Environment & Outdoors

Smiling man next to a large home telescope

After a little break (of 25 years or so) Bob King is celebrating his retirement with a return to The North 103.3's airwaves!After almost 40 years with the Duluth News Tribune, Bob is now retired. But scratch a print guy and you'll find a radio guy; King and then-UMD Planetarium Director Glen Langhorst hosted Startalk on KUMD for several years in the early '90s.Listen for Astro Bob every other Tuesday at 8am on Northland Morning.

Astro Bob's Backyard Astronomy: Cosmic Comings and Goings

The North 103.3 | By Luke Moravec

Published March 21, 2023 at 9:49 AM CDT

Wolf-Rayet stars are known to be efficient dust producers, and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows this to great effect. Cooler cosmic dust glows at the longer mid-infrared wavelengths, displaying the structure of WR 124’s nebula. The nebula is made of material cast off from the aging star in random ejections, and from dust produced in the ensuing turbulence. This brilliant stage of mass loss precedes the star’s eventual supernova, when nuclear fusion in its core stops and the pressure of gravity causes it to collapse in on itself, and then explode. As MIRI demonstrates here, Webb will help astronomers to explore questions that were previously only left to theory about how much dust stars like this create before exploding in a supernova, and how much of that dust is large enough to survive the blast and go on to serve as building blocks of future stars and planets.

The cosmos are in constant flux and objects in the night sky are frequently coming and going.

Jupiter is starting to head away from us, but the International Space Station will be starting to make passes in the northern sky. On Thursday night, the ISS will be visible between 9:16-9:18pm.

The "pink" full moon (the April full moon which is named for a pink wildflower) is on its way. Look for clear skies on April 5th for the next full moon. Northern lights will also be a possibility in the coming days. A coronal hole in the sun is sending the right ingredients to Earth for possible aurora later in the week.

And the Webb telescope continues to wow with its views from beyond. A Wolf-Rayet star is about to go supernova. It's roughly 30 times the mass of our sun and it's sending out stellar dust clouds that could possibly one day create planets.