Welcome to Three Alpha!

Welcome to the first edition of the Three Alpha newsletter! My name is Dr. Adam McMaster and I’m an astronomer at the University of Southampton. This is a weekly astronomy newsletter, containing one short original story (starting next week) and an overview of astronomy news from the past week. I don’t guarantee to cover every story, but I’ll try to make it interesting.

Soon I will also be launching a YouTube channel. I’m starting work on that now, but I expect it will take time to write, film, and edit the first videos (especially as I’m new at it). I’m aiming to start publishing videos in a month or two.

You can also find me on BlueSky, @adammc.space.

Three Alpha is a weekly newsletter. Make sure you don’t miss future editions by subscribing now!

Solar System

• NASA has turned off one instrument on each of the two Voyager probes to conserve power. Voyager 1 loses its cosmic ray subsystem and Voyager 2 loses its low-energy charged particle experiment. [NASA, The Verge, Scientific American]

• NASA has lost contact with its Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft. Engineers at Caltech are trying to establish contact, but it’s not looking good. [Ars Technica]

• Radiation from a nearby supernova may have driven the evolution of viruses in Lake Tanganyika 2.5 million years ago. The resulting genetic mutations likely explains an increase in viral diversity at that time. [Popular Mechanics]

• The constellations are not fixed – everything is moving and the patterns we see today were different just a few thousand years ago. Now new research says the Sun passed through a star-forming region in Orion 14 million years ago. [EarthSky]

Galaxy

• There are three main classes of black hole: stellar-mass (around the mass of a star), supermassive (millions of solar masses), and in the middle are the intermediate-mass black holes (IMBH). There aren’t many known IMBHs, and now it turns out there’s one hiding nearby in the Omega Centauri globular cluster. [Astrobites]

• No-one really knows what the inside of black holes is like. New ways of mapping the space within the event horizon may lead to a new understanding of gravity and what is really happening near the singularity. [Quanta]

• T Coronae Borealis is overdue for a dramatic flare in brightness. It might finally be about to happen. [Universe Today]

• Unexplained X-rays emanating from the Helix Nebula may be due to the nebula’s white dwarf consuming the remains of a planet it destroyed. [Sky at Night]

Universe

• A new space telescope, SPHEREx, is imminently due to launch as I’m writing this (and hopefully it will be in space by the time you read this). It’s due to conduct an all-sky galaxy survey to study the Big Bang. [Washington Post, Wikipedia]

• In more IMBH news, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) just found 300 new ones. This triples the number previously known. [Popular Mechanics]

• New simulations show that oxygen created by the earliest stars could have been abundant enough to lead the to creation of substantial amounts of water, even before the first galaxies formed. [New Scientist]

Finally

I absolutely love the absurdly large camera which has been built for the Vera Rubin Observatory. Check out this video of it being hosed down with pure CO₂ ice: