back of a spreadsheet; back of the net

Winter solstice is just a few days away, so I thought it would be a good week to share some of the fascinating recent news from astronomy.

A study was published in Science, summarized in a few news sites. Here is the least advertising-heavy version that I could find. It talks about how diverse life on a planet may be slow or unlikely to form, unless rich hydrocarbons are delivered to it from the outer edges of a solar system. Near the forming star, for example, the temperature is too hot for these gases to condense along with the planet, so they get blown by the solar wind and condense farther out. The hypothesized body Theia is what crashed into Earth (forming our moon afterward) and also delivered hydrocarbons and water. It's an interesting idea, and it makes Earth a little more special in the galaxy. That also makes it a factor in the Drake equation about the chances of finding intelligent life. I'm not sure how this theory squares with Venus, which is theorized to originally have had lots of water on it too.

Voyager 1 is almost 1 light-day away from Earth. This very anthropocentric "turning of the odometer" milestone will occur next year in November 2026. This article in Popular Science talks about it. I follow Voyager 2 on Mastodon, where there are automated reminders about the distance of both probes.

I don't know if Logan (aka loganbeary aka Dodecadude) is still alive. He left both Dreamwidth and Livejournal around the same time, but I thought his cancer treatment was going okay. He might appreciate this story in Scientific American about the magnetic sun. Scientists have a theory for predicting the solar cycle that is so effective that they're now forming a company to sell predictions based on the model. They don't know yet why the theory works, just that it's an effective model.

According to McIntosh, the Hale cycle and the sunspot cycle are both ruled by magnetic bands that wrap around the sun like rings. Near the maximum of the traditional solar cycle, two new bands appear at high latitudes in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres; they have opposite polarities. As the cycle continues, they gradually migrate toward the equator, and new bands again appear at high latitudes—picture the arrangement as kind of like a conveyor belt. A terminator happens when the older magnetic bands finally collide at the equator. That meet-cute isn’t actually cute: it annihilates both old bands because their opposition zeroes them out. McIntosh’s model suggests the annihilation is the definitive end of a solar cycle.

There's plenty more astronomy news. It's an exciting time to be alive! Someday, I might even go study this stuff formally. I hear the Powerball lottery jackpot is up to 1 billion dollars. That's nothing to sniff at.