For Australia, what promises to be the best meteor show of the year.
The best time to see them on the 14th and 15th will depend upon where you live:
Adelaide – 3:13 am ACST
Brisbane – 2:13 am AEST
Canberra – 3:00 am AEDT
Darwin – 2:43 am ACST
Hobart – 2:38 am AEDT
Melbourne – 3:17 am AEDT
Perth – 2:13 am AWST
Sydney – 2:52 am AEDT
The meteor shower will start to ramp up an hour or so before these times, so the idea is to head out earlier and watch the whole show unfold.
"For Darwin, for example, you can start watching from midnight, and other sites you can start watching it from about 1 to 1.30 am," Dr Musgrave says.
In 2012 I went to Cairns for the total solar eclipse. In the lead-up to it I noted there was also a big one coming up in 2028, with Sydney right in the path of totality. It's amazing that it's only 4 years away now. Then in 2030 there'll be another one covering big population areas from SA to Qld. I plan to be alive for both of those.
An asteroid discovered earlier this month will reach its closest point to Earth on Saturday (Jan. 27), when it will soar through the sky at a distance closer to us than the moon.
You can watch the airplane-size asteroid as it sails just 220,000 miles (354,000 kilometers) from Earth — more than nine tenths of the average distance between our planet and the moon — on a Virtual Telescope Project live feed from 12:15 p.m. EST. The flying space rock will reach its closest point to Earth at 12:30 p.m. EST, according to NASA.
Astronomers first detected the up to 121-foot-wide (37 meters) asteroid, dubbed 2024 BJ, on Jan. 17. They documented their discovery the following day, after calculating that the rock will safely soar past our planet without incident.
Satellites have detected a massive solar flare powerful enough to ionize part of Earth's atmosphere.
Scientists spotted the flare erupting from the bottom of the sun on Thursday (March 28), using satellites from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), according to the organization's Space Weather Prediction Center.
The flare, which peaked at 4:56 p.m. ET, was categorized as an X1.1 flare. X-class flares are the most powerful type of explosion the sun can produce, according to NASA.
The explosion was so powerful that it ionized the top of Earth's atmosphere, resulting in a "deep shortwave radio blackout over the Pacific Ocean," SpaceWeather.com reported.
The solar outburst was also accompanied by an enormous belch of plasma known as a coronal mass ejection (CME). NOAA scientists were initially concerned that the CME would collide with Earth, potentially resulting in a geomagnetic storm that could impact satellites, radio communications and other infrastructure. However, on Friday (March 29) the agency announced that the outburst would likely miss Earth.
Solar flares are large explosions that occur at the sun's surface when twisted magnetic-field lines suddenly snap, emitting large bursts of electromagnetic radiation, according to Space.com, Live Science's sister site.
Alejandro Otero returned to his Naples, Florida home on the evening of March 8, 2024, only to find a strange hole smashed through the entire structure. As Ars Technica reports:
Otero wasn't home at the time, but his son was there. A Nest home security camera captured the sound of the crash at 2:34 pm local time (19:34 UTC) on March 8. That's an important piece of information because it is a close match for the time—2:29 pm EST (19:29 UTC)—that US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris from the space station. At that time, the object was on a path over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward southwest Florida.
This space junk consisted of depleted batteries from the ISS, attached to a cargo pallet that was originally supposed to come back to Earth in a controlled manner. But a series of delays meant this cargo pallet missed its ride back to Earth, so NASA jettisoned the batteries from the space station in 2021 to head for an unguided reentry.
