The nearest black hole to Earth, plus Perseverance makes Oxygen on Mars! | Night Sky News May 2021

A recap of the space news of the past month, plus what to look out for in the night sky in the coming month. There's a lot of Mars news: from Ingenuity's flights, MOXIE making Oxygen, evidence for recent volcanic activity, and some not-so convincing "evidence" for mushrooms on Mars. Plus there's news on the James Webb Space Telescope and astronomers have found the nearest, smallest black hole to Earth.

NB: This was filmed and edited before Tianwen-1 successfully landed on Mars

Lunar eclipse (“blood moon”) map and timings: https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/m...
Annular eclipse map and timings: https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/m...

Joseph et al. (2021; mushrooms on Mars?) - https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...
Horvath et al. (2021; volcanic activity on Mars) - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Jayasinghe et al. (2021; nearest black hole) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.02212.pdf


00:00 - Intro
00:35 - Lunar eclipse 26th/27th May
02:40 - Mercury & Venus conjunction 28th May
04:18 - Jupiter, Saturn & the Moon 1st June
06:08 - Annular solar eclipse 10th June
08:23 - Toenail Moon, Venus & Mars 12th June
09:29 - RIP Michael Collins
09:55 - Rocket Science with SpaceX and CNSA
10:48 - Ingenuity mission extended
14:18 - Oxygen made on Mars!
16:59 - Mushrooms on Mars?! Nope...
19:37 - Recent volcanic activity on Mars?
22:16 - James Webb Space Telescope update
23:00 - Nearest, smallest black hole found
29:07 - Bloopers

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👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at Christ Church college, University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.

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