Top News

Scientists crack 70-year-old mystery of how magnetic waves heat the sun

The Schrodinger Equation makes an unlikely appear-ance at the astronomical scale

Hubble offers new image of dramatic galactic collision

Fingerprinting the very first stars

JILA team invents new way to ‘see’ the quantum world

Controlled coupling of light and matter

ALMA reveals inner web of stellar nursery

Cosmologists find way to ver-ify if the universe is hotter at one end than the other

The fine-tuning of two-di-mensional materials

KAIST finds the principle of electric wind in plasma

The shapes of water: New research details water’s mys-terious phase transitions

Technique to see objects hidden around corners

This Week’s Sky at a Glance, Mar. 10-16, 2018

Lecture:Dr. Grigorij Richters

Co-Founder Asteroid day

How Asteroid Day will save the World!

Mar. 10 - 6-7 pm (SCASS)Mar. 11- 11-12 (UoS - Nafis)

Mar. 10, 2018 Jumada II 22, 1439 AH Volume 8, Issue 10

2

3

4

6

7

5

Special Read:

China’s Tiangong-1 due for uncontrolled re-entry, soon

8

9

11

2

Scientists crack 70-year-old mystery of how magnetic waves heat the sun

Credit: Queen’s University Belfast

Scientists at Queen’s University Belfast have led an in-ternational team to the ground-breaking discovery that magnetic waves crashing through the sun may be key to heating its atmosphere and propelling the solar wind.

The sun is the source of energy that sustains all life on Earth but much remains unknown about it. However, a group of researchers at Queen’s have now unlocked some mysteries in a research paper, which has been published in Nature Physics.

In 1942, Swedish physicist and engineer Hannes Alfvén predicted the existence of a new type of wave due to mag-netism acting on a plasma, which led him to obtain the No-bel Prize for Physics in 1970. Since his prediction, Alfvén waves have been associated with a variety of sources, in-cluding nuclear reactors, the gas cloud that envelops com-ets, laboratory experiments, medical MRI imaging and in the atmosphere of our nearest star – the sun.

Scientists have suggested for many years that these waves may play an important role in maintaining the sun’s extremely high temperatures but until now had not been able to prove it.

Dr. David Jess from the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s University Belfast explains: “For a long time sci-entists across the globe have predicted that Alfvén waves travel upwards from the solar surface to break in the high-er layers, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the form of heat. Over the last decade scientists have been able to prove that the waves exist but until now there was no direct evidence that they had the capability to convert their movement into heat.

“At Queen’s, we have now led a team to detect and pin-point the heat produced by Alfvén waves in a sunspot. This theory was predicted some 75 years ago but we now have the proof for the very first time. Our research opens up a new window to understanding how this phenomenon could potentially work in other areas such as energy reac-tors and medical devices.” ...Read More...

The Schrodinger Equation makes an unlikely appearance at the astronomical scale

An artist’s impression of research presented in Batygin (2018), MNRAS 475, 4. Propagation of waves through an astrophysical disk can be understood using Schrodinger’s equation -- a cor-nerstone of quantum mechanics. Image courtesy James Tuttle Keane, California Institute of Technology

Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics governing the sometimes-strange behavior of the tiny particles that make up our universe. Equations describing the quantum world are generally confined to the subatomic realm--the mathematics relevant at very small scales is not relevant at larger scales, and vice versa. However, a surprising new discovery from a Caltech researcher suggests that the Schrodinger Equation--the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics--is remarkably useful in describing the long-term evolution of certain astronomical struc-tures.

The work, done by Konstantin Batygin, a Caltech assis-tant professor of planetary science and Van Nuys Page Scholar, is described in a paper appearing in the March 5 issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Massive astronomical objects are frequently encircled by groups of smaller objects that revolve around them, like the planets around the sun. For example, supermassive black holes are orbited by swarms of stars, which are themselves orbited by enormous amounts of rock, ice, and other space debris. Due to gravitational forces, these huge volumes of material form into flat, round disks. These disks, made up of countless individual particles orbiting en masse, can range from the size of the solar system to many light-years across.

Astrophysical disks of material generally do not retain simple circular shapes throughout their lifetimes. Instead, over millions of years, these disks slowly evolve to exhib-it large-scale distortions, bending and warping like ripples on a pond. Exactly how these warps emerge and propa-gate has long puzzled astronomers, and even computer simulations have not offered a definitive answer, as the process is both complex and prohibitively expensive to model directly. ...Read More...

3

Hubble offers new image of dramatic galactic collision

Arp 256 is a stunning system of two spiral galaxies in an early stage of merging. The Hubble image displays two galaxies with strongly disrupted shapes and an astonishing number of blue knots of star formation that look like exploding fireworks. The galaxy to the left has two extended ribbon-like tails of gas, dust and stars. The system is a luminous infrared system radiating more than a hundred billion times the luminosity of our Sun. Arp 256 is located in the constellation of Cetus, the Whale, about 350 million light-years away. It is the 256th galaxy in Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies.

Galaxies are not static islands of stars - they are dynamic and ever-changing, constantly on the move through the darkness of the universe. Sometimes, as seen in this spec-tacular Hubble image of Arp 256, galaxies can collide in a crash of cosmic proportions.

350 million light-years away in the constellation of Cetus (the Sea Monster), a pair of barred spiral galaxies have just begun a magnificent merger. This image suspends them in a single moment, freezing the chaotic spray of gas, dust and stars kicked up by the gravitational forces pulling the two galaxies together.

Though their nuclei are still separated by a large distance, the shapes of the galaxies in Arp 256 are impressively dis-torted. The galaxy in the upper part of the image contains very pronounced tidal tails - long, extended ribbons of gas, dust and stars.

The galaxies are ablaze with dazzling regions of star for-mation: the bright blue fireworks are stellar nurseries, churning out hot infant stars. These vigorous bursts of new life are triggered by the massive gravitational interac-tions, which stir up interstellar gas and dust out of which stars are born.

Arp 256 was first catalogued by Halton Arp in 1966, as one of 338 galaxies presented in the aptly-named Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. The goal of the catalogue was to image examples of the weird and wonderful structures found among nearby galaxies, to provide snapshots of different stages of galactic evolution.

These peculiar galaxies are like a natural experiment played out on a cosmic scale and by cataloguing them, as-tronomers can better understand the physical processes that warp spiral and elliptical galaxies ..Read More...

Fingerprinting the very first stars

This artist concept shows one of the universe’s first stars. The massive blue star is embedded within filaments of gas and dust, while the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is shown on the outer edges. Researchers recently inferred the existence of these massive blue stars by measuring the dimming of the CMB.N. R. Fuller/National Science Foundation

When solving a crime, detectives don’t always have access to footage or photographs of their suspect. Instead, they have to painstakingly search for small, easily overlooked clues — such as fingerprints.

Like detectives, astronomers can’t always just examine a simple image when they want to solve a mystery. Most of the time, the have to meticulously piece together tiny bits of evidence, often by scouring the heavens to hunt for clues. And one of the biggest cosmic cold cases that astronomers have been attempting to solve for years is: When exactly did the first stars form?

This week in the journal Nature, after over a decade of in-tense experimental investigation, a team of astronomers announced that they have finally cracked the case of the first stars. Using a simple radio antenna the size of a table-top located in the Australian desert, the researchers dis-covered the faint fingerprints of the earliest stars in the infant universe, which formed when the cosmos was just 180 million years old.

“This is exciting because it is the first look into a particu-larly important period in the universe, when the first stars and galaxies were beginning to form,” said Colin Lonsdale, director of MIT’s Haystack Observatory, in a press release. “This is the first time anybody’s had any direct observa-tional data from the epoch.”

After the Big Bang and before the first stars ignited, the universe was a very dark and cold place. There were no galaxies, no supernovae, and no quasars. The universe primarily consisted of neutral hydrogen gas floating in an omnipresent sea of background radiation leftover from the Big Bang. Over time, gravity slowly shepherded the dens-est regions of hydrogen gas into compact clouds, which ultimately collapsed to form the first stars.

When these primordial stars first began shining within the pitch-black void, they blasted the surrounding hydrogen gas with ultraviolet radiation. This excited the hydrogen atoms within the gas, causing them to ..Read More...

4

JILA team invents new way to ‘see’ the quantum world

This is artwork made with JILA’s new imaging technique, which rapidly and precisely measures quantum behavior in an atomic clock. The images are false-color representations of atoms de-tected in the ground state (blue) or excited state (red). The white region represents a fine mixture of atoms in the two states, which creates quantum “noise” in the image. This occurs because all the atoms were initially prepared in a quantum state of su-perposition, or both ground and excited states simultaneously, and the imaging measurement prompts a collapse into one of the two states. The imaging technique will help improve clock preci-sion, add new atomic-level detail to studies of phenomena such as magnetism and superconductivity and, in the future, perhaps allow scientists to “see” new physic

JILA scientists have invented a new imaging technique that produces rapid, precise measurements of quantum behavior in an atomic clock in the form of near-instant visual art. The technique combines spectroscopy, which extracts information from interactions between light and matter, with high-resolution microscopy.

As described in Physical Review Letters, the JILA method makes spatial maps of energy shifts among the atoms in a three-dimensional strontium lattice atomic clock, provid-ing information about each atom’s location and energy lev-el, or quantum state.

The technique rapidly measures physical effects that are important to atomic clocks, thus improving the clock’s pre-cision, and it can add new atomic-level detail to studies of phenomena such as magnetism and superconductivity. In the future, the method may allow scientists to finally see new physics such as the connection between quantum physics and gravity.

JILA is operated jointly by the National Institute of Stan-dards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colora-do Boulder. “This technique allows us to write a piece of beautiful ‘music’ with laser light and atoms, and then map that into a structure and freeze it like a stone so we can look at individual atoms listening to the different tones of the laser, read out directly as an image,” JILA/NIST Fellow Jun Ye said.

The atoms are in a so-called quantum degenerate gas, in which large numbers of atoms interact with each other. This “quantum many-body” phenomenon is extending measurement precision to new extremes. .Read More...

Controlled coupling of light and matter

Artistic representation of a plasmonic nano-resonator realized by a narrow slit in a gold layer. Upon approaching the quantum dot (red) to the slit opening the coupling strength increases. Image courtesy Heiko Grob.

Publishing in a journal like Science Advances usually her-alds a particularly exciting innovation. Now, physicists from the Julius-Maximilians-Universitat Wurzburg (JMU) in Germany and Imperial College London in the UK are reporting controlled coupling of light and matter at room temperature. This achievement is particularly significant as it builds the foundations for a realization of practical photonic quantum technologies.

Indeed, while many demonstrations of optical quantum processes require cryogenic temperatures to protect the quantum states, the present work elevates the quantum processes to room temperature and introduces controlla-bility - both vital elements of quantum technologies such as quantum computers, which to a certain extent “calcu-late with light” and are conceivably many times more pow-erful than existing computers.

Emitted photons are trapped and re-absorbedA light particle (photon) is generated when, for example, an exited molecule or a quantum dot returns to its low-en-ergy ground state. This process is generally known as spontaneous emission and is usually irreversible, i.e. an emitted photon will not simply return to the emitter to be absorbed again.

But if the emitter is intimately coupled to something like a storage element for light, a so-called optical resonator, then the emitted photon remains in the vicinity of the emitter for a sufficiently long period of time, considerably boosting its chance to be reabsorbed.

“Such a reversal of spontaneous emission is of highest im-portance for quantum technologies and information pro-cessing, not least as it facilitates exchange of quantum in-formation between matter and light while preserving the quantum properties of both,” says Professor Ortwin Hess of Imperial College.It’s showtime for plasmonic nano-resonatorsSuch an exchange of quantum information is, however, usually only possible at very low ...Read More...

5

ALMA reveals inner web of stellar nursery

This spectacular and unusual image shows part of the famous Orion Nebula, a star formation region lying about 1350 light-years from Earth. It combines a mosaic of millimetre wavelength images from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the IRAM 30-metre telescope, shown in red, with a more familiar infrared view from the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, shown in blue. The group of bright blue-white stars at the left is the Trapezium Cluster - made up of hot young stars that are only a few million years old. Image courtesy ESO/H. Drass/ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/A. Hacar

This spectacular and unusual image shows part of the famous Orion Nebula, a star formation region lying about 1350 light-years from Earth. It combines a mosaic of mil-limetre-wavelength images from the Atacama Large Milli-meter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the IRAM 30-metre telescope, shown in red, with a more familiar infrared view from the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s Very Large Tele-scope, shown in blue. The group of bright blue-white stars at the upper-left is the Trapezium Cluster - made up of hot young stars that are only a few million years old.

The wispy, fibre-like structures seen in this large image are long filaments of cold gas, only visible to telescopes working in the millimetre wavelength range. They are in-visible at both optical and infrared wavelengths, making ALMA one of the only instruments available for astrono-mers to study them. This gas gives rise to newborn stars - it gradually collapses under the force of its own gravity until it is sufficiently compressed to form a protostar - the precursor to a star.

The scientists who gathered the data from which this im-age was created were studying these filaments to learn more about their structure and make-up. They used ALMA to look for signatures of diazenylium gas, which makes up part of these structures. Through doing this study, the team managed to identify a network of 55 filaments.

The Orion Nebula is the nearest region of massive star for-mation to Earth, and is therefore studied in great detail by astronomers seeking to better understand how stars form and evolve in their first few million years. ESO’s telescopes have observed this interesting region multiple times, and you can learn more about previous discoveries here, here, and here.

This image combines a total of 296 separate individual datasets from the ALMA and IRAM telescopes, making it one of the largest high-resolution mosaics of a star for-mation region produced so far at millimetre wavelengths . ..Read More...

Cosmologists find way to ver-ify if the universe is hotter at one end than the other

A remnant of the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background appears to harbor a gradient across the universe, a feature that has puzzled cosmologists for decades. Credit: Matthew Savino

Scientists have long observed an apparent gradient in the cosmic microwave background but have been unable to determine how much is real and how much is perceived. USC Dornsife researchers appear to have found a way to an answer.

Observed from Earth, the universe appears a bit hotter at one end than the other, at least in terms of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). But the question plaguing cosmologists is whether that imbalance in the CMB is real or a result of the Doppler effect.

USC Dornsife scientists Siavash Yasini and Elena Pierpaoli may have found a way to nail down an answer.

Made most famous perhaps by Edwin Hubble, who used it to show that the universe is expanding, the Doppler ef-fect is the apparent shift in the frequency of electromag-netic waves due to the motion of bodies traveling swiftly through space. Waves such as electromagnetic radiation—light waves, X-rays, microwaves, etc.—appear to shift in energy, with those moving toward an observer appearing to be higher in energy, or hotter, than they really are. The opposite is true for waves moving away from the observ-er, which appear colder.

Scientists looking at the sky see space trailing behind Earth appearing colder than space up ahead, but it’s not clear if that’s only the Doppler effect or an observation of a true difference in CMB temperature. It’s a puzzle that has persisted for decades.

Because the CMB is leftover energy from the Big Bang—when the entire universe exploded outward from a single point—cosmologists have assumed it is dispersed evenly. The appearance of two poles in the universe, one warm-er than the other, must therefore be a result of the Dop-pler effect, a result of the solar system careening through space. “We think that one side of the CMB only looks hot-ter because we are moving towards it, and the opposite side looks colder because we are moving away from it,” said Yasini, a Ph.D. student in physics ...Read More...

6

KAIST finds the principle of electric wind in plasma

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A KAIST team identified the basic principle of electric wind in plasma. This finding will contribute to developing tech-nology in various applications of plasma, including fluid control technology.

Professor Wonho Choe from the Department of Physics and his team identified the main principle of neutral gas flow in plasma, known as ‘electric wind’, in collaboration with Professor Se Youn Moon’s team at Chonbuk National University.

Electric wind in plasma is a well-known consequence of interactions arising from collisions between charged par-ticles (electrons or ions) and neutral particles. It refers to the flow of neutral gas that occurs when charged particles accelerate and collide with a neutral gas.

This is a way to create air movement without mechanical movement, such as fan wings, and it is gaining interest as a next-generation technology to replace existing fans. How-ever, there was no experimental evidence of the cause.

To identify the cause, the team used atmospheric pres-sure plasma. As a result, the team succeeded in identifying streamer propagation and space charge drift from electro-hydrodynamic (EHD) force in a qualitative manner.

According to the team, streamer propagation has very little effect on electric wind, but space charge drift that follows streamer propagation and collapse was the main cause of electric wind.

The team also identified that electrons, instead of nega-tively charged ions, were key components of electric wind generation in certain plasmas.

Furthermore, electric wind with the highest speed of 4 m/s was created in a helium jet plasma, which is one fourth the speed of a typhoon. These results indicate that the study could provide basic principles to effectively control the speed of electric wind.

Professor Choe said, “These findings set a significant foun-dation to understand the interactions ..Read More....

The fine-tuning of two-di-mensional materials

In situ rhenium doping of monolayer MoS2.

A new understanding of why synthetic 2-D materials of-ten perform orders of magnitude worse than predicted was reached by teams of researchers led by Penn State. They searched for ways to improve these materials’ perfor-mance in future electronics, photonics, and memory stor-age applications.

Two-dimensional materials are films only an atom or two thick. Researchers make 2-D materials by the exfoliation method - peeling a slice of material off a larger bulk ma-terial - or by condensing a gas precursor onto a substrate. The former method provides higher quality materials, but is not useful for making devices. The second method is well established in industrial applications, but yields low perfor-mance 2-D films.

The researchers demonstrated, for the first time, why the quality of 2-D materials grown by the chemical vapor depo-sition method have poor performance compared to their theoretical predictions. They report their results in a recent issue of Scientific Reports.

“We grew molybdenum disulfide, a very promising 2-D ma-terial, on a sapphire substrate,” said Kehao Zhang, a doc-toral candidate of Joshua Robinson, associate professor of materials science and engineering, Penn State. “Sapphire itself is aluminum oxide. When the aluminum is the top lay-er of the substrate, it likes to give up its electrons to the film. This heavy negative doping - electrons have negative charge - limits both the intensity and carrier lifetime for photoluminescence, two important properties for all opto-electronic applications, such as photovoltaics and photo-sensors.”

Once they determined that the aluminum was giving up electrons to the film, they used a sapphire substrate that was cut in such a way as to expose the oxygen rather than the aluminum on the surface. This enhanced the photolu-minescence intensity and the carrier lifetime by 100 times.

In related work, a second team of researchers led by the same Penn State group used doping engineering that sub-stitutes foreign atoms into the crystal lattice of the film in order to change or improve the properties of the material. They reported their work this week in Advanced Function-al Materials. ...Read more...

7

The shapes of water: New re-search details water’s myste-rious phase transitions

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Water, always important, always controversial, always fas-cinating, remains surprising. For a substance that is ubiq-uitous on Earth, three quarters of our planet is covered with it, researchers can still be surprised by some of its properties, according to Arizona State University chemist C. Austen Angell.

Angell, a Regents Professor in ASU’s School of Molecular Sciences, has spent a good portion of his distinguished career tracking down some of water’s more curious phys-ical properties. In a new piece of research just published in Science (March 9), Angell and colleagues from the Uni-versity of Amsterdam have, for the first time, observed one of the more intriguing properties predicted by water theoreticians - that, on sufficient super-cooling and under specific conditions it will suddenly change from one liquid to a different one. The new liquid is still water but now it is of lower density and with a different arrangement of the hydrogen bonded molecules with stronger bonding that makes it a more viscous liquid.

“It has nothing to do with ‘poly-water,’” Angell adds recall-ing a scientific fiasco of many decades ago. The new phe-nomenon is a liquid-liquid phase transition, and until now it had only been seen in computer simulations of water models.

The problem with observing this phenomenon directly in real water is that, shortly before the theory says it should happen, the real water suddenly crystallizes to ice. This has been called the “crystallization curtain” and it held up progress in understanding water physics and water in biol-ogy for decades.

“The domain between this crystallization temperature and the much lower temperature at which glassy water (formed by deposition of water molecules from the vapor) crystal-lizes during heating has been known as a ‘no-man’s land,’” Angell said. “We found a way to pull aside the ‘crystalliza-tion curtain’ just enough to see what happens behind - or more correctly, below - it,” Angell said. ...Read More...

Technique to see objects hidden around corners

Illustration of the non-line-of-sight imaging system. Credit: Stanford Computational Imaging Lab

A driverless car is making its way through a winding neighborhood street, about to make a sharp turn onto a road where a child’s ball has just rolled. Although no per-son in the car can see that ball, the car stops to avoid it. This is because the car is outfitted with extremely sensi-tive laser technology that reflects off nearby objects to see around corners.

This scenario is one of many that researchers at Stanford University are imagining for a system that can produce images of objects hidden from view. They are focused on applications for autonomous vehicles, some of which already have similar laser-based systems for detecting objects around the car, but other uses could include see-ing through foliage from aerial vehicles or giving rescue teams the ability to find people blocked from view by walls and rubble.

“It sounds like magic but the idea of non-line-of-sight imaging is actually feasible,” said Gordon Wetzstein, as-sistant professor of electrical engineering and senior au-thor of the paper describing this work, published March 5 in Nature.

Seeing the unseen

The Stanford group isn’t alone in developing methods for bouncing lasers around corners to capture images of objects. Where this research advances the field is in the extremely efficient and effective algorithm the research-ers developed to process the final image.

“A substantial challenge in non-line-of-sight imaging is figuring out an efficient way to recover the 3-D structure of the hidden object from the noisy measurements,” said David Lindell, graduate student in the Stanford Compu-tational Imaging Lab and co-author of the paper. “I think the big impact of this method is how computationally ef-ficient it is.”

For their system, the researchers set a laser next to a highly sensitive photon detector, which can record even a single particle of light. They shoot ...Read More...

8

Special Read:

China’s Tiangong-1 due for uncontrolled re-entry, soon

Tiangong-1 potential re-entry area. Map showing the area between 42.8 degrees north and 42.8 degrees south latitude (in green), over which Tiangong-1 could reenter. Image via ESA CC BY-SA IGO 3.0.

The current estimated window for Tiangong 1’s re-entry is approximately March 29 to April 9, 2018. “This is highly variable,” according to ESA.

China’s first space station – Tiangong-1 (Heavenly Palace 1) – was launched in 2011, and, originally, a controlled re-en-try was planned. Firing the craft’s engines would have enabled controllers to allow the craft to burn up (mostly) over a large, unpopulated region of the South Pacific ocean. Any surviving pieces would have fallen into the ocean. But, in March 2016, the Tiangong-1 space station ceased functioning. Ground teams lost control of the craft, and it can no longer be commanded to fire its engines. It is, therefore, expected to make an uncontrolled reentry … soon.

The current estimated window for Tiangong-1’s re-entry is approximately March 29 to April 9, 2018. ESA calls these dates “highly variable.”

Reentry will take place anywhere between 43 degrees north and 43 degrees south (see map below). At no time will a precise time or location prediction for re-entry be possible.

The spacecraft’s main body is approximately 34 feet (10.4 meters) long.

ESA has said that Tiangong-1 will “substantially burn up” in Earth’s atmosphere. Will pieces crash to Earth? Possibly. Will they crash in populated areas? It’s not possible to say, but the chances are small that any human being will be harmed, according to a statement from Aerospace, a research organization that advises government and private enterprise on space flight. Aerospace said:

“There is a chance that a small amount of Tiangong-1 debris may survive reentry and impact the ground. Should this happen, any surviving debris would fall within a region that is a few hundred kilometers in size and centered along a point on the Earth that the station passes over.”

Aerospace also warned that the space station might be carrying a highly toxic and corrosive fuel called hydrazine on board.

As of today’s date (March 7, 2018), the spacecraft is at about 155 miles (258 km) altitude. Its orbit is clearly decaying as you can see if you follow the spacecraft’s descent here.

Tiangong-1 is not designed to withstand re-entry, as some spacecraft are. But it will mostly burn up when it falls, due to the extreme heat and friction generated by its high-speed passage through Earth’s atmosphere. ...Read More...

9

This Week’s Sky at a GlanceMar. 10-16, 2018

Mar 10 Sa 04:37 Moon-Mars: 4.2° SMar 11 Su 06:37 Moon-Saturn: 2.5° S 10:39 Moon South Dec.: 20.1° S 13:13 Moon Apogee: 404700 kmMar 14 We 07:48 Moon Descending NodeMar 15 Th 18:59 Mercury Elongation: 18.4° E