe, which scientists refer to as "galactic cannibalism."

"We may be seeing the first signature of galactic cannibalism," said MIT Professor Anna Frebel. "One galaxy may have eaten one of its slightly smaller, more primitive neighbors, that then spilled all its stars into the outskirts."

Using a telescope's imaging filter, astronomers are able to study the metal content of a galaxy's stars to determine just how primitive it is. They had previously found stars at Tucana II's core with such low metal content that the galaxy was identified as the most chemically primitive of the known ultrafaint dwarf galaxies.

New research found the outer stars were three times more metal-poor than the ones at the center, making them even more primitive.

"This probably also means that the earliest galaxies formed in much larger dark matter halos than previously thought," Frebel said. "We have thought that the first galaxies were the tiniest, wimpiest galaxies. But they actually may have been several times larger than we thought, and not so tiny after all."

An early galactic merger is one likely explanation for the imbalance. Galactic cannibalism occurs "constantly" across today's universe, according to MIT News, but mergers in the early universe are not so certain.

"Tucana II will eventually be eaten by the Milky Way, no mercy," Frebel said. "And it turns out this ancient galaxy may have its own cannibalistic history."

The team hopes to use their approach to discover even older, more distant stars in other ultrafaint dwarf galaxies.

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Astronomers find origins of "galactic cannibalism" with discovery of ancient dark matter halo - CBS News

The majority of the universes mass is believed to be mysterious dark matter and dark energy. 5 percent is normal matter that makes up stars, planets, asteroids, etc. This is known as baryonic matter.

For quite a long time, researchers have been puzzled about why they couldnt represent all the matter in the universe as anticipated by hypothesis.

For the first time, Astronomers used distant galaxies as scintillating pins to locate and identify a piece of the Milky Ways missing matter.

Yuanming Wang, a doctoral candidate in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, has developed an ingenious method to track down the missing matter. Using the technique, Wang pinpointed a hitherto undetected stream of cold gas in the Milky Way about ten light-years from Earth.

The cloud is about a trillion kilometers long and 10 billion kilometers wide but only weighing about our Moons mass.

Ms. Wang, who is pursuing her Ph.D. at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, said, We suspect that much of the missing baryonic matter is in the form of cold gas clouds either in galaxies or between galaxies.

This gas is undetectable using conventional methods, as it emits no visible light of its own and is just too cold for detection via radio astronomy.

Astronomers observed radio sources in the distant background to see how they shimmered. They discovered five twinkling radio sources on a giant line in the sky.

Their analysis also shows that their light must have passed through the same cold clump of gas.

When visible light is distorted while passing through the atmosphere, it gives stars their twinkle. Similarly, when radio waves pass through the matter, it affects their brightness. It was that scintillation that Ms. Wang and her colleagues detected.

Dr. Artem Tuntsov, a co-author from Manly Astrophysics, said: We arent quite sure what the strange cloud is, but one possibility is that it could be a hydrogen snow cloud disrupted by a nearby star to form a long, thin clump of gas.

According to theorists, some of the universes missing baryonic matter could be locked up in these hydrogen snow clouds. They are almost impossible to detect directly.

Ms. Wang said, However, we have now developed a method to identify such clumps of invisible cold gas using background galaxies as pins.

Professor Tara Murphy said: This is a brilliant result for a young astronomer. We hope the methods trailblazed by Yuanming will allow us to detect more missing matter.

For the study, scientists gathered the CSIROs Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in Western Australia.

Dr. Keith Bannister, Principal Research Engineer at CSIRO, said: It is ASKAPs wide field of view, seeing tens of thousands of galaxies in a single observation that allowed us to measure the shape of the gas cloud.

Professor Murphy said: This is the first time that multiple scintillators have been detected behind the same cloud of cold gas. In the next few years, we should be able to use similar methods with ASKAP to detect a large number of such gas structures in our galaxy.

Ms. Wangs discovery adds to a growing suite of astronomers tools in their hunt for the universes missing baryonic matter. This includes a method published last year by the late Jean-Pierre Macquart from Curtin University, who used CSIROs ASKAP telescope to estimate a portion of matter in the intergalactic medium using fast radio bursts as cosmic weigh stations.

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Astronomers identified a piece of the Milky Ways missing matter - Tech Explorist

Posted: Feb 3, 2021 / 12:08 PM HST / Updated: Feb 3, 2021 / 06:35 PM HST

Courtesy Maunakea Observatories.

HONOLULU (KHON2) In a House Chamber meeting on Tuesday, House Speaker Scott Saiki called for an end to University of Hawaiis management of Maunakea.

[Hawaii news on the goLISTEN to KHON 2GO weekday mornings at 7:30 a.m.]

In his speech, the speaker announced that the house would be looking into legislation that pushes for a new governance structure of Maunakea. The University of Hawaii, who conducts astronomy research atop the mauna, currently holds a master lease of the land. That lease is set to expire in 2033.

The University of Hawaii has held the master lease to manage the astronomy precinct and the natural, cultural and preservation area since 1968, said Speaker Saiki. The master lease is set to expire in 2033 and the University is currently working to extend it. The University has tried to manage Maunakea, but for too long the Universitys work has been shrouded by its inability to appropriately manage cultural practices, resources and education. This is why the University of Hawaii must no longer manage Maunakea and it should cease its work to extend the master lease.

In a news release sent out just one day after the speakers announcement, the University said it will continue to work to improve stewardship of Maunakea but that it believes a new governance is not the answer.

The University of Hawaii remains steadfast in its commitment to continue to improve stewardship of Maunakea. The University is willing to work with anyone to honor that commitment, which includes considering different governance structures, said a spokesperson for the University.

The University says the legislature has proposed similar ideas in the past with no real result stemming from them, except for hindering the efforts of the observatories to secure proper sponsorship and funding for continued astronomy research.

It will take substantial time to reach an agreement on a new approach, if that can be done. If a new organization is recommended, it will need to be created and funded, and even if it already exists it will have substantial work to complete the necessary plans, assessments and approvals, UH said.

In its commentary, the University added that those who oppose the development of the thirty meter telescope on Maunakea will most likely continue to oppose it regardless of a new governance or land manager. UH highlighted past achievements, including an internal restructuring and community outreach, that the school says shows responsible stewardship of Maunakea.

Meanwhile, Speaker Saiki says the legislature will work with advocacy group, Ku Kiai Maunakea, in its efforts to pursue a new governance.

To read the University of Hawaiis full news release, click here.

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Astronomy on Maunakea and in Hawaii will be put at significant risk, UH says of request for new governance - KHON2

A recently discovered object sharing Earth's orbital path around the Sun could actually be a trojan asteroid, astronomers have found.

If confirmed, it will be only the second object of its type identified to date, suggesting that there could be more of these hidden asteroids lurking in Earth's gravitational pockets.

Trojan asteroids are space rocks that share the orbital path of larger planetary bodies in the Solar System, hanging out in gravitationally stable regions known as Lagrangian points.

These are pockets where the gravitational pulls of the planet and the Sun balance perfectly with the centripetal force of any small body in that region to basically hold it in place.

Each two-body system has five Lagrange points, as seen in the diagram below. There are five between Earth and the Moon; and another five between Earth and the Sun.

These are really quite useful, actually we can put spacecraft in them and be reasonably confident they will stay put. The James Webb Space Telescope, for instance, will be going in the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrangian.

(NASA/WMAP Science Team)

Lagrangians, however, can also capture space rocks, and the phenomenon is well-known in the Solar System.

Jupiter has the most trojans, with well over 9,000 documented, but the other planets are not going without. Neptune has 28, Mars has 9, and both Uranus and Earth have one confirmed apiece.

Earth's confirmed trojan, named 2010 TK7, is a chunk of rock around 300 metres (984 feet) across, hanging about the Earth-leading L4 Lagrangian in an oscillating tadpole-shaped orbit known as libration.

The new object, named 2020 XL5, which was first observed in November and December of last year, seems similar.

According to amateur astronomer Tony Dunn, who calculated the object's trajectory using NASA's JPL-Horizons software, it, too, librates around the Earth-Sun L4 Lagrangian, looping close to the orbit of Mars, and intersecting the orbit of Venus.

In the gif below, the asteroid's orbit is in teal, with Earth in blue and Mars in orange. Venus and Mercury are both white.

(Tony Dunn/Twitter)

Because it draws so near to Venus, if 2020 XL5 is a trojan, it may not be stable on long timescales. According to simulations run by Dunn, for a few thousand years, the asteroid will pass above and below the orbital plane of Venus when it intersects, keeping the planet from disrupting its orbit.

Eventually, however, gravitational interactions should move it away from the L4 point. This is supported by simulations run by amateur astronomer Aldo Vitagliano, creator of the Solex and Exorb orbital determination software.

"I can confirm that 2020 XL5 is presently a moderately stable Earth Trojan (I mean stable on a time scale of 2-4 millennia)," he wrote on the Minor Planets Mailing List.

"I have downloaded the nominal elements and their covariance matrix from the Neodys site, thereby generating 200 clones of the body. All the 200 clones, integrated up to AD 4500, although becoming spread over an orbital arc of more than 120 degrees, keep librating around the L4 point. The first clone jumps over the L3 point around year 4500, and by year 6000 many of them have done the jump and a few of them are librating around the L5 point."

2010 TK7 isn't necessarily stable in its current position long-term, either. A 2012 analysis found that it only became a trojan around 1,800 years ago, and will likely move away from the L4 point in about 15,000 years, into a horseshoe-shaped orbit, or into L5.

Although only one more data point, 2020 XL5 could help us figure out how to search for other potential Earth trojans. We have done so both the OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa2 spacecraft scanned the L4 and L5 points respectively in 2017 while en route to their respective targets, but found nothing. Searches from Earth have been nearly as fruitless.

That is not necessarily surprising. Any objects inhabiting the Lagrangians would be moving around a lot, leaving a very large patch of sky to scour looking for relatively small objects. From Earth, also, the placement with respect to the Sun makes detection challenging.

Scientists have ruled out a stable population of primordial trojans hiding since the beginning of the Solar System.

Nevertheless, even with current observational limitations, scientists have estimated that we could be able to detect hundreds of Earth trojans comparable in size to 2010 TK7. Gaining a better idea of how they move around the Lagrangians could help us narrow down where in the sky to look.

What we find whether it's a whole bunch of trojans, or a whole bunch of nothing is bound to tell us more about the dynamics of our Solar System.

H/T: Sky & Telescope

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Astronomers Think They've Found Another Trojan Asteroid Lurking in Earth's Orbit - ScienceAlert

TipRanks

Weve got a full month of 2021 behind us now, and a few trends are coming clearer. The coronavirus crisis may still be with us, but as vaccination programs expand, the end is in sight. With President Trump out of the picture, and the Democrats holding both Houses of Congress and the White House, politics is looking more predictable. And both of those developments bode well for an economic recovery this year. Looking back, at the year that was, we can also see some trends that stayed firm despite the pandemic, the shutdowns, and the supercharged election season. One of the most important is the ongoing rollout of 5G networking technology. These new networks bring with them a fuller realization of the promises inherent in the digital world. Faster connections, lower latency, higher online capacity, clearer signals all will strongly enhance the capabilities of the networked world. And it wont just be mundane things like telecommuting or remote offices that will benefit 5G will allow Internet of Things and autonomous vehicles to further develop their potential. There is even talk of medical applications, of remotely located doctors performing surgery via digitally controlled microsurgical tools. And these are just the possibilities that we can see from now. Who know what the future will really bring? To this end, we pulled up TipRanks database to learn more about three exciting plays in the 5G space. According to the Street, we are likely to see further interesting developments in the next few years as this technology takes over. Skyworks Solutions (SWKS) The first 5G name were looking at, Skyworks, is a semiconductor chip manufacturer that brought in $3.4 billion in total revenues for FY2020. Skyworks, which is a prime supplier of chips for Apples iPhone series, saw a massive 68% year-over-year increase in 1QFY21 revenues the top line reached $1.51 billion, a company record, and also much higher than analysts had forecast. Much of Skyworks fiscal Q1 sales success came after Apple launched the 5G-capable iPhone 12 line. Strong sales in the popular handset device meant that profits trickled down the supply line and Skyworks channels a disproportionate share of its business to Apple. In fact, Apple orders accounted for 70% of Skyworks revenue in the recent quarter. iPhone wasnt the only 5G handset on the receiving end of Skyworks chips, however the company is also an important supplier to Koreas Samsung and Chinas Xiaomi, and has seen demand rise as these companies also launch 5G-capable smartphones. Finally, Skyworks supplies semiconductor chip components to the wireless infrastructure sector, specifically to the small cell transmission units which are important in the propagation network of wireless signals. As the wireless providers switch to 5G transmission, Skyworks has seen orders for its products increase. In his note on Skyworks for Benchmark, 5-star analyst Ruben Roy writes: SWKS significantly beat consensus estimates and provided March quarter guidance that is also well ahead of consensus estimates as 5G related mobile revenue and broad-based segment revenue continued to accelerate In addition to continued strength of design win momentum and customer activity, we are encouraged with SWKS confident tone relative to the overall demand environment and content increase opportunities. In line with his comments, Roy rates SWKS a Buy along with a $215 price target. At current levels, this implies an upside of 20% for the coming year. (To watch Roys track record, click here) Roy is broadly in line with the rest of Wall Street, which has assigned SWKS 13 Buy ratings and 7 Holds over the past three month -- and sees the stock growing about 15% over the next 12 months, to a target price of $205.69.(See SWKS stock analysis on TipRanks) Qorvo, Inc. (QRVO) Qorvos chief products are chipsets used in the construction of radio frequency transmission systems that power wifi and broadband communication networks. The connection of this niche to 5G is clear as network providers upgrade their RF hardware to 5G, they also upgrade the semiconductor chips that control the systems. This chip maker has a solid niche, but it is not resting on its laurels. Qorvo is actively developing a range of new products specifically for 5G systems and deployment. This 5G radio frequency product portfolio includes phase shifters, switches, and integrated modules, and contains both infrastructure and mobile products. Qorvo posted $3.24 billion in total revenues for fiscal 2020. That revenue represents a 4.8% year-over-year increase and the companys sales have been accelerating in fiscal 2021. The most recent quarterly report, for the second fiscal quarter, showed $1.06 billion in revenues, a 31% yoy increase. Rajvindra Gill, 5-star analyst with Needham, is bullish on Qorvos prospects, noting: Qorvo reported strong sales and gross margins as 5G momentum rolls into CY21 on atypical seasonality... The company is planning for 500M 5G handsets to be manufactured in 2021, with an incremental $5-7 of content/unit from 4G to 5G. Management believes that ultra-wideband adoption will be a key growth driver in for smartphones going forward..." To this end, Gill puts a $220 price target on QRVO shares, suggesting room for 31% upside in 2021. Accordingly, he rates the stock a Buy. (To watch Gills track record, click here) What do other analysts have to say? 13 Buys and and 6 Holds add up to a Moderate Buy analyst consensus. Given the $192.28 average price target, shares could climb ~15% from current levels. (See QRVO stock analysis on TipRanks) Telefonakiebolaget LM Ericsson (ERIC) From chipsets, well move on to handsets. Ericsson, the Swedish telecom giant has long been a leader in mobile tech, and is well known for its infrastructure and software that make possible IP networking, broadband, cable TV, and other telecom services. Ericsson is the largest European telecom company, and the largest 2G/3G/4G infrastructure provider outside of China. But that is all in the background. Ericsson is also a leader in the rollout of Europes growing 5G networks. Ericsson is involved in 5G rollout in 17 countries in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and its product line includes infrastructure base units and handsets, giving the company an interest in all aspects of the new 5G networks. Ericssons revenue performance in 2020 was not notably distressed by the corona crisis. Yes, the top line dipped in Q1, but that was in line with the companys historical pattern of rising revenue from Q1 through Q4. While the companys 1H20 revenues showed small yoy declines, the 2H20 gains were higher. In Q3, the $6.48 billion top line was up 8.7% yoy, and Q4s $8.08 billion revenue was up 17% from the prior year. The companys shares have also performed well during the corona year, and show a 12 month gain of 64%. Raymond James 5-star analyst Simon Leopold bluntly assigns Ericssons recent gains to its participation in 5G rollouts. Japan's awaited 5G roll-out has started. Share gains continue as Ericsson benefits from challenges facing its biggest competitors and more operators embrace 5G it seems obvious that Ericsson should be gaining market share... Competitor Nokia shunned the Chinese 5G projects, citing profitability challenges, yet Ericsson appears to be profiting in the challenging region. Leopold rates this stock an Outperform (i.e. Buy), and his $15 price target implies an upside potential of ~14% for the year ahead. (To watch Leopolds track record, click here) The Raymond James analyst, while bullish on ERIC, is actually less so than the Wall Street consensus. The stock has a Strong Buy consensus rating, based on a unanimous 5 reviews, and the $16.50 average price target indicates 25% growth potential from the share price of $13.19. (See ERIC stock analysis on TipRanks) To find good ideas for 5G stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks Best Stocks to Buy, a newly launched tool that unites all of TipRanks equity insights. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analysts. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment.

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Explore Scientific, the Explore Alliance, and Astronomy Magazine Team Up for Global Star Party Celebrating Pluto - Yahoo Finance

Chances are, you've seen, heard, or felt a lightning bolt erupt in the sky somewhere near you. After all, there are well over a billion lightning flashes on Earth per year. That's about four dozen per second, somewhere over our planet (sometimes in one spot, where an astronomer with a phonecam can get video).

Thunderstorms are a common feature of our planet, and the electrical fields therein are the root source of the power of lightning. But they also generate other phenomena, too, ones that we're just starting to learn about.

One of the most mysterious of these is a blue flash. As the name says, these are intense, short blasts of blue light that occur near the tops of storm clouds, and last for only ten microseconds (one one-hundred-thousandth of a second). They sometimes trigger blue jets: upward-reaching tendrils that last for perhaps a few tenths of a second. These pulsate with energy as they go from being narrow channels to fanning out into wide cones as they propagate into the stratosphere, 1020 kilometers above the ground. But we don't know a huge amount about them.

Because they happen above the clouds, it's hard to see them from the Earth's surface. That's why scientists built a device called the AtmosphereSpace Interactions Monitor (or ASIM), which is mounted on the outside of one of the modules on the International Space Station (ISS). It looks to the Earth below, and can take data at 10 microsecond intervals, allowing these weird phenomena to be studied.

On February 26, 2019, a thunderstorm brewed in the South Pacific Ocean near the equator. The ISS passed almost directly over it, giving ASIM an incomparable view. Happily, the storm didn't disappoint: Five blue flashes were seen, including one that generated a blue jet.

The flashes occurred 16 kilometers above the ocean, near the center of the storm where deep convection was seen this is the rising and falling of air inside the cloud, which is how the strong electric fields inside are generated. These flashes may be from electrons accelerated to high speed inside the cloud slamming into nitrogen molecules in the air, which respond by emitting ultraviolet and blue light.

When this happens, the air becomes ionized electrons are stripped from the molecules creating a channel in the air that can conduct electricity. There's a huge charge difference between the top of a cloud and the air above it, and if conditions are just right, that blue flash can create a blue jet, a tremendous but narrow discharge of electricity upwards into the sky (similar to a lightning leader). The one seen by ASIM stretched about 50 kilometers up.

There was also a very faint red pulse at the start of the flash, which may have been the start of the leader, the first ionized channel carved upward, probably a few hundred meters long. This is also due to electrically excited nitrogen gas emitting light as well (the same reason some aurorae are red).

The blue flashes did more than make a blue jet, too: They made ELVES, which stands for get this Emission of Light and Very low frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic pulse Sources. A blue flash strongly accelerates electrons, which in turn generate powerful pulses of radio waves. These pulses move upwards into the ionosphere (80 kilometers or more above Earth's surface) which themselves accelerate electrons there. This creates rapidly expanding rings of blue and ultraviolet light as the pulse propagates horizontally at the bottom of the ionosphere, like a ripple moving away from a rock dropped into a pond.

I know, this is all quite complicated, but that's part of the point. The theory is partly there, but scientists have lacked observations to back them up. These ASIM observations really help.

Mind you, there are lots of other bizarre phenomena generated in clouds you may not have heard of. Terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, for example, are blasts of extremely high-energy photons out of the tops of thunderstorms, generated when electrons in the cloud are accelerated to nearly the speed of light and then interact with molecules of air. Maybe; the details of these flashes also aren't well understood even though they've been studied for decades.

There are also red sprites, which are tendril-like features that flash upwards from the tops of clouds. Pilots had reported seeing them for years but they were never caught in photos, so scientists were perhaps overly skeptical. In the 1990s these faint flashes started turning up in digital images, and now they're understood more or less in general. They're on my bucket list of Things I Want To See For Myself, but it's hard; since they appear over storms you have to be far enough away to see above the storm, and they're faint. We do see enormous storms to our east in the summer, and at some point I'll see about trying for them.

I know I usually write about mysterious objects and phenomena quadrillions of kilometers away, but there's a lot of very cool stuff going on much closer to us. It's not technically astronomy, but hey, it's still over our heads. Unless you're ASIM, looking down on Earth. But that's just a matter of perspective.

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A blue bolt out of the blue: On the edge of space, lightning leaps *upward* - SYFY WIRE

A galaxys main business is star formation. And when theyre young, like youth everywhere, they keep themselves busy with it. But galaxies age, evolve, and experience a slow-down in their rate of star formation. Eventually, galaxies cease forming new stars altogether, and astronomers call that quenching. Theyve been studying quenching for decades, yet much about it remains a mystery.

A new study based on the IllustrisTNG simulations has found a link between a galaxys quenching and its stellar size.

About 10 billion years ago, the Universe was in what cosmologists call the Cosmic Noon. That was when star formation in galaxies peaked. How and why galaxies stop forming stars since then has been mysterious.

In a new paper titled MOSEL and IllustrisTNG: Massive Extended Galaxies at z = 2 Quench Later Than Normal-size Galaxies, a team of researchers wanted to examine quenching. The lead author of the study is Dr. Anshu Gupta of Australias ARC Centre of Excellence in All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D). The paper will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Theres a period in the life of the Universe known as the cosmic noon, which occurred about 10 billion years ago, said Dr. Gupta in a press release. That was when star formation in massive galaxies was at its peak. After that, gas in most of these galaxies grew hot in part because of the black holes in the middle of them and they stopped forming stars.

Cosmic noon also saw galaxies develop the characteristics we see today: regular rotating disk and bulges, for instance. That was also when a population of dead galaxies, or quenched galaxies, started to emerge. Something was going on.

Cosmic noon wasnt only a period of peak star formation. It was also a period of peak black hole accretion. As the black holes at the center of galaxies grew more massive, they drew the galaxys gas towards them, compressing and heating the gas. But stars need cold gas to form; hot gas refuses to coalesce and collapse into a star.

But this compression and heating effect didnt dominate all galaxies. For a puffier, less dense galaxy with more space between stars, the black holes didnt have the same effect. They couldnt reach enough of the gas to quench star formation.

In galaxies that are really, really stretched out, however, we found that things didnt heat up as much and the black holes didnt exert such a great influence, so stars kept getting made over a longer period.

The team of researchers focused on whats called the galactic disk. The galactic disk is a flattened circular region surrounding the nucleus, and it contains stars, gas, and dust. If that disk is spread out instead of compact, then star formation persists, and quenching is delayed.

Where the stars in the disk are widely distributed you could call it puffy the gas stays cooler, so continues to coalesce under gravity and form new stars, said Dr. Gupta. In galaxies with more compact disks, the gas heats up quite quickly and is soon too energetic to mash together, so the formation of stars finishes by just after cosmic noon. Puffy disks keep going much longer, say as far as cosmic afternoon tea.

Their study found that by z=1, only 36% of extended massive galaxies had become quenched, while 69% of the more normal size massive galaxies had become quenched. By z=2 to 4, they found that normal-size massive galaxies build up their central stellar mass without a significant increase in their stellar size. But for extended massive galaxies, their stellar mass nearly doubled.

This research relied on both observations and simulations.

The IllustrisTNG simulations were an ambitious effort involving mostly German and American scientists. The IllustrisTNG website describes the effort best: Each simulation in IllustrisTNG evolves a large swath of a mock Universe from soon after the Big-Bang until the present day while taking into account a wide range of physical processes that drive galaxy formation. The simulations can be used to study a broad range of topics surrounding how the Universe and the galaxies within it evolved over time.

So what do these results mean? The results mean that for the first time weve been able to establish a relationship between disk size and star-making. So now astronomers will be able to look at any galaxy in the Universe and accurately predict when it will stop making stars just after lunch, or later in the cosmic afternoon.

The Milky Way is humanitys home. Where does our galaxy fit in all this? The Milky Way is a late bloomer, as it turns out. It was here at cosmic noon, but it was still very small and decidedly un-massive. At that point in time, it had only one-tenth of the star mass it has now. Its grown more massive over time, thanks to mergers. Now its a massive galaxy, but its still making stars.

So where are we now in the cosmic-galactic day timer? Cosmic noon was a long time ago, said Dr Gupta. Id say that by now the Universe has reached cosmic evening. Its not night-time yet, but things have definitely slowed down.

The team behind this study integrated the IllustrisTNG simulations with observations from the Multi-Object Spectroscopic Emission Line (MOSEL) Survey. MOSEL relied on the Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory. The team included scientists from the UK, Germany, Mexico, the USA, and Australia.

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Astronomers Can Predict When a Galaxys Star Formation Ends Based on the Shape and Size of its Disk - Universe Today

When most of us picture the shape of the Milky Way, the galaxy that contains our own sun and hundreds of billions of other stars, we think of a central mass surrounded by a flat disc of stars that spiral around it. However, astronomers know that rather than being symmetrical, the disc structure is warped, more like the brim of a fedora, and that the warped edges are constantly moving around the outer rim of the galaxy.

If you have ever seen the audience making a wave in a stadium, its very similar to that concept, said Xinlun Cheng, an astronomy graduate student in the University of Virginias College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Each member of the audience stands up and then sits down at the correct time and in the correct order to create the wave as it goes around the stadium. Thats exactly what stars in our galaxy are doing. Only in this case, as the wave is going around the galaxys disk, the galaxy disk is also rotating around the center of the galaxy. In terms of the sports-fan analogy, its as if the stadium itself is also rotating.

What caused that warp to occur has been the subject of debate. Some researchers suggest that the phenomenon is a result of the instability of the galaxy itself, while others assert that it is the remnant of a collision with another galaxy in the distant past.

A recent article published in The Astrophysical Journal by Cheng, who studies the movements of the stars, and his colleagues, Borja Anguiano, a post-doctoral research associate at UVA, and Steven Majewski, a professor in the Colleges Department of Astronomy, may finally put that debate to rest.

Using data from the Gaia space observatory, a satellite launched in 2013 by the European Space Agency to measure the positions, distances and motions of billions of stars and information from APOGEE, an infrared spectrograph developed by UVA to examine the chemical composition and motions of stars, astronomers now have the tools to observe the movements of the stars in the Milky Way with an unprecedented degree of accuracy.

By combining information from the APOGEE instrument with information from the Gaia satellite, were starting to understand how the different components of the galaxy are moving, said Anguiano, who is interested both in the movements of those components and what phenomena may have originally caused those movements to occur.

It is now possible to characterize those movements with unprecedented accuracy because of the precision and statistical robustness of the huge catalogue of stars that has been probed by the Gaia satellite, Majewski explained. Meanwhile, our own large database of stellar chemistries generated by APOGEE gives us the unique ability to infer stellar ages. This allows us to explore how stars of different age participate in the warp and lets us zero in on when it was created. Knowing this, then, gives us an idea of why it was created.

Using those data, Cheng and his colleagues have developed a model that characterizes the parameters of the galactic warp, where it begins in the outer disk, how fast the warp is moving and the shape of the warp. The model has helped them determine that the warp, which doesnt affect our own sun, but is passing our solar system now at speeds that allow it to make a full rotation around the galaxy every 450 million years, is not a result of the Milky Ways own internal mass. Instead, it is the relic of gravitational tugging on the Milky Ways disk by the nearby passage of a satellite galaxy, possibly the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy, about 3 billion years ago.

We can still see the disk of our galaxy shaking as a result, Anguiano said.

The data the team collected from the new tools available to astronomers may be just the beginning of a new wave of discoveries about our universe and how it came to be.

Were entering an age in astronomy, especially in galactic astronomy, in which we are measuring the movement of the stars at such a level of precision that we can map their past orbital paths and start to understand how they may have been affected at earlier times and how other galaxies approaching our own interacted with stars as they were being born, Anguiano said. This level of precision has opened a new door to understanding our galaxys past and how it was assembled.

The article, Exploring the Galactic Warp through Asymmetries in the Kinematics of the Galactic Disk, by Cheng and his colleagues, was published in the December issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

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A Warp in the Milky Way Linked to Galactic Collision - University of Virginia