DUBAI: After a spectacular night of the Perseids Meteor Shower in the UAE skies on August 12, two more celestial treats beckon.
August 19 is the night of the Supermoon or Blue Moon when the Moon will be on the opposite side of the Earth as the Sun, with its face being fully illuminated.
“Early Native American tribes knew this full Moon as the Stargeon Moon,” Dubai Astronomy Group said. The story goes that the tribes gave the Supermoon this name after the large fish that were caught easily at this time of the year in the Great Lakes and other water bodies in what is now the northeastern part of the US (NASA).
The Full Sturgeon Moon will occur at 2.26pm EDT (10.26pm in UAE), says the US Naval Observatory.
According to NASA, “The term Supermoon was coined by astrologer Richard Nolle in 1979 as either a new or full Moon that occurs when the Moon is within 90 per cent of its closest approach to Earth. Since we don’t really see new Moons, what has caught the public’s attention are full Supermoons as they are the biggest and brightest full Moons of the year. This will be the first of four consecutive Supermoons this year (with the full Moons in September and October virtually tied for the closest of the year).”
Second treat
The second treat is the Jupiter and Mars Conjunction on August 14.
This will showcase the two planets in an extremely close pair-up as they will appear just a third of a degree apart from each other on the day.
The distance will be less than the width of the Full Moon, according to DAG.
Underground reservoir on Mars
Meanwhile, a study released on Monday using data from NASA’s Mars InSight lander showed evidence of liquid water far below the surface of the fourth planet, advancing the search for life there and showing what might have happened to Mars’ ancient oceans, according to WAM which quoted a Reuters report.
The lander, which has been on the Red Planet since 2018, measured seismic data over four years, examining how quakes shook the ground and determining what materials or substances were beneath the surface.
Based on that data, the researchers found liquid water was most likely present deep beneath the lander. Water is considered essential for life, and geological studies show the planet’s surface had lakes, rivers and oceans more than 3 billion years ago.
The study found that large reservoirs of liquid water in fractures 11.5 kilometres (7.15 miles) to 20km beneath the surface best explained the InSight measurements.
It noted that the volume of liquid water predicted beneath the surface is “more than the water volumes proposed to have filled hypothesised ancient Martian oceans””
“On Earth what we know is where it is wet enough and there are enough sources of energy, there is microbial life very deep in Earth’s subsurface,” said one of the authors, Vashan Wright of the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “The ingredients for life as we know it exist in the Martian subsurface if these interpretations are correct.”
“On Earth, groundwater infiltrated from the surface” to deep underground, Wright said. “We expect this process to have occurred on Mars as well when the upper crust was warmer than it is today.”
There is no way to directly study water that deep beneath the surface of Mars, but the authors said the results “have implications for understanding Mars’ water cycle, determining the fates of past surface water, searching for past or extant life, and assessing in situ resource utilization for future missions”.
