RSID: <<2021-12-31T00:31Z MFSK-32 @ 9265000+1500>>

Welcome to program 237 of Shortwave Radiogram.

I'm Kim Andrew Elliott in Arlington, Virginia USA.

Here is the lineup for today's program, in MFSK modes as noted:

  1:41 MFSK32: Program preview (now)
  2:46 Another launch in the OneWeb global internet system*
  6:48 MFSK64: Largest collection of free-floating planets found
11:30 This week's images*
28:21 MFSK32: Closing announcements

* with image(s)


Please send reception reports to radiogram@verizon.net

And visit http://swradiogram.net

Twitter: @SWRadiogram




From TechXplore:

UK firm closer to offering global internet via satellites

December 27, 2021

A Russian Soyuz rocket on Monday took 36 more satellites from
British operator OneWeb into orbit, bringing the company more
than halfway towards its goal of providing global broadband
internet.

The London-headquartered company is working to complete the
construction of a constellation of low earth orbit satellites
providing enhanced broadband and other services to countries
around the planet.

The UK company plans for its global commercial internet service
to be operational by next year, supported by some 650 satellites.
With the latest mission, it now has a total of 394 satellites in
orbit for the constellation.

The Russian rocket, operated by Europe's Arianespace, took off at
1310 GMT from the Moscow-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in ex-Soviet
Kazakhstan.

"LIFTOFF!" Russia's Roscosmos space agency tweeted after the
launch.

OneWeb is competing in the race to provide fast internet for the
world's remote areas via satellites along with tech billionaire
Elon Musk and fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos of Amazon.

Arianespace, which has worked with Russia for close to two
decades, is under contract to make 16 Soyuz launches between
December 2020 and the end of 2022.

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-12-uk-firm-closer-global-internet.html
 

Image: Illustration of a OneWeb satellite ...

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Shortwave Radiogram now changes to MFSK64 ...

 

RSID: <<2021-12-31T00:37Z MFSK-64 @ 9265000+1500>>

This is Shortwave Radiogram in MFSK64

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From Phys.org

Largest collection of free-floating planets found in the Milky
Way

by Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA)
December 26, 2021

Using observations and archival data from several of NSF's
NOIRLab's observatories, together with observations from
telescopes around the world and in orbit, astronomers have
discovered at least 70 new free-floating planets—planets
that wander through space without a parent star—in a nearby
region of the Milky Way. This is the largest sample of such
planets found in a single group and it nearly doubles the
number known over the entire sky.

Researchers have discovered a group of free-floating
planets—planets not orbiting a star—in a nearby region of the
Milky Way known as the Upper Scorpius OB stellar association. At
least 70, and as many as 170 of these Jupiter-sized planets have
been found by examining data from over 20 years of observations.
The first free-floating planets were discovered in the 1990s, but
the latest findings have almost doubled the total number known.

To find these planets, the study's first author, Núria Miret-Roig
of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux, at the University
of Bordeaux in France, with a team of astronomers, used
observations and archival data from a number of large
observatories, including facilities from NSF's NOIRLab,
telescopes of the European Southern Observatory, the
Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, and the Subaru Telescope,
amounting to 80,000 wide-field images over 20 years of
observations.

Hervé Bouy, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de
Bordeaux, and project leader of the research, says that the
discovery of so many free-floating planets would not have been
feasible without access to NOIRLab's Astro Data Archive and Astro
Data Lab Science Platform operated at the Community Science and
Data Center (CSDC).

The data include 247 images from the NEWFIRM extremely wide-field
infrared imager at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) in
Arizona, 1348 images from the same NEWFIRM instrument after it
was relocated to the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory
(CTIO) in Chile, 2214 images from the Infrared Side Port Imager
that was previously operating on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter
Telescope at CTIO, and 3744 images from the Dark Energy Camera.

"The treasure trove available in the NOIRLab Astro Data Archive
has been fundamental to this study," Bouy says. "We needed very
deep and wide-field images in both the optical and near-infrared,
spanning a long time baseline. So the Dark Energy Camera and
NEWFIRM were very appealing for our project because they are
among the most sensitive wide-field cameras in the world."

One of the highest-performance, wide-field CCD imagers in the
world, the Dark Energy Camera was designed for the Dark Energy
Survey funded by the Department of Energy (DOE). It was built and
tested at DOE's Fermilab, and was operated by the DOE and
National Science Foundation (NSF) between 2013 and 2019. At
present the Dark Energy Camera is used for programs covering a
huge range of science. The analysis of data from the Dark Energy
Survey is supported by the DOE and the NSF.

"This project illustrates the incredible importance of providing
access to archival data from different telescopes, not just
throughout the US, but worldwide," says Chris Davis, Program
Officer at the National Science Foundation for NSF's NOIRLab.
"This is something NOIRLab and specifically the CSDC has been
working hard to enable over a number of years, and continues to
do so with support from NSF."

The free-floating planets lie in the Upper Scorpius OB
association, which is 420 light-years away from Earth. This
region contains a number of the most famous nebulae, including
the Rho Ophiuchi cloud, the Pipe Nebula, Barnard 68, and the
Coalsack.

Free-floating planets have mostly been discovered via
microlensing surveys, in which astronomers watch for a brief
chance alignment between an exoplanet and a background star.
However, microlensing events only happen once, meaning follow-up
observations are impossible.

These new planets were discovered using a different method. These
planets, lurking far away from any star illuminating them, would
normally be impossible to image. However, Miret-Roig and her team
took advantage of the fact that, in the few million years after
their formation, these planets are still hot enough to glow,
making them directly detectable by sensitive cameras on large
telescopes. Miret-Roig's team used the 80,000 observations to
measure the light of all the members of the association across a
wide range of optical and near-infrared wavelengths and combined
them with measurements of how they appear to move across the sky.

"We measured the tiny motions, the colors and luminosities of
tens of millions of sources in a large area of the sky," explains
Miret-Roig. "These measurements allowed us to securely identify
the faintest objects in this region."

The discovery also sheds light on the origin of free-floating
planets. Some scientists believe these planets can form from the
collapse of a gas cloud that is too small to lead to the
formation of a star, or that they could have been kicked out from
their parent system. But which is the actual mechanism remains
unknown.

The ejection model suggests that there could be even greater
numbers of free-floating planets that are Earth-sized. "The
free-floating Jupiter-mass planets are the most difficult to
eject, meaning that there might even be more free-floating
Earth-mass planets wandering the galaxy," says Miret-Roig.

It is expected that Vera C. Rubin Observatory could find many
more free-floating planets when it begins scientific operations
this decade.

https://phys.org/news/2021-12-largest-free-floating-planets-milky.html

 

This is Shortwave Radiogram in MFSK64

Please send your reception report to radiogram@verizon.net
 

This week's images ...


A vendor sells balloons in Kolkata, India. https://bit.ly/3z7F1l6
...

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The Shepelevsky lighthouse shines amid fog in Russia's Leningrad
region on December 18, 2021. https://bit.ly/3zhW6c3 ...

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The moon rises beyond the Lee's Summit Magic Tree on December 22,
2021, in Lee's Summit, Missouri. The lone tree in a field next to
a freeway is covered with more than 12,000 lights and attracts
thousands of visitors every Christmas season.
https://bit.ly/3zhW6c3 ...

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Residents of Kelseyville, California, walk their dog in the snow
on Cobb Mountain. https://bit.ly/3pE7fkb ...

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Ice sculptures at the Harbin Ice and Snow World in China.
https://bit.ly/3pE7fkb ...

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A street in Frankfurt, Germany, on a foggy Monday morning.
https://bit.ly/3EztRGZ ...

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Near Faribault, Minnesota, off of Interstate 35, a farmer
illuminates a tree with 48,000 lights. https://bbc.in/3sHNYQK ...

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A crow on a streetlight near the US Capitol in Washington DC,
December 28. https://wapo.st/3FKxfA4 ...

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And, finally ...

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Shortwave Radiogram returns to MFSK32 ...


 

RSID: <<2021-12-31T00:58Z MFSK-32 @ 9265000+1500>>

This is Shortwave Radiogram in MFSK32 ...

 

Shortwave Radiogram is transmitted by:

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and

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Please send reception reports to radiogram@verizon.net

And visit http://swradiogram.net

Twitter: @SWRadiogram or twitter.com/swradiogram

I'm Kim Elliott. Please join us for the next Shortwave
Radiogram.