Conjunction

September 18, 2025

Image credit: Matt Champlin via Getty Images

A USA Today article toward the back of the front section of my local newspaper reported on the celestial event taking place on September 19th (tomorrow). Three celestial bodies are preparing to meet for one night that should be widely visible in the sky. The Earth’s moon and the planet Venus of Sol’s solar system will be briefly joined by the star Regulus. This event follows the close appearance of Venus and Jupiter during much of August. This moon-planet-star combination involves three of the brightest objects in our solar system and should make it easy for amateur astronomers to spot. This coming together, or conjunction, presents a special opportunity for even casual stargazers to see multiple celestial bodies at the same time.

When I went online, I found an astronomical conjunction occurs when two objects or spacecraft appear to be close to each other in the sky. This means they have either the same angular distance of a particular point measured eastward along the celestial equator (right ascension) or the same apparent positions, orbits, and pole orientations (ecliptic longitude). This closeness phenomenon is caused by the observer’s perspective, and the objects are not actually close to one another in space. Conjunctions between two bright objects close to the ecliptic, such as two bright planets, can be seen with the naked eye. More generally, it means they have the same right ascension. A conjunction seen by an observer on Earth involves two (or more) astronomical bodies and the times and details depend only slightly on the observer’s location on the Earth’s surface. The differences are greatest for conjunctions involving the Moon because of its relative closeness, but even for the Moon the time of the observed conjunction never differs by more than a few hours.

Conjunctions occur as the various paths of celestial objects traveling at varying speeds are brought together on the same side of the sun (from Earth’s perspective). The moon orbits around the Earth as our only satellite. Venus orbits as the sun’s second planet and is often referred to as “the Earth’s twin” as both are rocky (rather than gaseous) and have a similar orbit. Regulus is the brightest star in the constellation Leo. This trio should be visible in the sky tomorrow night. Those who are in the Northern Hemisphere (North America, Europe, Asia) should be able to spot the conjunction easily by looking for the moon. Chelsea Gohd, science communicator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, explained attention should be directed east in the early pre-dawn toward the waning crescent moon as it sets in the sky. Pre-dawn may be a stretch for me as I generally do not stay up that late or rise that early. We will see.

THOUGHTS: Conjunction is one of the words that stuck in my mind in high school as I was a cartoon connoisseur and often did stay up late enough to catch the pre-dawn shows that aired. This was the 70’s and evils of television were being countered by short educational promos offered by educational media like “Schoolhouse Rock!”. One segment in the series was titled “Conjunction Junction” and addressed the grammatical use of a conjunction. It was presented as a catchy song that is running through my head as I blog. The phrase “conjunction junction what’s your function” draws its meaning as a “junction” that connects things, and its “function” is to join words, phrases, and clauses together to form more complex sentences. The song uses the analogy of railroad “boxcars” hooked up by the conjunctions (i.e., “and,” “but,” “or”) to help viewers understand their grammatical role (analogical reasoning). This cognitive process uses prior knowledge of a known situation (“base domain”) to understand or solve a new, similar problem (“target domain”) by identifying shared structures and relationships between them. In human relationships, such analogies may create positive or negative responses. Act for all. Change is coming and it starts with you.

Aurora

October 11, 2024

Both the national and local news were abuzz yesterday with predictions of the amazing light displays that were going to appear in the northern sky last night. This dazzling display of color was the result of a powerful solar storm that slammed into Earth. This celestial phenomenon is more often a tourist attraction for people traveling to Alaska, Iceland, and regions within the Arctic Circle, but last night’s storm triggered lights in the night sky much further south. This is the second time a severe solar storm hit the Earth this year, with the first being in May. My sister lives in Maine and she started the buzz for our family, posting photos on our family feed of the crimson display seen from her back yard. It was also suggested by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that the lights were going to be visible as far south as Alabama and northern California. Reports came in from as far south as Texas and Arizona, while the southern lights were seen in parts of Australia. As we watched the 10 pm news, there were postings of the aurora from areas of northwest Arkansas.

When I looked online, I found an aurora, commonly known as the northern lights (aurora borealis) or southern lights (aurora australis), is a natural light display in Earth’s sky that is predominantly seen in high-latitude regions around the Arctic and Antarctic. Auroras display dynamic patterns of brilliant lights that appear as curtains, rays, spirals, or dynamic flickers covering the entire sky. An aurora is the result of disturbances in the Earth’s magnetosphere caused by the solar wind. Major disturbances result from enhancements in the speed of the solar wind from coronal holes and from coronal mass ejections that alter the trajectories of charged particles in the magnetospheric plasma. The particles, mainly electrons and protons, then precipitate into the Earth’s upper atmosphere (thermosphere or exosphere) and the ionization and excitation of atmospheric components emit light of varying colors and complexity. The form of the aurora is dependent on the amount of acceleration the solar winds impart to the precipitating particles. Most of the planets in Sol’s Solar System, some moons, brown dwarfs, and even comets can display an aurora.

Melissa and I had taken the bait in May and gone outside to look for the aurora on our back deck. The TV news had been posting photos taken throughout our state and we wondered if we could see anything. Our deck is mostly surrounded by trees, but there is a patch of northern sky that is visible. At the time we had not seen anything. This time Melissa’s friends began sending photos and we were again lured into the dark. Melissa used her flashlight rather than the porch lights to keep the area as dark as possible. When situated she turned off the flashlight and we scanned the horizon. Nothing. The night was pitch black with only the faint lights of the city to the north visible. Then I remembered the lights could often be seen through filters such as a phone camera. Again, I scanned and horizon. Nothing. However, as I looked higher in the sky, I began to see the pink glow above the blue caused by the lights of the city to the north. We saw the aurora.

THOUGHTS: Witnessing the aurora goes along with the total Eclipse of the sun as memorable celestial events for Melissa and me during 2024. The contrast between the blackness seen by the naked eye and the colors seen by the camera were amazing. While ancients watched the skies and considered such events as omens or predictors of the future, but this aurora would have gone unseen in the past. The problem with celestial predictions, is they portend “something”, more so than “a thing”. History predicts the coming elections in the US will bring some sort of change. While that may be an easy prediction for modern pollsters, the last two elections have proven the “what” is far less known. Change happens, but humans can play an active role in what that change is going to be. Work for positive change. Act for all. Change is coming and it starts with you.

SMBH

September 26, 2024

Today’s NY Times feed reported on the massive pair of jets releasing from a supermassive black hole (SMBH) 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. The megastructure spans 23 million light-years in length, making these black hole jets the largest ever seen, according to new research. While Black holes gobble up nearly everything that comes close to them, a fraction of material is ejected before an object falls in, forming a jet on either side of the black hole, said Martijn Oei, a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology and the lead author of a new study describing the discovery published September 18 in the journal Nature. The jets have a power output equivalent to trillions of suns and are so massive that researchers have nicknamed the megastructure Porphyrion after a giant from Greek mythology. The discovery is causing astronomers to rethink their understanding of how massive black hole jets can be as well as how these giant features can affect their surroundings and the structure of the universe.

When I looked online, I found a supermassive black hole (SMBH or SBH) is a black hole more than one hundred thousand times the mass of the Sun. Solar mass (M☉) is a standard unit of mass used in astronomy equal to approximately 2×1030 kg, or the approximate mass of the Earth’s Sun. It is often used to indicate the masses of other stars, as well as stellar clusters, nebulae, galaxies and black holes. Black holes are a class of astronomical objects that have undergone gravitational collapse, leaving behind spheroidal regions of space from which nothing can escape, including light. The discovery of SMBH was a consequence of the investigation of quasars in the mid-20th century. Nearly every large galaxy has a SMBH at its center. Active galactic nuclei, such as Seyfert galaxies and quasars, are powered by supermassive black holes. The largest SMBH is in the galaxy cluster Abell 1201 and has a mass thirty billion times that of the Sun. The SMBH at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy (Sagittarius A*) has a mass four million times that of the Sun. Two supermassive black holes have been directly imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope: the black hole in the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 and Sagittarius A* at the Milky Way’s center.

When sustained for mega years, high-power jets from SMBH become the largest galaxy-made structures in the Universe. “This pair is not just the size of a solar system, or a Milky Way; we are talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total. The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions” Oei said. The structure consists of a northern lobe, a northern jet, a core, a southern jet with an inner hotspot, and a southern outer hotspot with a backflow. This system demonstrates that jets can avoid destruction by magnetohydrodynamical instabilities over cosmological distances. How jets can retain such long-lived coherence is unknown at present. The haunting question is what Porphyrion is doing to the rest of the universe. Cosmologists have found that the visible features of the universe are structured in a weblike manner, with galaxies clumped in giant clusters and connected by thin filaments that span dark voids of tens to hundreds of millions of light-years. In Porphyrion’s day, this cosmic web was half the size it is now, and these jets would have been big enough to affect the overall web.

THOUGHTS: In total, the team spotted 10,000 new black hole jet pairs. Like many discoveries, the researchers were not looking for jets from the SMBH but were trying to observe the cosmic web. Research (and exploration) often mistakenly makes discoveries that expand our understanding of the universe, the Earth, and even humanity. The quest for understanding is one aspect that (we think) sets humans apart from other animals. Act for all. Change is coming and it starts with you.