Why don't Russian spacecraft fly on Monday, and what is the story of the "White Sun of the Desert"?

“After the second rehearsal of spacesuits, cosmonauts usually and inevitably visit our museum, 4-5 days before launch. This tradition has been observed since 1983. Previously, before space flight, astronauts always visited the first launch pad,” called the platform, Bogdanova said. Gagarin, from which the world's first cosmonaut took off in 1961). Later, this tradition was canceled and another one was adopted, which is visiting the Baikonur Museum at the cosmodrome.

Bogdanova explained that the Baikonur Museum includes the Soviet spacecraft "Buran" and the homes of Sergei Korolev and Yuri Gagarin.

Bogdanova indicated that the astronauts always go before launch, to the house where Gagarin and German Titov slept before heading into space. This is a well-established and unshakable tradition that is always repeated.

As for the other traditions, one of them is for all crew members to watch the movie "White Sun of the Desert". Cosmonauts always sign the doors of the hotel where they lived during training before launching from Baikonur.

Also, Russian spacecraft do not usually take off on Mondays, and the reason is simply that the famous designer Sergey Korolev was pessimistic about this day, but no one knows why he does not like it. Source: TASS

What happens to rocky, Earth-like planets that wander too close to their host stars?

The massive Kepler survey has found a 'treasure trove' of exoplanets. But within all that wealth, scientists have found three anomalies, what appear to be rings of dust surrounding stars where planets should be.

These cases were rocky planets in the process of extinction. And a team of astronomers has found a way to use these "bloody sites" to understand some of the most mysterious and difficult-to-detect planets in the universe.

Scientists point out that we know so far about 5000 of the outer planets in the galaxy. This represents only a small part of the trillion worlds in the Milky Way.

Scientists face exceptional difficulty in finding a specific category of exoplanets, which are small and rocky planets, because the currently available technologies depend on transit technology.

When an exoplanet crosses in front of its host star, it causes a slight dip in brightness from our vantage point. But if the planet is very small, the change in brightness is not great enough for scientists to detect, so smaller planets, about the size of Earth and smaller, remain hidden from us.

But recently a team of researchers suggested that some anomalies in the Kepler data might beserve as reliable evidence.

Among the data returned from Kepler are what appear to be rings of dust and debris surrounding a star. Previous researchers concluded that these are rocky planets in the process of being destroyed. They are worlds that came very close to their parent star (the host star), and the heat of that star caused them to boil.

The researchers have released a paper, available on arXiv preprint , detailing simulations of how this process unfolds. And they find that these small worlds are caught between two extremes.

Since it orbits close to its parent star, it is almost certainly governed by the phenomenon of orbital locking, or tidal restriction, which means that only one side of the planet faces the star at all times. And the other side is permanently plunged into darkness.

And the day side is so destroyed that instead of a crust, it contains only a thin skeleton of pure magma. But the other side is so cold that the rocky crust stays in place.

The night side cools the planet while the day side heats it. Astronomers have found that there is only a very narrow window in which we can observe such situations. And if the planet is too big or the star isn't bright enough, it won't evaporate enough material for scientists to detect it with instruments like Kepler.

However, if the planet is very small or the star is very dense, the entire planet collapses in a short enough time that we are unlikely to see it in a random sample of stars.

And only certain special cases can result in a debris ring large enough and visible enough to be seen.

From this, astronomers estimate that for every star in the galaxy there is one planet roughly the size of Earth or smaller.

In addition, astronomers have found that these debris trails can give us very important clues about the formation of rocky planets. Source: phys.org

A very rare hybrid solar eclipse on April 20 that will not be repeated until 2031

On April 20, parts of the Pacific and Indian Oceans will witness a rare type of astronomical event called a hybrid solar eclipse.

A hybrid solar eclipse occurs between the total eclipse and the annular eclipse with the moon’s shadow racing over the earth, as in some places the moon blocks the sun completely for people to see a complete eclipse, while in other places a ring of light appears around the edge of our natural moon, in what is known as the annular eclipse. . This mixture of eclipses is very rare, occurring only a few times per century. And one of them will decorate our planet's sky less than two weeks from now.

The hybrid eclipse will be visible from western Australia, East Timor and eastern Indonesia starting at 01:36 GMT on April 20, and ending at 06:59 GMT.

Some skywatchers in these regions will see a total eclipse of the sun, while others will see the "ring of fire," which is the annular eclipse. Others can also see a partial eclipse of the sun, where the moon obscures part of the sun's disk.

And there are two points on Earth where the eclipse will move from annular to total to annular again. However, those two locations are far out in the middle of the ocean, as Space.com's Jimmy Carter pointed out in his explainer about the April 20 hybrid eclipse.

This hybrid eclipse will appear as a total or annular eclipse of the sun when viewed from Western Australia from 02:29 to 02:35 GMT on April 20. and in East Timor from 03:19 to 03:22 GMT. and in Indonesia from 03:23 to 03:58 GMT).

The celestial event will appear as a partial eclipse from several countries, including the southern French provinces, where an eclipse of 93% of the sun will be observed, and in Papua New Guinea, where 87% of the sun will be blocked. In the Marshall Islands, the moon will cover 95% of the sun's disk, according to In the Sky.

Hybrid eclipses occur due to the fact that the Earth is curved and the moon's shadow has different regions, notably a darker central region known as the umbra and a lighter outer region, the penumbra. A hybrid eclipse occurs when the Moon is as far from Earth as it can be in its elliptical orbit, while a shadow still meets our planet's surface.

Carter wrote in his explanatory essay: "The Moon is just the right distance from the Earth so that the apex of the conical shadow is slightly above the Earth's surface at the beginning and end of the eclipse path, causing the opposite Moon's shadow to move across the Earth, causing an annular eclipse." So, in the middle of the eclipse path, the top of the moon's umbra hits the Earth's surface because that part of the planet is a little bit closer to the moon."

The last eclipse of this kind occurred nearly 10 years ago, on November 3, 2013. The next hybrid solar eclipse will occur after this month in November 2031, and will be visible from some parts of the United States. After that, skywatchers will next see a hybrid eclipse on March 23, 2164. Source: Myspace