This week in space from Fraser Cain | | Every now and then you see an image or video from space that completely and fully blows your mind. And I think this is the animation of the year. OMG.
It's from a series of photographs captured by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft of its target, Comet 67P. Twitter user @landru79 took the separate images and stitched them together into a short animation that's absolutely stunning to watch.
You're seeing the comet rotate in the field of view, with dust particles and cosmic ray particles in the foreground, with stars wheeling in the background.
And just to think, this was happening on another world, millions of kilometers away.
Anyway, click the link, watch the video. Then watch it over and over again.
Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today
As always, if you have comments or questions, or suggestions on how I can improve this newsletter, please don't hesitate to reply this email or send me an email at frasercain@gmail.com. | | 
You're probably familiar with the Earth's magnetosphere, which surrounds the planet and protects it from harmful radiation from space. But did you know the Earth has a second magnetosphere? Its oceans. ESA's Swarm Satellites measured the strength of this secondary magnetosphere, which is actually really difficult to measure.
Christmas has arrived for astrometry nerds. That's because the Gaia mission just dumped detailed information onto the Internet about the location and movement of 1.7 billion stars in the Milky Way. This is an enormous data release, and should keep astronomers busy for years.
Etienne Leopold Trouvelot created more than 7,000 astronomical illustrations using various telescopes more than a century ago. This article shows some of his best work, including a solar eclipse, Jupiter, and the Aurora Borealis.
In order to see exoplanets directly, you need to be able to block the light from the star, so the much fainter planets are visible. The device to do this is known as a coronograph, and astronomers have plans to develop one capable of blocking light from a star so that planets which are 100 million times fainter are visible.
Isn't this a nice picture of Saturn's rings captured by Cassini? It's an old picture, but I really just love the subtle color variations in the rings. And now I miss Cassini. :-(
I always enjoy new videos from the folks at Kurzgesagt, but this week's episode was really terrific. It's all about how advanced civilizations harness the intense gravity of black holes to generate power. Oh, and use it as a bomb if they liked.
New exoplanets are being discovered all the time, from hot Jupiters to super earths. But the holy grail will be the discovery of Earth 2.0. An Earth-sized world, orbiting a sunlike star in the habitable zone. But what signals would help us to understand that we've truly found a second earth?
Well, the Uranus potty humor folks are having a field day this week, when it was announced that the gases in Uranus' atmosphere would smell like rotten eggs here on Earth. In other words, Uranus smells like farts. It's with a heavy heart that Bad Astronomer Phil Plait takes on this challenging story to talk about the, uh, smelly science.
About 252 million years ago, something terrible happened to the Earth and more than 90% of all animals went extinct. It was the greatest catastrophe in the history of life on Earth. But life bounced back over the course of 5 million years or so. How did it do it?
Here's a really old documentary about how nuclear rockets work. Sorry, nothing newer out there.
Remember when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter leaving these bizarre bruises? It turns out that amateur astronomers have continued to see asteroid impacts, and astronomers have calculated that this could be happening more often than we thought.
Once TESS gets rolling in a few months, it's going to be finding a LOT of planets for followup study. How many planets? Astronomers are estimating thousands, including hundreds of Earth and super-earth worlds.
Other Interesting Space Stuff
Amazing Astrophotography
Here's the Lagoon Nebula as seen by Nathan @archioptic. This is an emission nebula located about 4,000 light years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Of course, whenever I see a picture of this nebula, I always think it looks like Homer from the Simpsons with a glowing Borg eye. You'll need to look at it upside-down, though.
We feature a different astrophotographer every day on our Instagram page. Want to do a takeover? Use the hashtag #universetoday and I'll check out your photos. | | | |
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