TV News LIES

Get ready for some shooting stars — this weekend is the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower, the beloved astronomical event that sends bright streaks of light streaming across the night sky.

This year's show should be a good one, "mainly because the moon isn't going to interfere," says Michelle Nichols, director of public observing with the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. "We can have different reasons why a meteor shower may be better one year versus the next, and a lot of times it's the phase of the moon."

Because the waning crescent moon will be just a little sliver that rises late, the sky will be dark, creating the ideal backdrop for the meteor shower's celestial fireworks.

Plus, the fact that the peak arrives on the weekend means that many folks can stay up late or get up before dawn without the usual worries about having to go to work after losing sleep.

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It was just a normal day's flying for Alex Dietrich – until it wasn't. Streaking through the sky over the tranquil expanse of the Pacific Ocean near San Diego, the US Navy lieutenant commander was taking her F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet on a training mission with a colleague in another plane. Then came a voice through the crackle of the radio.

It was an operations officer aboard the warship USS Princeton, asking them to investigate a suspicious object flitting around: on several occasions, it had been spotted 80,000ft (24.2km) high, before suddenly dropping close to the sea and apparently vanishing.

When the two jets arrived at its last known location, close to the ocean's surface, the water seemed almost to be boiling. Moments later Dietrich saw it: what seemed to be a whitish, oblong object around 40ft (12m) long, hovering just above the water – like a wingless capsule, which she described as resembling a Tic Tac. As they edged in closer, it was gone, accelerating off into the sky at what seemed an impossible speed, leaving a glassy expanse of regular sea behind.

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Nasa has named the first woman and the first African American ever assigned as astronauts to a lunar mission, introducing them as part of the four-member team chosen to fly as early as next year on what would be the first crewed voyage around the moon in more than 50 years.

Christina Koch, an engineer who already holds the record for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman, was named as a mission specialist, along with Victor Glover, a US Navy aviator, who was selected as the Artemis II pilot.

Glover, who was part of the second crewed flight of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, would become the first astronaut of colour ever to be sent on a lunar mission.

Rounding out the four-member crew are Jeremy Hansen, the first Canadian ever chosen for a flight to the moon, serving as a mission specialist, and Reid Wiseman, an International Space Station veteran, named as Artemis II mission commander.

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It's prime time to see the comet known as C/2022 E3, marked by its bright green nucleus and long faint ion tail. The comet has been visible for some time with telescopes and binoculars — but the best chance of seeing it with the naked eye is coming up on Wednesday, Feb. 1.

This marks possibly the first time ever — or at least for thousands of years — that the comet has streaked across our sky.

"If C/2022 E3 has ever passed through the solar system before, it would have last been seen in the sky more than 10,000 years ago," Jon Giorgini, a senior analyst at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told NPR.

Astronomers first spotted the brightening outburst in March 2022 at the Zwicky Transient Facility on Palomar Mountain in California. At the time, the comet was inside the orbit of Jupiter.

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Scientists have been given an unprecedented glimpse into the birth of stars and the early stages of the universe, after a new image showing a cluster more than 10bn years ago was released by the James Webb space telescope.

The image shows a young cluster of stars, known as NGC 346, which is more than 200,000 light years from Earth.

Scientists have taken a particular interest in the cluster, which is in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), because it resembles the conditions of the early universe when star formation was at its peak.

Astronomers hope that studying the region could give more answers as to how the first stars formed during the “cosmic noon”, only 2 or 3 billion years after the big bang.

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An iron-rich planet spotted in a nearby solar system could help scientists understand the mystery of how the planet Mercury formed in our own neighborhood.

The newly-described planet is about 31 light years away, according to a report in the journal Science. Astronomers haven't seen it directly, but they've been able to estimate its size and mass by watching its effects on the star that it orbits. It appears that this planet is largely made of iron.

"From our measurements, we find that this exoplanet is smaller and less massive than the Earth," says Kristine Lam, a researcher at the Institute of Planetary Research in the German Aerospace Center in Berlin. "It could be similar to Mercury, which is composed of mostly iron."

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