Bakersfield Night Sky — February 1, 2025
The spring season of shows at the William M Thomas Planetarium begin this Friday and Saturday (February 7 & 8) with three showings of Mesmerica each night. Later in February, on Thursday, February 20, is the showing of “Ice Worlds”. Other shows coming up this season are “Moon Base”, “Mars One Thousand One”, “Dynamic Earth”, and “Black Holes”. The Mesmerica tickets are sold through the Mesmerica website and tickets for the other Planetarium shows are sold through Vallitix.
Well, word is sure getting around about the “parade of planets” visible in our evening sky! Many of the news outlets and social media sites are posting articles or stories about the planets strung out along the ecliptic arc. Facing south in tonight’s evening sky after astronomical twilight ends at shortly before 7 P.M. (when the sky is as dark as it’s going to get—the attached starchart shows the view at 7:30 P.M.), here’s what you’ll see from left to right. In the east will be bright orange-red Mars to the right of Pollux in Gemini. In the south will be super-bright Jupiter in Taurus with orange Aldebaran to the right of Jupiter at the eye of Taurus. A bit further to the right but still in the south is Uranus at the boundary between Taurus and Aries but you’ll need binoculars to see it.
On your right in the west will be a beautiful pairing of a thin waxing crescent moon just three days past new phase and brilliant Venus to the right of the moon. A special bonus is that if you use your binoculars, both of them will fit within the same field of view and you may be able to also spot Neptune at the bottom left edge of the field of view when you place the moon at the top left of the binocular view. You’ll see in your binoculars that Venus has a fat crescent shape as well. Venus is beginning to move between us and the sun and it gets brighter as it does so. Low in the west will be dimmer Saturn but you’ll need to catch it before 7:30-ish when it gets buried in the haze layer. Near the end of February, Mercury will join the evening parade as it passes by Saturn.
The first quarter moon will pass next to Uranus the morning of February 5 but the moon and Uranus will be below the horizon for us. By the time of the evening of February 5, the moon will be between Uranus and Jupiter, next to the Pleiades. The Pleiades and the moon will fit within the same field of view of your binoculars. Throughout the night of February 5/6, you’ll see the moon pass through the Pleiades. The waxing gibbous moon passes above Jupiter the night of February 6 and a nearly full moon will be roughly between Pollux and Mars the evening of February 9.
New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope are shedding light—infrared light— on where the heavier elements found in dust clouds came from in the early universe. Planetary systems form in these dust clouds. Whereas large planets like Jupiter and Saturn are mostly the lighter elements hydrogen and helium, planets like Earth and the other inner planets are made primarily of silicate rock and iron with hydrocarbons on the outer layers. Hydrogen and most of the helium in the universe were produced within the first few minutes after the Big Bang while the heavier elements were made later in stellar processes. A couple of mechanisms for making most of the heavier elements found in dust clouds are old lower-mass smoky stars called “asymptotic giant branch (AGB)” stars and core-collapse supernovae, the final stage of higher-mass star’s life when its core suddenly collapses and triggers a tremendous explosion, blasting debris all over the place.
The puzzle has been that the early universe has a lot more dust than could be accounted for by these two mechanisms. The AGB stars take many millions of years to pollute their environment with the dust. Core-collapse supernovae have the advantage of being formed by very short-lived stars, so they could have formed in the early universe and theoretical models of the explosions show they can produce a lot of dust. However, observations of nearby core-collapse supernovae with Webb’s infrared predecessor, the Spitzer Space Telescope, showed they actually produced less than 1% of the dust predicted by the models. Well, it turns out that not all core-collapse supernovae are the same.
A team led by Melissa Shahbandeh and Ori Fox pointed Webb at one of supernovae studied several years ago by Fox, SN 2005ip which is a “Type IIn” supernova discovered in NGC 2906 about 100 million years away (that’s “nearby”). Type IIn supernovae are core-collapse supernovae where the light we see is not from the supernova itself but from the interaction of the supernovae with dense gaseous material surrounding the star. That interaction keeps the explosion bright for years.
Spitzer observations 15 years ago of SN 2005ip showed carbon dust and the new Webb results show a larger amount of silicate dust, meaning the supernova is still continuing to produce dust and the amount it has produced over the years is in line with the theoretical models. More supernovae need to be studied to determine if there was enough of the Type IIn long ago to dust up the early universe enough and giant telescopes like the Vera C Rubin Observatory coming online later this year will find many hundreds, even thousands of new supernovae to train Webb’s infrared eye upon.
—
Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
