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In a small Polish village near a Russian exclave, US-led NATO battle group is ready ‘in case anything happens’ – Stars and Stripes

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

BEMOWO PISKIE, Poland When American troops first deployed to northeast Poland in 2017 to lead a NATO enhanced Forward Presence battle group, the population of the village of Bemowo Piskie grew by a third overnight.

Nearly three years later, locals have grown used to the military presence and the occasional columns of tanks that pass through the village. Some say having the Americans in the village, which lies just south of the strategic Suwalki Corridor a border area between Poland and Lithuania that is sandwiched between Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad makes them feel safer. Others just like having them in town.

American soldiers in Bemowo Piskie enjoy being here and we like having them, said Kate, a villager who didnt want to give her last name.

The U.S.-led battle group is one of four on NATOs eastern flank aimed at deterring Russian aggression in Europe. The other three are in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all of which were annexed by the Soviet Union immediately after World War II, only regaining their freedom in 1991 when the USSR crumbled.

Russia often breaches the air space of the three Baltic states, has conducted crippling cyberattacks against them, and in 2014 was accused by the Estonians of abducting a security official at the border.

A 2018 report co-authored by former U.S. Army Europe commander retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges called the Suwalki Corridor, about 60 miles northeast of Bemowo Piskie, some of the most important territory within NATOs borders.

It is NATOs physical link between the Baltic littoral to the north and the European plain to the south. If this Corridor is not fully secured, NATOs credibility as a security guarantor to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia could be seriously undermined, the report said.

Having American and other NATO troops in Bemowo Piskie is seen as a deterrent to Russian aggression because, under NATOs founding principles, an attack on the battle group would be seen as an attack on the entire alliance. But with around 15,000 Russian troops based in Kaliningrad, just 65 miles north of Bemowo Piskie, the U.S.-led battle group, which with Polish, Croatian, Romanian and British forces totals about 1,200 troops, would be sorely outnumbered in an attack.

The troops know their job would be to hold off any attackers until NATO could strike back on a much larger scale.

We have a training plan in case anything happens, said Capt. Ian Staley, Lightning Troop commander for 3rd Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment. We dont feel that being this close [to Russia] is an issue. It is an opportunity for us to be in Bemowo Piskie in case anything happens.

American troops cycle through Bemowo Piskie in six-month rotations, living in barracks inside the fenced-off training area of around 42,000 acres, where they regularly participate in exercises with forces from other NATO member states.

Earlier this month, the battle group took part in kill tank, an exercise designed to teach soldiers about the functions and capabilities of weapons systems, Staley said. In July last year, Bemowo Piskie was host to the first Interoperability Games, testing how well allied troops can use each others equipment and vehicles.

Other than the language barrier and a 10 p.m. curfew, the American troops are free to take advantage of the villages amenities two small grocery stores and two restaurants.

The soldiers enjoy going out in town and out at night, even though it is a small town, Kate, said.

Some of the Americans came to Poland with apprehensions not because of how close theyd be to Russia but because theyd heard stories about the long, cold winters and how small and isolated Bemowo Piskie is.

I heard a lot of horror stories, but its not as bad as I thought it would be, said Spc. Kyle Bercsik, who arrived in January with the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, out of Vilseck, Germany.

There are soccer and basketball teams, and Bercsik attends Polish lessons with a few other soldiers, he said.

It puts the stress away for a couple of hours.

Johnson.Immanuel@stripes.comTwitter: @Manny_Stripes

A U.S. soldier from 3rd Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment, prepares to fire an M3 Carl Gustaf 84mm recoilless rifle, during an anti-tank training course in Bemowo Piskie, Poland, Jan. 31, 2020. TIMOTHY HAMLIN/U.S. ARMY

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In a small Polish village near a Russian exclave, US-led NATO battle group is ready 'in case anything happens' - Stars and Stripes

Russia’s MFA Lavrov: NATO "has nothing to do with Ukraine," shouldn’t interfere in Donbas talks – UNIAN

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

He says NATO "could only worsen" the Ukrainian issue.

Sergei Lavrov / REUTERS

"When they [at NATO] say that they are ready for dialogue with Russia, they are not completely true they are open for dialogue that they understand as advancing claims against us, primarily regarding Ukraine," Lavrov said after the 2020 Munich Security Conference, according to an UNIAN correspondent in the Russian Federation.

Read alsoRussia names condition for holding Normandy Four summit

According to him, the Russia-NATO Council has never gathered "without an attempted ultimatum to force us to consider Ukrainian problems in this format."

"Our response is and I mentioned this [to NATO Secretary General Jens] Stoltenberg when we met in Munich that NATO has nothing to do with Ukraine. We have dialogue with those Western countries that are in charge of the Ukrainian settlement primarily participants of the Normandy format France and Germany," he said.

"And as Americans also joined these Ukrainian negotiations from time to time, at least in the last couple of years, we're still in contact with them but NATO as it is they have nothing to do with the Ukrainian issue. They could only worsen it, deepen the problems by keeping on saying that NATO is looking forward to having Ukraine joining them. That's undermining the efforts to implement the Minsk agreements," he said.

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Russia's MFA Lavrov: NATO "has nothing to do with Ukraine," shouldn't interfere in Donbas talks - UNIAN

North Macedonia ratifies NATO accession protocol, but still waiting for Spain – EURACTIV

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

North Macedonias parliament unanimously ratified NATOs accession protocol on Tuesday (11 February), taking Skopje a step closer to becoming the military alliances 30th member in the coming weeks.

By joining this alliance, we are not simply joining an international organisation, North Macedonias President Stevo Pendarovski told lawmakers ahead of the vote.

Membership of the worlds most powerful military-political alliance is a privilege, but also a huge responsibility, Pendarovski added and described the vote as a major step in completing Macedonian statehood and a (guarantee) for our territorial integrity and sovereignty.

All 114 lawmakers present in the 120-seat parliament voted in favour, with none against or abstaining.

In the presence of NATO representatives, diplomats, and officials from some neighbouring countries, a NATO flag was raised in front of the parliament building in Skopje.

The vote was a rare moment of unity after months of political upheaval and took place several weeks ahead of schedule as the current parliament is set to dissolve at the end of the week.

Skopjes Prime Minister Zoran Zaev agreed in October to hold early elections on 12 April, after EU leaders failed to agree on opening accession talks with North Macedonia and Albania, mostly because of opposition from France. He later stepped down to pave the way for early elections.

Zaevs government was the driving force behind the countrys progress towards the West as in recent years it poured all of its political capital into efforts to put North Macedonia on a path to NATO and EU membership.

While being supportive of NATO membership, France, the Netherlands and Denmark have been reluctant to green-light the accession negotiations with the EU.

Without the prospect of joining NATO, the North Macedonia name change deal with Greece (Prespa Agreement) would have been dead because the EU side has not been delivering on its promises, North Macedonias deputy PM and defence minister, Radmila ekerinska, told EURACTIV earlier last year.

Without the prospect of joining NATO, the North Macedonia name change deal with Greece (Prespa Agreement) would have been dead because the EU side has not been delivering on its promises, North Macedonian deputy PM and defence minister, Radmila ekerinska, has said.

In 2019, the two Balkan neighbours ended a 27-year-old name dispute, lifting Athens veto on North Macedonias way toward the EU and NATO. North Macedonia has been an EU candidate since 2005.

At the Bucharest NATO summit in April 2008, Greece vetoed its neighbours bid to join the alliance because of the name dispute.

In a symbolic move, last year Greece was the first country to ratify North Macedonias accession to the western military alliance.

Whats happening with Spain?

All NATO members have ratified North Macedonias accession except Spain, even though the document was forwarded to the Spanish Parliament for signature already in June 2019.

Asked by EURACTIV what the obstacles are and what the expected timeline for ratification is, a Spanish MFA spokesman replied:

There had been no other obstacles to the ratification except for the parliamentary agenda, which has been on constant stand-by due to repeated elections and the text has just been sent to the newly composed parliament.

It is expected to be completed as soon as possible through a special urgent procedure but at the end of the day, it depends on both Houses legislative agenda, the MFA spokesman added.

According to Spanish sources, the parliament is expected to hold a ratification vote in March.

If everything goes according to plan concerning the political process, that process should finish around 10 March. There will remain some technical details that our parliament in Skopje will have to deal with, President Pendarovski told reporters during a visit to NATO member Poland.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]

North Macedonia ratifies NATO accession protocol, but still waiting for Spain - EURACTIV

North Macedonia Is Being Used by NATO To Target Serbia and Russia – Antiwar.com

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

The North Macedonian House of Representatives unanimously approved on Monday for their country to acceptthe NATO Accession Protocol, taking the former Yugoslav Republic a step closer towards accession into NATO which is expected to be completed and finalized in the spring. North Macedonias rapid accession into NATO is only possible because of the Prespa Agreement signed between Athens and Skopje in June 2018, bringing an end to the name dispute between the two countries that emerged in 1991 with the breakup of Yugoslavia.

The Prespa Agreement, named after a lake that traverses the borders of Greece, North Macedonia and Albania, defined exactly what was meant by "Macedonia" and "Macedonian." For Greece, according to the agreement, these terms denote an area and people of Greeces northern region, who continue the legacy of the Ancient Macedonian Hellenic civilization, history and culture, as well as the legacy of Alexander the Great. In reference to North Macedonia, these terms denote the modern territory of North Macedonia, the Slavic language and Slavic people with their own history and culture unrelated to the Ancient Macedonians. The agreement also stipulates the removal of North Macedonian irredentist efforts against Greek territory and to align them with UNESCO and Council of Europes standards.

With Greece no longer blocking North Macedonias attempts to join NATO and the European Union, no time has been wasted to elevate the Balkan country into the Atlanticist organization. There is no doubt that thePrespa Agreement, which caused political turmoil in Athens and Skopje,was signed only for North Macedonias rapid entry into NATO.

The acceleration of North Macedonia into NATO is not only a key priority for the organization to reduce Russian influence in the Balkans, but to continue pressurizing Serbia that was bombed by NATO in 1999 in response to the Serbian military operation against the "Kosovo Liberation Army" terrorist organization. North Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia are the only non-NATO members remaining in the Balkans, however it is important to remember that Bosnia is effectively a U.S. protectorate, while North Macedonia has been trying to join NATO since 1995 when Yugoslavia was completely destroyed in all but name. Serbia has no such ambition to join NATO and is considered a problematic country as it is the only remaining bastion of Russian influence left in the Balkans and is preventing full Atlanticist hegemony over the region.

Syriza, the ruling Party of Greece at the time of the signing of the Prespa Agreement, knew full well that the Prespa Agreement was largely despised by the Greeks, but none-the-less pushed for it and signed it. It is very obvious that the Prespa Agreement was to accelerate North Macedonia primarily into NATO, especially as not only Syriza, but also the current ruling party of New Democracy is loyal to NATO, with North Macedonias entry into the EU being only a consolation prize for Western powers. Less than a month after signing the Prespa Agreement, North Macedonia received an invitation to join NATO on 11 July 2018 with the accession protocol made in February 2019. North Macedonias accession into the EU on the other hand has made no progress since the Prespa Agreement was made.

For the Atlanticists, a rapid accession into NATO to contain and weaken Russian influence in North Macedonia and to also further constrain and pressurize Serbia was a higher priority than formalizing the Balkan country into the European neoliberal order as an official member. Although North Macedonia will undoubtedly join the EU eventually, it is not a matter of urgency as making the country into a NATO member. The Prespa Agreement is highly unpopular in both countries as they both feel they have lost out and did not achieve their objectives of promoting their interests with the name issue. NATO was unwilling to risk the Prespa Agreement failing and the name issue re-emerging which would once again put on hold North Macedonias accession into the organization.

North Macedonia cannot contribute to NATO in any meaningful way as it is a poor country of just over two million people and not close to the Russian border like the tiny Baltic states. Its accession into NATO is only for the purpose of weakening or preventing any Russian influence in the country and to further isolate Serbia. Despite North Macedonia being an overwhelmingly Orthodox and Slavic country that had the potential to become another pro-Russia state in the Balkans alongside neighboring Serbia, since its separation from Yugoslavia in 1991, Skopje pursued a pro-Western policy and joined the NATO program Partnership for Peace as early as 1995 and became a European Union candidate a decade later. Why North Macedonia has pursued such a Western-centric policy since its separation with Yugoslavia is not clearly understood, but it is certainly understood why NATO has accelerated North Macedonias membership into its organization.

Paul Antonopoulos is a research fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.

Greece wants NATO to halt migration influx from Turkey – Greek City Times

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

Greeces Defence Minister, Nikos Panagiotopoulos on Thursday called for a greater presence of NATO in the Aegean, during the two-day meeting of NATO Defence Ministers in Brussels that occurred on the 12-13th February.

Panagiotopoulos wanted to see the strengthening of NATOs presence in the Aegean so as to halt, as he said, the migration influx from Turkey.

During the two-day session, NATO member Defence Ministers focused on developments in the strategic environment of the greater Middle East, including North Africa, the security situation in Afghanistan, the further development of EU-NATO relations and the Alliances operational issues.

On the sidelines of the meeting, Panagiotopoulos met with his Turkish counterpart, Hulusi Akar, with whom he exchanged views on how the two countries military delegations could help reduce tension in bilateral relations at talks on the confidence-building measures scheduled to start in Athens on Monday.

The Greek Minister said he made it clear that in order for the military dialogue to succeed, provocative actions that undermine any effort to build confidence must be avoided.

Panagiotopoulos also met with counterparts from Estonia, Yuri Luik; Portugal, Joao Gomes Cravinho; and North Macedonia, Radmila Shekerinska.

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Greece wants NATO to halt migration influx from Turkey - Greek City Times

Unique Russian Tu-134 UBL (NATO Reporting Name Crusty-B) Nicknamed Black Pearl Intercepted Over The Baltic – The Aviationist

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

Top: the IR image of the Tu-134UB-L intercepted by the BAF. Below, a shot of the Tu-134UB-L RF-12041 nicknamed "Black Pearl". (Image credit: BAF)

Four Belgian Air Force F-16AM jets are deployed to Siauliai, Lithuania, to support NATO BAP (Baltic Air Policing) mission in the Baltic region since September. As part of their mission to safeguard the airspaces over Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and the Baltic Sea, the Belgian Vipers (just like the fighters of all the other air forces which support the BAP mission with rotational deployments to the Baltic States) are regularly scrambled to intercept Russian/non-NATO aircraft that fly in international airspace near NATO airspace.

While Il-76s, Su-27s and other interesting zombies are often escorted over the Baltic, the Russian Navy Tu-134 UB-L, RF-12041 nicknamed Black Pearl, that the BAF F-16s intercepted last week is a real first. The Belgian Air Force shared an IR image (most probably taken by the F-16s SNIPER Advanced Targeting Pod used in air-to-air mode for long range identification) of the rare bird, along with a file photo of the same aircraft taking off in 2019:

The Tu-134UB-L, NATO reporting name Crusty-B, is a variant of the civilian Tu-134B aircraft designed to train Tu-160 and Tu-22M3 strategic bombers aircrews (in particular, the Tu-134 was chosen because of the thrust to weight ratio and landing/takeoff characteristics were similar to those of the Tu-22M). The Tu-134UB-L (Uchebno-Boyevoy dla Lyotchikov, Russian for combat trainer for pilots) is indeed a Tu-134B airframe with a Tu-22 nose. According to Russias Warplanes Vol. 2 by Piotr Butowski, a total 109 Tu-134UB-L were built, with the first one making its maiden flight in March 1981.

Noteworthy, according to some sources, the Black Pearl is no longer used as a trainer, but was converted to be used for transportation tasks in 2017.

Whatever its current mission is the Tu-134UB-L RF-12041 is an extremely interesting and rare aircraft. Lets just hope the BAF will release more images of this beauty!!

H/T @ryankakiuchan for the heads-up

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Unique Russian Tu-134 UBL (NATO Reporting Name Crusty-B) Nicknamed Black Pearl Intercepted Over The Baltic - The Aviationist

Astronomers Have Aired Concerns About Musk’s Starlink in a Paper, And It’s Intense – ScienceAlert

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

Picture the space around Earth filled with tens of thousands of communications satellites. That scenario is slowly coming into being, and it has astronomers concerned.

Now a group of astronomers have written a paperoutlining their detailed concerns, and how all of these satellites could have a severe, negative impact on ground-based astronomy.

SpaceX and other companies are casting their keen capitalist eyes on the space around Earth. SpaceX and OneWeb are the only companies - so far - to launch any portions of their satellite constellations.

But a number of other companies have plans to do the same, and eventually all of those satellites will number in the tens of thousands.

The astronomy community has raised some concerns about these satellite constellations. The Royal Astronomical Society and the American Astronomical Society have both released statements expressing their concern and desire to work with companies in the satellite constellation business.

Those statements are polite, cautious in their criticism, and written in the spirit of cooperation.

But this new paper lays out all of the astronomical community's concerns, backed up with data, and presses their point more insistently.

The first 240 Starlink satellites in Celestrak. (Gallozzi et al., 2020/Celestrak.)

"For centuries ground based astronomical observations have led to exceptional progresses in our scientific understanding of the Laws of Nature."

A satellite constellation is a group of artificial satellites that work together to provide global or near-global communications coverage. They have the potential to make high-speed internet available almost anywhere. Obviously, there are a lot of benefits to that.

But there are criticisms, too, and three astronomers from Italy's INAFOsservatorio Astronomico di Roma, have presented these criticisms in detail. The three are Stefano Gallozzi, Marco Scardia, and Michele Maris.

Their paper is titled "Concerns about ground based astronomical observations: A step to Safeguard the Astronomical Sky".

When you add up all the satellites that companies want to launch as part of their constellations, you get somewhere around 50,000 satellites. The question is, what effect will of those satellites have on ground-based astronomy?

The authors of the report claim that all of these satellites will inevitably damage astronomical observing.

A note to readers: English is not the first language of the authors of the paper, so some of the quotes contain small inconsistencies, but the meaning is clear.

"Depending on their altitude and surface reflectivity, their contribution to the sky brightness is not negligible for professional ground based observations," the report says in the introduction.

"With the huge amount of about 50,000 new artificial satellites for telecommunications planned to be launched in Medium and Low Earth Orbit, the mean density of artificial objects will be of >1 satellite for square sky degree; this will inevitably harm professional astronomical images."

(Gallozzi et al., 2020)

TABLE: There are only 172 stars in the whole sky exceeding the expected brightness of Starlink satellites. Higher altitude LEO satellites (e.g. over 1000 km-altitude) will be visible all the night reaching approximately the 8th magnitude.

Since SpaceX is the furthest along in deploying their constellation, their name pops up frequently in the paper. SpaceX's Starlink system has already launched almost 250 of their satellites, and they plan to deploy up to 42,000 satellites in total.

According to the paper, these satellites "will shine from the 3rd to the 7th magnitude in sky after sunset and before sun dawn."

The authors say that all of those satellites will inevitably leave trails in astronomical images, and may inhibit the search for Near Earth Objects. There's some degree of risk that we might not spot a potential impact because of all these satellites.

But it's not just images that will be negatively affected, according to the report.

"Serious concerns are common also to other wavelengths eligible for ground based investigation, in particular for radio-astronomy, whose detectors are already saturated by the ubiquitous irradiation of satellites communication from space stations as well as from the ground."

Back in May 2019, Elon Musk tried to dismiss any astronomical concerns about Starlink. Among his rather brusque dismissal of criticisms was his statement that "We need to move telelscopes (sic) to orbit anyway. Atmospheric attenuation is terrible."

Musk has a huge profile in the space community, so his words might have convinced some that there are no problems between Starlink and astronomy. But Musk is an entrepreneur, not a scientist.

For all his accomplishments, Musk is not an expert in astronomy or astronomical observing. Is his statement that Starlink "will have ~0 percent impact on advancements in astronomy," accurate and informed?

The three authors of the new paper don't seem to think so. They outline the risks that satellite constellations pose to astronomy, and it's not all about whether they're visible in optical light.

They point out that there are "dangerous effects arising from such changes in the population of small satellites. A dedicated strategy for urgent intervention to safeguard and protect each astronomical band observable from the ground is outlined."

"Without ground based observations most of current space based astronomy would be useless or impossible."

The authors start at the beginning, by pointing out the enormous advances in understanding made by ground-based observations. "For centuries ground based astronomical observations have led to exceptional progresses in our scientific understanding of the Laws of Nature." That's hard to argue with.

In the paper's first section, they talk about how space-based astronomy, or space telescopes, have contributed to knowledge. But they point out that ground-based and space-based astronomy need each other and produce the best science when they work together.

"Without ground based observations most of current space based astronomy would be useless or impossible."

It's safe to say that the authors don't agree with Musk's glib assertion that "We need to move telelscopes (sic) to orbit anyway. Atmospheric attenuation is terrible."

Maybe Musk has never heard of adaptive optics. Adaptive optics allow modern ground-based telescopes to overcome the effect of the atmosphere on observations. Upcoming telescopes like the European Extremely Large Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope feature adaptive optics at the heart of their designs.

The authors also point out what should be clear to anyone who thinks about it for very long: compared to ground-based astronomy, space-based telescopes are enormously expensive. And risky.

Advances in telescope technology are made here on Earth. Their deployment is the risky part, but the technologies have already been tested and developed here on Earth. As the authors of the paper point out, testing and developing new telescope technologies is not feasible in space.

"A major limitation of space based telescopes is that they can not be maintained, refurbished or repaired after launch." The Hubble is an exception, and other space telescopes have not been maintained. Once they're done, they're done.

The first Hubble servicing mission, the only space telescope to be serviced since launch. (NASA)

"Compared to ground based observatories, the average life-time of space based telescopes is of the order of a couple of decades or less. On the contrary ground based observatories lasts for several decades, with telescopes installed at the beginning of the space era again working in a profitable manner."

In short, space telescopes become technologically obsolete, while their ground-based counterparts keep on working.

We can see this with the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT). The VLT is made up of four primary units, and the first one saw first light in 1998.

Over the years its been upgraded multiple times, each time increasing its observing capabilities. Two of its instruments, SPHERE (first light June 2014) and ESPRESSO (first light September 2016), are designed to study exoplanets, something that wasn't important when the VLT was designed. Other instruments, like VISIR (VLT Imager and Spectrometer for mid-Infrared) were upgraded to study exoplanets.

Space telescopes are also costly when compared to ground-based telescopes. The James Webb Space Telescope has been in development for 20 years, and it will cost US$10 billion. But the next generation of ground-based telescopes, like the Giant Magellan Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope, will cost about US$1 billion each. And they will likely outlive the JWST by decades.

The nitty-gritty part of the paper deals with the actual problems that ground-based astronomy will face from satellite constellations. In some electromagnetic wavelengths, space telescopes are much more effective than ground-based telescopes. In the far Infrared for example, the atmosphere blocks much of it. But that doesn't tell the whole tale.

In the paper the authors talk about sky degradation. This degradation comes not only from light pollution on the ground, but "it is also due to artificial satellite fleets crossing and scarring observations with bright parallel streaks/trails at all latitudes."

Starlink alone would like to place up to 40,000 satellites into orbit. That's just one company out of several with plans to launch satellite constellations. Nobody knows how many there will eventually be, but it's fair to use a 50,000 satellite figure for discussion.

"Astronomers are extremely concerned by the possibility that sky seen from Earth may be blanketed by tens of thousands of satellites, which will greatly outnumber the approximately 9,000 stars that are visible to the unaided human eye," the authors say. "This is not some distant threat: it is already happening."

(NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory/NSF/AURA/CTIO/DELVE)

IMAGE:This is what astronomers are concerned about, Starlink satellites visible in a mosaic of an astronomical image.

The three astronomers break down all the numbers for Earth's growing fleet of satellites. Taking into account viewing angles, altitude, and brightness leads them to this conclusion:

"Thus with 50k satellites the "normality" will be a sky crowded with artificial objects: every square degree of the sky will have a satellite crawling in it along the whole observing night accessible and visible by astronomical cameras and not only by professional instrumentation."

According to the authors, all of this light pollution will be a serious detriment to astronomical observing. They acknowledge that SpaceX is experimenting with one "dark" satellite which is painted black to reduce reflectivity.

But they point out that 75 percent of the satellite's surface is solar panels, which obviously cannot be painted. They also point out problems with painting a satellite black:

"If the satellite body will be inhibited to reflect the sun light, it will absorb radiation warming too much with possible failures, thus will probably increase the risk management for the whole fleet and make the dark-coating solution ineffective or even counterproductive."

Apparent magnitude of satellites during an observing night depending on the altitude. (Gallozzi et al., 2020)

Then there's the whole problem of radio-band interference.

"Even with best coating and mitigation procedures to decrease the impact on visual astronomical observations, what it is often omitted or forgotten is that telecommunication constellations will shine in the radio wavelengths bands, observable from the ground."

There are decades old agreements from the beginning of the space age that reserve certain radio frequencies for certain uses. The frequencies of certain atoms and molecules in space are reserved for radio astronomy. These include carbon monoxide and its isotopes, and H2O.

Radio astronomers already have to contend with all kinds of interference. According to the authors, this will get much worse.

"What is not widely acknowledged is that the development of the latest generation telecommunication networks (both from space and from Earth) already has a profound impact on radio-astronomical observations (at all sub-bands): with LEO satellite fleets it is quite sure that the situation could become unbearable."

Then there's the question of legality, and which bodies can authorize the deployment of satellite constellations.

The authors draw our attention to the 1994 statement from UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

That statement says:

"Persons belonging to future generations have the right to an uncontaminated and undamaged Earth, including pure skies; they are entitled to its enjoyment as the ground of human history of culture and social bonds that make each generation and individual a member of one human family."

The number of objects around Earth is growing rapidly. (Gallozzi et al., 2020)

That same statement from UNESCO also says "Here, World Heritage is the property of all humankind, and while there may be protective laws, enforcing this is another matter, as only States can sue other States under this type of international treaty. A State is responsible for the activities that occur within its jurisdiction whether they are authorized or unauthorized."

The three astronomers point out that since the FCC and other bodies in the United States have given approval to Starlink, they may be able to halt Starlink, too. They may even be obligated to under international law.

They also mention the Outer Space Treaty, and say "And the legal process is that the state government, this time the USA government, is legally responsible for all objects sent into outer space that launch from USA borders. That means, that it is the USA government that is responsible for the harm caused by its corporation, Starlink, sending objects into orbit that cause harm."

The paper draws to a close by pointing out possible legal actions that the international community could take to stop satellite constellations.

They could sue the FCC because in their approval they didn't take light pollution into account, which violates the National Environmental Policy Act. That act requires any federal agency to consider the environmental impact of the projects they approve. The authors claim that the FCC didn't adequately consider the light pollution from Starlink.

The international astronomy community could "sue in court for lack of jurisdiction and jurisprudence of US FCC to authorize private not geostationary satellites over other states and nations." This calls into question the FCC's right to even authorize satellite constellations that travel over other nations.

Then there's the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The three authors say the international community could sue the US government at the ICJ " to put on hold further Starlink launches to quantify the loss of public finances in damaging national and international astronomical projects."

The international astronomy community started a petition in January 2020. The community wants a hold put on Starlink and others, they want legal protections put in place for astronomical observing, and they want to limit the number of satellite constellations to a minimum.

"All of these requests come from the heartfelt concern of scientists arising from threatens to be barred from accessing the full knowledge of the Cosmos and the loss of an intangible asset of immeasurable value for humanity," the authors say.

Space is becoming more of a legal morass as time goes on. Exactly which types of activities will be allowed is unclear. Decades ago, near the beginning of the space age, laws and agreements were put in place to keep things under control.

But nobody foresaw anything like satellite constellations, and the legal framework governing space is likely going to come under a lot of pressure.

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

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Astronomers Have Aired Concerns About Musk's Starlink in a Paper, And It's Intense - ScienceAlert

On Student Success, This Astronomer Walks the Walk – UANews

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

In Gurtina Besla's universe, astronomy would be inclusive, diverse and accessible, and she is using a new award to make sure it is just that.

Besla, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, has received a five-year, $745,000 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation for both her novel research on galaxies and dark matter and her outreach efforts to retain, mentor and support students studying STEM disciplines.

The CAREER grant is the agency's most prestigious honor in support of early-career faculty members who have the potential to serve as academic role models and lead advances in their organization's mission.

"In both her research and outreach, Besla is truly forward-thinking. The strides she is making toward enabling diversity and equity in the field of astronomy are exemplary, and I am pleased that the National Science Foundation has provided her with this richly deserved recognition," said Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation Elizabeth "Betsy" Cantwell.

With her CAREER grant, Besla plans to explore two nearby cloudlike galaxies called the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds.

"We've always thought that the smaller galaxies orbiting around the Milky Way could never actually affect our galaxy," she said.

But the Magellanic Clouds are big. Their gravitational pull, therefore, should be big, too. Not only that, but they are traveling at nearly three times the speed of sound.

"The fact that the Magellanic Clouds are this big and this fast and relatively new to our galaxy means they're messing things up. There's going to be all kinds of perturbations," Besla said. One example might be stars around our Milky Way "making weird movements" as a result of the Magellanic Clouds' presence, she added.

Besla is developing new models to simulate the impact of these galaxies and plans to publicly release them as an open-source program, small enough for undergraduate and graduate students to access on ordinary laptops. The open-source models will even come with tutorials.

It's all about access, she explained, adding, "Faculty need to think about making their data products available to students across the world."

In addition to helping further her research, the CAREER award will help Besla continue to build a program she founded in 2015 called TIMESTEP: the Tucson Initiative for Minority Engagement in Science and Technology Program.

"We want to help students graduate and get to the career paths they want and are excited about," Besla said. "We want to level the playing field so that everyone has the same information and access to opportunity."

TIMESTEP is a professional development program open to undergraduates in science, technology, engineering and math disciplines and is designed to provide them the information they need to succeed. Its 100 or so students majoring in astronomy, physics, mathematics, optical sciences, engineering and computer science meet twice a month. Half of the students in TIMESTEP are people of color.

To provide inspiration and access to mentorship, Besla invites faculty from across the country to talk to the students about their cultural heritage and how to stay true to their identity in their chosen profession.

"Of course, anyone is welcome to come to TIMESTEP, but we typically invite speakers of color and design programs for minority students. Studies show that they need it more," Besla said.

The university's designation as a Hispanic-Serving Institution "is directly relevant to the astronomy department's goal of building a diverse and inclusive community," Besla said. "The retention of Hispanic students in our program is a key part of realizing this goal. A large part of that is making sure Hispanic students have access to community."

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On Student Success, This Astronomer Walks the Walk - UANews

Orion and its dimming star Betelgeuse shine over a stargazer in this sentimental night-sky photo – Space.com

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

Miguel Clarois a professional photographer, author and science communicator based in Lisbon, Portugal, who creates spectacular images of the night sky. As aEuropean Southern Observatory photo ambassador,a member ofThe World At Nightand the official astrophotographer of theDark Sky Alqueva Reserve, he specializes in astronomical "skyscapes" that connect Earth and night sky. Join Claro here as he takes us through his photograph"Orion in the Winter Sky and the Story Behind the Fainting Star Betelgeuse."

Captured during one of my private workshops on Dec. 12, 2019, this image shows a lonely stargazer enjoying the most beautiful constellation of the winter sky: Orion, the hunter.

The photo, captured from one of the landscapes of Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve in Portugal, features the bright star Betelgeuse, which is located on the hunter's left "shoulder." Many amateur and professional astronomers since last October have been reporting a decrease in brightness of the yellow-orange star, giving space for some speculation that the star is about to explode.

Related: The dimming star Betelgeuse is acting weird. Here's how to spot it in Orion's shoulder.

According to an article published by National Geographic last December, "decades of photometric data show that Betelgeuse brightens and dims in cycles, with one notable cycle vacillating on a roughly six-year time scale and another rising and falling every 425 days or so."

Scientists suspect that the red supergiant Betelgeuse has recently dimmed quite dramatically because those two periodic cycles are overlapping at minimal brightness, according to a report published in the Astronomer's Telegram by Edward Guinan, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

Astronomers have long suspected that the star might explode sometime in the next million years. It's also possible that Betelgeuse has already exploded and we just haven't seen it happen; because the star is 600 light-years away, it takes 600 years after something happens on Betelgeuse for light from that event to reach Earth. But if and when astronomers do witness the star's explosion, it will be the most astonishing astronomy event of all time.

When Betelgeuse explodes, turning into a supernova, it will briefly shine even brighter than the full moon. Then, the star will vanish forever, leaving an "empty space" in our hearts and in the mythic Orion constellation, which will still be visible in the night sky for us and many future civilizations. Without his left shoulder, however, the hunter will never look the same.

To capture this single shot, I used a Nikon D810A camera with the ISO set to 2500 and a 24-70mm lens set to 26mm at f/2.8. The exposure time was 15 seconds.

To get a print of Claro's amazing astrophotography, visit his fine-art prints store atwww.miguelclaro.com/prints. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcomand onFacebook.

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Orion and its dimming star Betelgeuse shine over a stargazer in this sentimental night-sky photo - Space.com

When Betelgeuse goes supernova, what will it look like from Earth? – Astronomy Magazine

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

Supernova seen from Earth

With all the speculation about what a Betelgeuse supernova would look like from Earth, University of California, Santa Barbara, astronomer Andy Howell got tired of the back-of-the-envelope calculations. He put the problem to a pair of UCSB graduate students, Jared Goldberg and Evan Bauer, who created more precise simulations of the stars dying days.

The astronomers say theres still uncertainty over how the supernova would play out, but they were able to augment their accuracy using observations taken during Supernova 1987A, the closest known star to explode in centuries.

Life on Earth will be unharmed. But that doesnt mean it will go unnoticed. Goldberg and Bauer found that when Betelgeuse explodes, it will shine as bright as the half-Moon nine times fainter than the full Moon for more than three months.

All this brightness would be concentrated into one point, Howell says. So it would be this incredibly intense beacon in the sky that would cast shadows at night, and that you could see during the daytime. Everyone all over the world would be curious about it, because it would be unavoidable.

Humans would be able to see the supernova in the daytime sky for roughly a year, he says. And it would be visible at night with the naked eye for several years, as the supernova aftermath dims.

By the time it fades completely, Orion will be missing its left shoulder, adds Sarafina Nance, a University of California, Berkeley, graduate student whos published several studies of Betelgeuse.

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When Betelgeuse goes supernova, what will it look like from Earth? - Astronomy Magazine

Planetesimal Arrokoth is helping astronomers understand the formation of the planets – Firstpost

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

ReutersFeb 17, 2020 10:19:22 IST

A vaguely hourglass-shaped icy object called Arrokoth residing in the far reaches of the solar system the most distant body ever explored by a spacecraft is giving scientists intriguing clues about the formation of the planets including Earth.

Scientists on Thursday offered the fullest description yet of the composition and origin of Arrokoth based on data from NASAs New Horizons spacecraft, which whizzed past it last year.

Arrokoth, located 6.6 billion km from Earth in a region beyond the planet Neptune called the Kuiper Belt, boasts a uniformly reddish surface that is smooth and undulating with few craters. It is coated with frozen methanol a type of alcohol and unidentified complex organic molecules.

Arrokoth is a planet that is comprised of two lobes looking somewhat like giant wheels of cheese fused together by a bridge. Image credit: NASA

About 36 km long and 20 km wide, it is classified as a planetesimal, objects that were among the solar systems original building blocks. These small bodies coalesced at an early stage of the solar systems formation some 4.5 billion years ago and are a key intermediate size step on the way to building planets.

Arrokoth is comprised of two lobes looking somewhat like giant wheels of cheese fused together by a bridge.

It consists of two bodies that appear to have formed in orbit around each other from a local dust cloud, which collapsed under its own gravity within the solar nebula the huge disk of dust and gas that the solar system formed from.The two bodies then spiralled in together and merged very gently, said astronomer John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institutein Colorado, one of the researchers in the study published in the journal Science.

This suggests that planetesimals formed in localized conditions in which collision speeds were slow rather than from a gradual assembly of widely dispersed objects growing by randomly colliding with each other at higher speeds.

So we now have a clearer picture of how planets, including the Earth, were built, Spencer said.

Planetesimals previously visited by space probes were all badly battered by impactors or cooked by approaching too close to the sun. So it is thrilling to finally be able to see one still pretty much just as it was after its formation, said planetary scientist and study co-author Will Grundy of Lowell Observatory in Arizona, a New Horizons mission co-investigator.

Arrokoth is one of the thousands of small icy bodies inhabiting the Kuiper Belt, the solar systems vast third zone beyond the inner terrestrial planets and the outer gas giant planets. Its name is a Native American term for sky.

Welcome to Tech2 Innovate, Indias most definitive youth festival celebrating innovation is being held at GMR Grounds, Aerocity Phase 2, on 14th and 15th February 2020. Come and experience an amalgamation of tech, gadgets, automobiles, music, technology, and pop culture along with the whos who of the online world. Book your tickets now.

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Planetesimal Arrokoth is helping astronomers understand the formation of the planets - Firstpost

How many planets are there in the universe? – Astronomy Magazine

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

Astronomers estimate that there is roughly one exoplanet per star in our galaxy. Of course, some stars have many planets our own Sun has eight. And some stars have none. But if a star lives long enough, forming planets seems to be the rule, rather than the exception.

That doesnt mean astronomers can map all of those billions of stars though. When it comes to exoplanets that have been measured or counted in some way, the numbers are much smaller.

The running counter of known exoplanets as of this writing stands at 4,108 confirmed worlds. But astronomers are surprisingly good at figuring out what they cant see. They know that their telescopes arent powerful or precise enough to see the stealthiest planets those that are very small, very far from their stars, or around stars very far from Earth. And conversely, there are regions of space where astronomers are pretty confident theyve found all the planets within a certain range.

By combining the knowledge of what they can see the known exoplanets with the knowledge of what they cant see the parts of space currently beyond our ability to investigate astronomers end up at the approximation of one planet per star.

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How many planets are there in the universe? - Astronomy Magazine

The Sky This Week from February 14 to 23 – Astronomy Magazine

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

Monday, February 17Mars rises before 4 a.m. local time and climbs 20 above the southeastern horizon an hour before the Sun comes up. Glowing at magnitude 1.2 against the fainter background stars of Sagittarius the Archer, the ruddy world stands out nicely in the predawn darkness. But the real reason you should target Mars through binoculars or a telescope this morning is because of the company it keeps: The Red Planet passes between two of the Milky Ways finest star-forming regions, the Lagoon Nebula (M8) and the Trifid Nebula (M20). These two Messier objects lie just 1.4 apart and will make a marvelous backdrop for astroimagers. Unfortunately, a telescope doesnt add much to our view of Mars, revealing a bland disk that measures just 5" across.

Tuesday, February 18As spectacular as Mars passage between M8 and M20 yesterday was, this morning holds even more drama for observers in the western two-thirds of North America. Shortly before dawn, the waning crescent Moon slides in front of the Red Planet in a stunning occultation. You can view this event with your naked eye, but binoculars or a telescope reveal far more detail. Use a scope if you want to watch Mars fade away as Lunas bright limb gradually overtakes it. Depending on your location, the Moon can take up to 15 seconds to completely cover the planets featureless disk. The occultation occurs earlier the farther west you live. Although Mars has already disappeared by the time the two objects rise along the West Coast, observers there can witness the planets equally stunning reemergence from behind the Moons dark limb. Those in the mountain states get to view the disappearance against a dark sky, while Midwesterners see the same event during twilight. Unfortunately, East Coast skygazers miss out because the occultation occurs after the Sun rises. Even so, theyll enjoy a beautiful close conjunction between the two objects before dawn.

Wednesday, February 19Less than an hour after Mars rises, Jupiter pokes above the southeastern horizon. Theres no mistaking the giant planet for any other object at magnitude 1.9, it is by far the brightest point of light in the morning sky. The waning crescent Moon forms a pretty pair with Jupiter this morning, appearing just 4 to the planets right.

Thursday, February 20The Moon moves eastward an average of 13 relative to the background stars each day. That motion carries it into western Sagittarius this morning, where it lies just 2.5 to the lower right of Saturn. The two rise shortly after 5 a.m. local time and appear impressive as twilight starts to brighten the sky. The ringed planet glows at magnitude 0.6, 10 times fainter than its brilliant neighbor, Jupiter.

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The Sky This Week from February 14 to 23 - Astronomy Magazine

What is a neutron star? | Astronomy Essentials – EarthSky

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

Artists concept of a neutron star. The stars tiny size and extreme density give it incredibly powerful gravity at its surface. Thus this image portrays the space around the neutron star as being curved. Image via Raphael.concorde/ Daniel Molybdenum/ NASA/ Wikimedia Commons.

When at the end of its life a massive star explodes as a supernova, its core can collapse to end up as a tiny and superdense object with not much more than our suns mass. These small, incredibly dense cores of exploded stars are neutron stars. Theyre among the most bizarre objects in the universe.

A typical neutron star has about about 1.4 times our suns mass, but they range up to about two solar masses. Now consider that our sun has about 100 times Earths diameter. In a neutron star, all its large mass up to about twice as much as our suns is squeezed into a star thats only about 10 miles (15 km) across, or about the size of an earthly city.

So perhaps you can see that neutron stars are very, very dense! A tablespoon of neutron star material would weigh more than 1 billion U.S. tons (900 billion kg). Thats more than the weight of Mount Everest, Earths highest mountain.

Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of massive stars. They pack roughly the mass of our sun into a sphere with the diameter of a city. Heres a comparison of a neutron stars typical diameter with the city of Chicago. Graphic via M. Coleman Miller.

Heres how neutron stars form. Throughout much of their lives, stars maintain a delicate balancing act. Gravity tries to compress the star while the stars internal pressure exerts an outward push. The outward pressure is caused by nuclear fusion at the stars core. This fusion burning is the process by which stars shine.

In a supernova explosion, gravity suddenly and catastrophically gets the upper hand in the war it has been waging with the stars internal pressure for millions or billions of years. With its nuclear fuel exhausted and the outward pressure removed, gravity suddenly compresses the star inward. A shock wave travels to the core and rebounds, blowing the star apart. This whole process takes perhaps a couple of seconds.

But gravitys victory is not yet complete. With most of the star blown into space, the core remains, which may only possess a couple of times the mass of our sun. Gravity continues to compress it, to a point where the atoms become so compacted and so close together that electrons are violently thrust into their parent nuclei, combining with the protons to form neutrons.

Thus the neutron star gets its name from its composition. What gravity has created is a superdense, neutron-rich material called neutronium in a city-sized sphere.

What neutron stars are, and are not. If, after the supernova, the core of the star has enough mass, then according to current understanding the gravitational collapse will continue. A black hole will form instead of a neutron star. In terms of mass, the dividing line between neutron stars and black holes is the subject of much debate. Astrophysicists refer to a kind of missing mass, occurring between about two solar masses (the theoretical maximum mass of a neutron star) and five solar masses (the theoretical minimum mass of a black hole). Some expect that this mass bracket will eventually be found to be populated by ultra-lightweight black holes, but until nownone have been found.

The exact internal structure of a neutron star is also the subject of much debate. Current thinking is that the star possesses a thin crust of iron, perhaps a mile or so thick. Under that, the composition is largely neutrons, taking various forms the further down in the neutron star they are.

A neutron star does not generate any light or heat of its own after its formation. Over millions of years its latent heat will gradually cool from an intial 600,000 degrees Kelvin (1 million degrees Fahrenheit), eventually ending its life as the cold, dead remnant of a once-glorious star.

Because neutron stars are so dense, they have intense gravitational and magnetic fields. The gravity of a neutron star is about a thousand billion times stronger than that of the Earth. Thus the surface of a neutron star is exceedingly smooth; gravity does not permit anything tall to exist. Neutron stars are thought to have mountains, but they are only inches tall.

Anatomy of a pulsar. They are neutron stars that are oriented in a particular way with respect to Earth, so that we see them pulse at regular intervals. Image via Roen Kelly/ Discovermagazine.com.

Pulsars: How we know about neutron stars. Although neutron stars were long predicted in astrophysical theory, it wasnt until 1967 that the first was discovered, as a pulsar, by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Since then, hundreds more have been discovered, including the famous pulsar at the heart of the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant seen to explode by the Chinese in 1054.

On a neutron star, intense magnetic fields focus radio waves into two beams firing into space from its magnetic poles, much like the beam of a lighthouse. If the object is oriented just so with respect to Earth so that these beams become visible from our earthly viewpoint we see flashes of radio light at regular and extremely precise intervals. Neutron stars are, in fact, the celestial timekeepers of the cosmos, their accuracy rivalling that of atomic clocks.

Neutron stars rotate extremely rapidly, and we can use the radio beams of a pulsar to measure just how fast. The fastest-rotating neutron star yet discovered rotates an incredible 716 times per second, which is about a quarter of the speed of light.

Read more about Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars

Irish astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell was 24 years old when she noticed the odd radio pulses from space that she and her colleagues at first affectionately labeled LGMs, for little green men. Later, they understood that the pulses came from neutron stars. Fast-spinning neutron stars seen by earthly astronomers to emit radio pulses are now called radio pulsars. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

More manifestations of neutron stars in our galaxy. There are estimated to be more than a hundred million neutron stars in our Milky Way galaxy. However, many will be old and cold, and therefore difficult to detect. The unimaginably violent neutron star collisions, one of which was detected in 2017 by the LIGO gravitational wave observatories and designated GW170817, are thought to be where heavy elements like gold and platinum are created, as normal supernovae are not thought to generate the requisite pressures and temperatures.

A neutron star that has an abnormally strong magnetic field is known as a magnetar, able to pull the keys out of your pocket from as far away as the moon. The origin of magnetars is not well understood.

Neutron stars, including magnetars and pulsars, are thought to be responsible for several little-understood phenomena, including the mysterious Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) and the so-called Soft Gamma Repeaters (SGRs).

Astronomers Simulated How the Universe Would Look Without Dark Matter – Universe Today

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

Since the 1960s, there has been a general consensus among astronomers and cosmologists that the majority of the Universe is made up of an invisible, mysterious mass (known as Dark Matter). While scientists still havent identified the candidate particle that makes up this mass, indirect tests and simulations have shown that Dark Matter must exist in order for the Universe to be the way it is.

In a fascinating twist, a team of European researchers conducted a simulation that looked at a Universe without Dark Matter. Using an alternative theory known as MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), the team created a computer simulation in which the galaxies were actually very similar to what we see in the Universe today. These findings could help to resolve one of the most enduring mysteries of modern cosmology.

The study that describes their findings (recently published in the Astrophysical Journal) was conducted by the Stellar Populations and Dynamics Research Group (SPODYR) led by Prof. Pavel Kroupa of the Helmholtz Institue for Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn. He was joined by Nils Wittenburg, a doctoral member of SPODYR, and Benoit Famaey the Research Director at the University of Strasbourg.

This theory that gravity behaves differently than previously thought (depending on the scale) was first proposed by Israeli physicist Prof. Dr. Mordehai Milgrom hence the alternative name Milgromian gravity. According to this theory, the attraction between two masses obeys Newtons Laws of Motion (aka. Universal Gravitation) only up to a certain point.

At lower accelerations, as is the case with galaxies, the influence of gravity becomes considerably stronger. In short, the attraction of a body depends not only on its own mass but also on whether other objects are in its vicinity. This theory is a possible explanation for why galaxies do not break apart as a result of their rotational speed.

MOND is also attractive because it makes the existence of Dark Matter (which remains unconfirmed) entirely superfluous. Nevertheless, MOND remains a largely unproven and untested theory, which is what Wittenberg and his colleagues sought to address. With the help of Famaey, the team employed computational software that conducts gravitational computations (which they designed) to simulate a cosmos where MOND exists.

This consisted of simulating the birth of the first stars and galaxies which are believed to have formed between 100,000 and 300,000 years after the Big Bang and how they have evolved since. What they found, interestingly enough, was that the distribution and velocity of the stars in the computer-generated galaxies followed the same pattern as those that are visible in the Universe today.

As Wittenburg, who was the lead author on the study, explained:

In many aspects, our results are remarkably close to what we actually observe with telescopes. Furthermore, our simulation resulted mostly in the formation of rotating disk galaxies like the Milky Way and almost all other large galaxies we know. Dark matter simulations, on the other hand, predominantly create galaxies without distinct matter disks a discrepancy to the observations that is difficult to explain.

In addition, the MOND simulation was virtually immune to changes in parameters, like the frequency of supernovae and their effect on the distribution of matter in galaxies. In the case of simulations where the existence of Dark Matter is assumed, however, changes in these parameters have a considerable effect. This is not to say that the MOND simulations were correct on all points.

For example, the simulations relied on some rather simple assumptions about the distribution of matter and the conditions present during the early Universe. Our simulation is only a first step, Prof. Kroupa emphasized. We now have to repeat the calculations and include more complex influencing factors. Then we will see if the MOND theory actually explains reality.

Invariably, when it comes to the dynamics and behavior of the Universe on the grandest of scales and longest of time periods, the jury is still out. While the existence of Dark Matter remains unproven, it is the only cosmological theory that is consistent with General Relativity an endlessly proven theory and the only working hypothesis for how gravity behaves on cosmological scales.

And while MOND provides some resolution to theoretical problems presented by Dark Matter, it presents problems of its own. In the near future, a number of next-generation observatories that could help resolve this mystery will be going into space including the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the ESAs Euclid mission.

These and other missions will offer a better picture of the geometry of the Universe and improved measurements of the cosmic expansion. From this, scientists hope to gain a better understanding of how Dark Matter could have affected cosmic evolution not to mention Dark Energy, another cosmological mystery that is also the subject of debate!

Further Reading: University of Bonn, arXiv

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Astronomers Simulated How the Universe Would Look Without Dark Matter - Universe Today

What is a fast radio burst? What causes the signal from space? – Vox.com

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

Fast radio bursts are one of astronomys tantalizing unsolved mysteries. These sudden pulses of radio waves come from far outside our galaxy. They last about a millisecond. And sometimes, the signals repeat.

Until recently, thats about all scientists could tell you about fast radio bursts, or FRBs. Our radio telescopes, which pick up noise rather than light, first detected them in 2007; since then, weve recorded a few dozen more, but not enough to be able to put together a compelling theory of what causes them.

With the origin of these signals still unknown, some scientists notably the chair of the Harvard astronomy department, Avi Loeb speculate aliens could be sending them.

Now, researchers based in Canada, where a radio telescope exceptionally well equipped to detect FRBs began operating in 2018, have added a new piece to the puzzle. A few previously detected FRBs had been shown to repeat sporadically, without any regular pattern. But by observing the sky from September 2018 through October 2019, the researchers in Canada found 28 bursts including one that repeats with a very regular pattern indeed: It appears every 16.35 days, to be exact.

This is the first time scientists have detected such a pattern in an FRB source. The peculiar signal is coming from a massive spiral galaxy 500 million light-years away. The source sends out one or two bursts of radio waves every hour, over four days. Then it goes quiet for 12 days. Then the whole process repeats.

So why is a radio signal repeating every 16 days like clockwork, and what can that teach us about its origins?

Thats the central question of a new paper authored by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment in collaboration with the Fast Radio Burst Project (CHIME/FRB).

There are a couple of things we know for sure. The 16-day periodicity cannot be occurring by chance coincidence, the scientists write, and its an important clue to the nature of the object. Its clear that the FRB cant be originating from a cataclysmic event, like a star going supernova, since thats a one-time affair.

But beyond that, the scientists really arent sure. They propose a few possibilities.

One explanation is orbital motion. Celestial bodies are known to orbit on regular timescales, so a pair of objects like a star and a black hole could account for the 16-day pattern. Given the sources location in the outskirts of a massive spiral galaxy, the paper says, a supermassive black hole companion seems unlikely, although lower-mass black holes are viable.

The authors say FRBs could be generated if giant radio pulses from an energetic neutron star are eclipsed by a companion object. They also note that periodicity could arise from the rotation of a star, but thats a tricky hypothesis: Previously observed sources have had way shorter periodicities (a few hours, not a couple of weeks) and way less strength (were talking nine orders of magnitude less) than FRBs have.

In short, the authors dont know whats causing FRBs. But aliens are not on their list of possibilities. They end their paper calling for more research.

While grounded speculation among astrophysicists suggests that FRBs are caused by neutron stars, stars merging, or black holes, its a different theory that has caught hold of the public imagination: Maybe theyre caused by intelligent alien life.

A study by Avi Loeb and Manasvi Lingam of Harvard University, published in 2017, argued that the patterns could plausibly result from extraterrestrials transmitters. The paper is theoretical; it doesnt propose any evidence for the aliens hypothesis, it just argues that itd be compatible with the recorded data so far. They concluded itd be physically possible to build such a transmitter if you had a solar-powered, water-cooled device twice the size of Earth.

The hypothesis raises some obvious questions. FRBs come from all over space, not just from one particular region. Are we to assume that these aliens are sophisticated enough to have spread across many galaxies, but that there are no signs of them other than these energy bursts? Or that many civilizations independently settled on the same odd style of energy burst?

The 2017 paper argues for the latter possibility: that many civilizations have separately built such massive transmitters and are sending out FRBs. The latest estimates suggest that there are 10^4 [10,000] FRBs per day, the paper observes, which would suggest an implausible number of extremely busy, scattered alien civilizations. To resolve that, the paper argues that perhaps not all FRBs have an artificial origin only a fraction of them could correspond to alien activity.

But once we concede that FRBs can occur naturally, and conclude that at least some of them are occurring naturally, why conclude that any of them are artificial?

And if a civilization had the astounding technical capacities to build solar-powered, planet-size transmitters, wouldnt it be doing other things we could detect that would be less ambiguous?

The possibility that FRBs are produced by extragalactic civilizations is more speculative than an astrophysical origin, the paper concedes.

Indeed, thats what the CHIME/FRB researchers behind the new paper think. We conclude that the periodicity [of the FRB] is significant and astrophysical in origin.

Scientists disagree about how to interpret phenomena like FRBs in large part because they disagree about how plausible alien life is in the first place. In statistical terms, they have different priors, meaning that the background assumptions they are using to interpret the new evidence are different.

From one perspective, the universe is astonishingly large, full of habitable planets like Earth where life could evolve as it did here. Sometimes, that life would become intelligent. Wed expect such a universe to have lots of flourishing civilizations as well as lots of extinct ones.

This is clearly the expectation that motivates Harvards Loeb. As soon as we leave the solar system, I believe we will see a great deal of traffic out there, he said in a 2019 interview with Haaretz. Possibly well get a message that says, Welcome to the interstellar club. Or well discover multiple dead civilizations that is, well find their remains.

If you think that space is teeming with aliens, its not so much of a stretch to interpret astronomical phenomena as remnants of those aliens.

But if youre looking at the same data with the expectation that were alone in the universe, youre much likelier to conclude that theres a natural explanation for FRBs.

Its weird, given that the universe is so vast, that we seem to be alone in it. Physicist Enrico Fermi was the first to spell out this dilemma, and its named after him: the Fermi paradox. The paradox is that, under some reasonable assumptions about how often life originates and reaches technological sophistication, we should be able to detect signs of thousands or millions of other civilizations. And yet we havent. Recent investigations suggest that the paradox may have a mundane resolution under more accurate assumptions about how life originates, we are very plausibly, alone.

The disagreement between researchers who think advanced civilizations must be extremely rare and those who think theyre common is a fairly substantive one. For one thing, if advanced civilizations are common, then why cant we see them? We might be forced to conclude that theyre fairly short-lived. Thats Loebs take: The technological window of opportunity might be very small, he told Haaretz.

That take would have some consequences for us. If theres some danger ahead that destroys every technological civilization that runs into it, we might expect that were living in a vulnerable world where future technological advances will destroy us, too.

In that way, disagreements over aliens have big implications. But thats probably not the reason everyone cares about them. Offhand speculation about aliens tends to get vastly more coverage than anything else in astronomy. Whether were alone in the universe feels like a profoundly important question, for its implications for human civilization but also for its own sake. The lack of evidence suggesting phenomena like FRBs are alien in origin wont be enough to stop people from wondering.

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What is a fast radio burst? What causes the signal from space? - Vox.com

SpaceX’s next Starlink volley remains stuck on Earth to glee of astronomers everywhere – The Register

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

Roundup Cygnus flies, SpaceX stands down, Rocket Lab is going to the Moon and New Horizons drops a massive dump (of new data) in this week's roundup. A heck of a way to celebrate the 30th anniversary of a view of Earth from really, really far away.

Northrop Grumman overcame both a delay and some unexpected bonus commentary (in the form of a Verizon interruption) to launch its latest freighter, Cygnus NG-13, to the International Space Station (ISS). The spacecraft, loaded with science and supplies, should turn up at the orbiting outpost at around 0905 UTC on Tuesday.

NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan will use the ISS's robotic arm to capture the Cygnus and install it on the Earth-facing port of the Unity module while fellow 'naut Jessica Meir keeps an eye on things. The spacecraft is scheduled to remain docked to the ISS until May.

The launch marks the 13th successful mission of the freighter. Memorably, the third operational flight ended in a fireball just after launch in 2014 following a catastrophic failure involving the elderly Russian engines of the 130-variant Antares rocket. Excepting a brief flirtation with the Atlas, the Cygnus has continued to fly on the Antares, although using somewhat more recent RD-181 power plant.

The next batch of 60 Starlink satellites remained rooted to a Cape Canaveral pad this weekend as engineers opted to take a look at a potentially iffy valve on the second stage of the launcher.

Our suspicion that an astronomer snuck up in the dead of night and had at the thing with a hammer is, of course, totally unfounded. After all, Elon has said that the albedo issue is going to get better. No, really, it will. Elon said so:

The launch, now scheduled for 17 February, will be the fourth flight for the first stage of the Falcon 9. The stage has lofted two Dragon freighters bound for the ISS, CRS-17 and CRS-18, and, most recently, the JCSAT-18/Kacific1 mission in December 2019. The company plans to recover the first stage once again as well as having another crack at catching the fairing halves.

In a now deleted tweet, NASA's commercial crew tentacle heralded the arrival in Florida of the next Crew Dragon capsule, which will be used for the upcoming Demo-2 mission. Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will clamber into the spacecraft for a trip to the ISS in the coming months.

NASA proudly declared that the SpaceX capsule would be the first to launch a crew from American soil since the shuttles were rolled off to museums.

The tweet was accompanied by a blog post giving SpaceX a nod. The original post was rapidly updated since while Boeing's capsule may have managed just one, near-disastrous flight and SpaceX's spacecraft has survived an exploding Falcon 9 as well as paying an uncrewed visit to the ISS it's still a two-horse race.

The internet, alas for NASA, never forgets.

The tweet was hastily replaced by one that doubtless made faces at Boeing, manufacturers of the Calamity Capsule Starliner CST-100, less frowny.

We imagine that Virgin Galactic, which has already sent Americans into space (depending on which definition you're using), might have had a thing or two to say about that assertion too, though the suborbital lobs in Branson's much delayed glider are quite a bit different to SpaceX and Boeing's orbital ambitions.

While it is over a year since NASA's New Horizons probe made its flypast of the Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth (formerly known as 2014 MU69), the spacecraft has continued to return to Earth the data it captured during the event. Last week, the team reported more findings, giving new insights into how planetesimals (the building blocks of planets) are formed.

Arrokoth consists of two lobes, and the gang has pieced together a picture of how the object came to be; two objects formed close together and orbited each other at low velocity before gently merging to create the 22-mile long object.

The indications are that Arrokoth formed during the gravity-driven collapse of a cloud of solid particles rather than through hierarchical accretion (the slamming together of planetesimals to form larger bodies).

The probe, now 7.1 billion kilometres from Earth and heading deeper into the Kuiper Belt at nearly 50,400 kilometres per hour, has more observations to transmit, and Principal Investigator for the mission Alan Stern told The Register that it would be 2021 before everything was down.

This summer the team will start searching for more bonus KBOs for the probe to visit, should fuel allow.

Having made much of its lunar ambitions last year, Rocket Lab was cock-a-hoop over its selection by NASA last week for the upcoming Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) mission, which will be launched from the company's Launch Complex 2 at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, USA. The CAPSTONE satellite will be sent on its way by Rocket Lab's Photon platform, eventually operating in a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon.

CAPSTONE will pass as close as 1,000 miles and as far as 43,500 miles from the lunar surface.

The mission is slated for launch in early 2021, and it will take nearly three months for CAPSTONE to enter its target orbit ahead of spending six months demonstrating operations in the region where NASA hopes to send the Lunar Gateway. Should the latter, of course, survive the determination of lawmakers to sacrifice sustainability on the altar of getting flags on footprints on the regolith by 2024.

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SpaceX's next Starlink volley remains stuck on Earth to glee of astronomers everywhere - The Register

Astronomers Discover Eleven Dangerous Asteroids That Could Impact the Earth – SciTechDaily

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

Near Earth objects. Credit: ESA P.Carril.

Three Leiden astronomers have shown that some asteroids that are considered harmless for now, can collide with Earth in the future. They did their research with the help of an artificial neural network. The results have been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Using a supercomputer, the researchers integrated the orbits of the sun and its planets forward in time for 10,000 years. After that, they traced the orbits back in time while launching asteroids from the Earths surface. During the backwards calculation, they included the asteroids in the simulations in order to study their orbital distributions at todays date. In this way, they acquired a database of hypothetical asteroids for which the researchers knew that they would land on the Earths surface.

Astronomer and simulation expert Simon Portegies Zwart explains: If you rewind the clock, you will see the well-known asteroids land again on Earth. This way, you can make a library of the orbits of asteroids that landed on Earth. The library of asteroids then served as training material for the neural network.

The first set of calculations was performed on the new Leiden super computer ALICE, but the neural network runs on a simple laptop. The researchers call their method Hazardous Object Identifier (HOI), which means hi or hello in Dutch.

The neural network can recognize well-known near-Earth objects. In addition, HOI also identifies a number of hazardous objects that were not previously classified as such. For example, HOI discovered eleven asteroids that, between the years 2131 and 2923, come closer than ten times the Earth-Moon distance and are larger than a hundred meters in diameter.

That these asteroids have not previously been identified as potentially dangerous is because the orbit of these asteroids is so chaotic. As a result, they are not noticed by the current software from space organizations, which is based on probability calculations that use expensive brute force simulations.

According to Portegies Zwart, the research is only a first exercise: We now know that our method works, but we would certainly like to delve deeper in the research with a better neural network and with more input. The tricky part is that small disruptions in the orbit calculations can lead to major changes in the conclusions.

The researchers hope that in the future an artificial neural network can be used to detect potentially hazardous objects. Such a method is much faster than the traditional methods that space organizations use nowadays. By noticing asteroid on a collision course earlier, the researchers say, organizations can sooner think of a strategy to prevent impact.

Reference: Identifying Earth-impacting asteroids using an artificial neural network by John D. Hefele, Francesco Bortolussi and Simon Portegies Zwart, 4 February 2020, Astronomy & Astrophysics.DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201935983

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Scientists theorize that space aliens may already be here, but we dont recognize them – San Francisco Chronicle

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

Stargazing scientists have recently begun to focus on the prospect of encountering intelligent extraterrestrials, and the more they think about it the more they realize the first meeting probably wont be with little green men in flying saucers.

What aliens might look like is a growing question among astrobiologists, who are increasingly conjuring up creatures more Lilliputian than mega-brained or reptilian.

The intriguing possibility is they are, in fact, here, but we just dont know it, said Andrew Fraknoi, the emeritus chairman of the astronomy department at Foothill College who recently taught a course on aliens at the University of San Franciscos Fromm Institute and believes space aliens could very well be microscopic or unrecognizable as a life-form.

Fraknoi is on the board of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, known as the SETI Institute, based in Mountain View, where questions about alien civilizations are often discussed. He has long speculated that members of a civilization billions of years old might by now have evolved into a mechanical-biological mix, like a robot with a brain, capable of living for thousands of years as they travel through space.

But it is also possible, he said, that advanced civilizations would have sent into space thousands of tiny canisters holding the germs of life programmed to incubate and grow when they encounter suitable conditions around a star.

In all the mathematical models, a species that started early in the history of the galaxy and had the will and resources to diffuse could by now have filled many parts of the galaxy with its artifacts or biological spores, Fraknoi said.

The otherworldly speculation comes after the recent discovery of two interstellar objects zipping past Earth prompted a surge of interest among scientists in space travel and alien civilizations.

A spinning, red, cigar-shaped object called 1I/Oumuamua was spotted in 2017, followed by the sighting last year of a comet named 2I/Borisov. They were the first verified sightings in human history of objects speeding by from outside our solar system.

The objects, by their very existence, brought home to many astronomers the reality that rocks or vessels potentially carrying biological spores from other solar systems could actually reach Earth.

The notion got a major boost from Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard Universitys astronomy department. He co-wrote a scientific paper suggesting that Oumuamuas odd, elongated shape and peculiar nongravitational acceleration could mean it is a mechanical probe a light sail driven by sunshine sent by an alien civilization.

The object, first spotted by the University of Hawaiis Institute for Astronomy, was, by all accounts, strange. Observations from Earth as it shot past the sun on Sept. 9, 2017, at a speed of 196,000 mph showed that it was slowly spinning, like a bottle on its side, and that it was missing the tail of gas or dust that would signify a comet.

Astronomers around the world immediately attacked Loebs hypothesis, and a subsequent study published in Nature Astronomy last year concluded that Oumuamua was a rocky conglomeration, not a space ship.

But Loeb said his point was that objects like Oumuamua and Borisov could have been synthetic and that humans would be well served by developing techniques for determining if such visitors were constructed. He believes the possibility of extraterrestrial life is too important for humans to discount without investigation, especially considering how useful it would be in figuring out the origin of life.

Intelligent life is more recent in the Earths history, but at the same time, given that it happened here, there is the possibility that it exists elsewhere, Loeb said. I dont think we should pretend that we are the only ones the smartest kid on the block because very likely we arent the smartest kid on the block.

The questions about what form alien beings might take are rooted in what is known as the Fermi paradox, named after Italian American physicist Enrico Fermi, who created the first nuclear reactor. He asked during a casual lunchtime conversation in 1950 why aliens have never been spotted, given the high probability of their existence.

SETI has been searching the skies for radio signals or some other sign of life beyond Earth for nearly four decades without a single peep.

Despite the failure, belief in the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations has only increased since Fermis time. Thats largely because powerful telescopes have recently detected numerous planets orbiting their stars at a habitable distance, known as the Goldilocks zone. Calculations indicate there are habitable planets around at least a quarter of the tens of billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, possibly including the closest star, Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light-years from Earth.

Most astrophysicists believe life must have sprung up somewhere, some time, in the 13.5 billion years since the galaxy was formed. Given that our sun is 4.6 billion years old, Fraknoi said civilizations in other parts of the galaxy could have been using robotics, artificial intelligence and tapping the energy from their stars as many as 8 billion years before our solar system was created.

In other words, Fraknoi said, there has been ample time for a civilization to become advanced enough to send alien microbes or micro-artifacts around the galaxy, including to our solar system.

Astronomers have even concocted a sciency name, directed panspermia, to describe the act by an alien civilization of planting the seeds of life in another world.

Samantha Rolfe, a lecturer in astrobiology at Bayfordbury Observatory at the University of Hertfordshire in England, suggested recently that such organisms could be hidden inside what she called a microscopic shadow biosphere that is so different from ours that we dont even recognize it as biological in origin.

So why havent we found it? We have limited ways of studying the microscopic world as only a small percentage of microbes can be cultured in a lab, she wrote in an article for the Conversation website. We do now have the ability to sequence the DNA of unculturable strains of microbes, but this can only detect life as we know it that contain DNA.

Some have suggested that these alien life-forms could be small inactive spores floating in our solar system waiting for the right conditions to grow or as active monitors transmitters used by alien civilizations to determine whether Earthlings are a threat and might need to be eliminated.

Then again, a growing number of astronomers speculate that humanity itself might have originated somewhere else, possibly clinging to a chunk of rock ejected from a planet that was hit by a giant meteor.

We know there are rocks on Earth that came from Mars, so you could imagine that microbes could have potentially survived the journey, Loeb said. So its possible we are all Martians. If you can do it from Mars, you can potentially bring life from other planets in other galaxies.

Loeb recently published a paper calculating how asteroids could graze Earths atmosphere, scoop up microbes like the foamy cream off a latte, and potentially carry the seeds of life into outer space. Maybe, he and others suggest, this swapping of biological spores has happened since the beginning of time.

Either way, most experts believe an alien encounter is likely someday. The question, say those who think about such things, is whether humans will know it when they see it.

Potentially, we could be part of an experiment where life was planted on Earth and someone is watching, Loeb said. If thats the case, for sure they are disappointed. That would be my assessment by reading the morning newspaper.

Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimrite

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Scientists theorize that space aliens may already be here, but we dont recognize them - San Francisco Chronicle

Astronomers want you to help them count the stars this Valentine’s Day – CBC.ca

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Danzig

In an effort to better understand the loss of the night sky due to light pollution, astronomers are calling on star-lovers and romantics to enjoy a night under the stars and give them a helping hand.

Each year, a group of astronomers, headed by Connie Walker at the National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratoryin Tucson, Az., conduct the Globe at Night project, whichasks people around the world to step out and record how many stars they see in a specific constellation.

This, in turn, will allow them to gauge how dark or bright the night sky is in a particular location.

This year, the campaign has two runs, the first from Feb. 14 to 23 and the second from March 14 to 24.

"The Globe at Night is a social science program. That means every citizen can be an actual scientist and contribute data. And it's extremely easy to do," said Walker. "People can get involved very simply by just going out in the night, then looking up at the stars."

For Valentine's Day, the particular constellation the project is asking citizen scientists to look at is Orion.

Walker said that the whole process is easy, particularly as Orion is one of the most recognizable constellations in the northern hemisphere this time of year.

Participants are asked to visit the Globe at Night's webapp. It asks the time and date and your location (it can also do this automatically). Then there are seven illustrations to choose from, based on how many stars you saw. And finally, it asks you what the sky conditions were at the time of observation, i.e. partly cloudy, etc.

Walker explained the difference between the charts, which measure the magnitudes or apparent brightness of the star.

"So, one, it's like you would see in New York City, where there's just a couple of stars at best if you see any at all towards Orion," she said. "And thenseven, it's like you're in the national parks, where you see a couple thousand stars."

Most people probably don't think of light as a form of pollution, but it's something that has serious consequences for human health, the environment and wildlife.

For example, light pollution which is simply defined as the "inappropriate or excessive use of light," according to the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) has affected the nesting habits of sea turtles. There are also estimates that 300,000 to one billion birds die annually from flying into buildings, because they are drawn to the bright lights at night.

As for humans, some studies have linked artificial light with forms of cancer.

About 54 per cent of people around the world live in cities. In Canada, that number soars to more than 80 per cent. As a consequence,most people across the planet have not seen the Milky Way.

Though many people and communities have switched to energy-saving LED lights, a 2017 study by Canadian Christopher Kyba, a light pollution researcher at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, found that these lights might actually be doing more harm than good.

Because the lights cost less, it appears more of them are being used. Kyba, who is involved in the Globe at Night project,is looking to conduct follow-up studies to determine if the night sky brightness is increasing or decreasing.

But why does it matter if we see the stars or not?

"It's part of our cultural heritage. It has inspired humanity, since the beginning of humanity, for tens of thousands of years. It is an infinite resource for wonder, and it's where all of our thoughts about science began," Walker said. "And it's not just science. It's the inspiration to be creative in terms of music, like [Gustav] Holst's The Planets,or literature like Shakespeare .... and then paintings, likeVan Gogh.

"If we take away that source of inspiration. What is it going to do to our culture?"

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Astronomers want you to help them count the stars this Valentine's Day - CBC.ca

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