Nicholas St. Fleur

“This is a poetic moment to me where you’re seeing Mercury doing this amazing thing: crossing in front of this gigantic ball of nuclear burning that is our sun,” said Jackie Faherty, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

From here on Earth, our solar system’s innermost planet will appear as a black dot cruising over a gigantic glowing red disk — although don’t look directly at it, as staring into the sun will damage your eyes.

But if you’re lucky enough to watch the transit with proper viewing equipment, you’ll be taking part in an astronomical tradition that dates back to at least 1631 when French astronomer Pierre Gassendi observed the phenomenon. You’ll also experience firsthand how astronomers today hunt for exoplanets orbiting stars light years away.

What is a transit of Mercury?

Cosmically speaking, a transit is when a celestial body — like a planet or moon — moves between a larger object and some observers, typically us on Earth.

The most famous transit is a solar eclipse, when the moon passes in front of the sun, like during the 2017 Great American Eclipse. There is also a lunar eclipse, where Earth passes directly between the sun and the moon, casting a reddish shadow on the lunar surface.

Because Earth is the third planet in our solar system, we can see the transits of Mercury and Venus. Mercury transits occur about 13 times every century, according to NASA. Because of Mercury’s and Earth’s orbits and tilts, such crossings tend to occur near May 8 or Nov 10.

Transits of Venus are even rarer. The last one was in 2012 and the next won’t be until 2117.

Where and when can I watch it?

The entire show will take about five hours, 30 minutes. Those watching from the East Coast of the United States will be in luck. The entirety of the transit will be visible during daylight hours.

Viewers on the West Coast of the United States can catch part of the show after the sun rises. People living in South America, western Africa and western Europe will also see much of the event. Parts of Australia and southern and west Asia will also catch some of the trip.

— Mercury will make first contact with the sun at 7:35 a.m. Eastern time.

— It will be closest to the sun’s center at 10:20 a.m. Eastern time.

— At 1:04 p.m. Eastern time, the transit will end.

How can I watch the transit of Mercury?

Remember: Do not look at the sun directly. You will damage your eyes.

With proper solar filters, you can view the event through a telescope or binoculars. Check with the manufacturer of your viewing device to find out what the proper filters are.

You can also use binoculars or a telescope to project an image of Mercury as it skids across the sun. Space.com published a guide for making your own safe viewing device.

If you don’t have your own equipment, contact your local science museum, planetarium or astronomical society, which may be hosting a live viewing party. The Amateur Astronomers Association of New York will be hosting public events in several locations around New York City. In Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian Institution’s Phoebe Waterman Haas Public Observatory will also have a public viewing.

If you can’t get to a place that is showing the transit, tune into a livestream using high-powered telescopes:

— NASA will show the event live.

— NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory will show a view from its orbiting telescope.

— The Slooh network of telescopes will show the event from the Canary Islands and other observatories across the world.

— The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles will also stream it live.

What is the scientific significance of a Mercury transit?

After Gassendi made his sighting in 1631, astronomer Edmund Halley (whom Halley’s comet is named after) saw the Mercury transit in 1677 and formulated the idea that you could use transits of Mercury and Venus to calculate the distance from Earth to the sun, according to NASA.

Since then, scientists have traveled across the world using transits to figure out our place in the solar system.

“The transit of Mercury was one of these gigantic scientific experiments to see if we could get the timing down to make this very important measurement of how far away the sun was,” Faherty said.

Some expeditions to follow transits came at great risk to the astronomers involved. During the 1761 transit of Venus, French astronomer Alexandre Guy Pingré was ambushed by British pirates while traveling to the island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean near Mauritius, and then hijacked by the British Royal Navy during his trip home to France.

During Monday’s transit of Mercury, there will be citizen science projects across the world. One, the Citizen Transit of Mercury, will try to calculate the distance to the sun using the transit, according to Skyandtelescope.com.

The transit of Mercury provides amateur astronomers with another scientific bonus.

“It’s a representation of one of the most important techniques that’s currently being applied in astronomy to find worlds around other stars,” Faherty said.

NASA’s Kepler space telescope located more than 2,600 exoplanets during its nearly 10 years in service by searching for celestial transits in front of distant stars. A similar experiment, the TESS satellite that currently orbits Earth, is on the hunt to discover potentially 10,000 more exoplanets using the same technique.

By looking at Mercury as it glides across the sun, you too can become a planet hunter within your own solar system.

This article originally appeared in

On Monday, you can witness Mercury in motion as the tiny planet waltzes across the face of the sun. This celestial dance, known as the transit of Mercury, last occurred in 2016 and will not happen again until 2032. North American skywatchers will have to wait until 2049 for an encore.

How to Watch Mercury Transit the Sun

Now, a team of paleontologists has uncovered a trove of thousands of fossils in Colorado that provides an in-depth look at the first 1 million years following the K-Pg mass extinction event. The finding provides insight into the interactions between animals, plants and climate that occurred in the earliest days of the age of mammals, and that allowed them to grow from the size of large rodents into diverse wildlife we might begin to recognize today.

“We provide the most vivid picture of recovery of an ecosystem on land after any mass extinction,” said Tyler Lyson, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. His team’s paper was published Thursday in Science.

Lyson has hunted fossils since he was 10. Although he has found many dinosaurs, uncovering fossils of species that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the dinosaur extinction had proved rather elusive in his field of study.

“You can only find so many triceratops skeletons and partial T. rex skeletons and things like that until you want a larger challenge,” said Lyson. “Finding fossils just after the K-Pg extinction is a huge, huge challenge.”

In spring 2016 he and some colleagues explored a fossil site near Colorado Springs called Corral Bluffs. He knew that years earlier, Sharon Milito, an amateur fossil hunter, had found a mammal skull that was confirmed to be from the K-Pg boundary there. He set out looking for mammal bones sticking out of the ground. But his search proved fruitless.

As he wandered around the bluff, he thought back to his time as a graduate student working in South Africa. There, he had learned to spot certain rocks called concretions that held fossils captive, like pearls in oysters. He shifted his focus from bones to rocks.

“I found this ugly white-looking rock that looked like it had a little mammal jaw coming out of it,” Lyson said. He cracked it open and found inside part of a fossilized crocodile. “That was the moment when the light bulb went off. If there’s one concretion with fossils inside, there’s got to be more.”

He and his colleagues returned to Corral Bluffs that September and searched for more of the ugly rocks.

“When I cracked open the very first concretion I found a mammal skull,” Lyson said.

It was the most complete mammal from the K-Pg interval that he had ever seen. Within an hour they found four or five more. So far, they have uncovered more than 1,000 vertebrate fossils and 16 different mammal species.

“With this discovery, we’re starting to see the entire skull of many of these mammals that we previously only knew from teeth,” said Stephen Chester, a mammalian paleontologist at Brooklyn College and an author on the paper.

The skulls tell a story of mammalian resilience. Whereas rat-size mammals survived the extinction event, raccoon-size ones perished. About 100,000 years after the K-Pg event, mammals bounced back, with raccoon-size mammals reappearing.

Some 300,000 years after the asteroid struck, more mammals appeared, such as Loxolophus and the small, pig-size Carsioptychus. Within 700,000 years, the capybara-size Taeniolabis and the wolf-size Eoconodons began to thrive.

“You’re going from a very small dog that you’d see on the streets on New York City to a very large wolf within those hundreds of thousands of years,” Chester said.

The team also collected more than 6,000 fossilized leaves and analyzed more than 37,000 pollen grains. Together the items describe the reemergence of plant life, which may have been a crucial factor in the evolution of mammals.

First came the ferns. With their featherlike leaves, they proliferated across the wasteland for many hundreds of years to a couple of thousand years, paving the way for forests to rebound.

Next, the palms paraded in, dominating the green scene for hundreds of thousands of years.

Then around 300,000 years after the catastrophe, a diverse array of walnuts appeared. That coincided with the jump in diversity and body size of herbivorous mammals, which suggests they were an important food source.

“We call that world the ‘Pecan Pie World,’” said Ian Miller, a paleobotanist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He added that this epoch also coincided with a warming period in the fossil record, which could indicate that a shifting climate played a role in the development of plants and animals following the extinction event.

One of their most important botanical finds — a fossil bean pod — was made one summer by a high school student while the team was working with Nova for a documentary that will be broadcast Wednesday, Oct. 30, on the Public Broadcasting Service.

“There she is holding the world’s earliest fossil legume,” Miller said. “She just had this ear-to-ear smile, totally beaming.”

They dated the legume to around 700,000 years after the mass extinction event. That period was tied to another short warming pulse as well as to the appearance of wolf-size mammals. Perhaps the legumes were fueling furry animals, the team suggested.

“We liken them to the protein bars of the ancient world,” Miller said. One remaining question, he added, is whether climate drove the changes in the plants and mammals.

Courtney Sprain, a geoscientist at the University of Florida, said she was impressed by their animal, plant and climate records. “That’s one of the really spectacular things about this paper, just how amazing the preservation is and how good the record is for a variety of different changes following a mass extinction.”

“I looked at this and went, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of skulls!’” said Jaelyn Eberle, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who was not involved in the paper. She said a next step should be to perform micro CT scans on the skulls to determine the brain sizes and compartments, which would provide insight into the animals’ sensory abilities.

The find also helps elucidate how species are able to respond to catastrophic events in a relatively rapid time frame.

“It has obvious ramifications for the current biodiversity and climate crisis as we start to approach similar levels of devastation,” said Anjali Goswami, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. The current crisis, she added, is “ unfortunately caused by our own shortsighted avarice, rather than a chance encounter with an extraterrestrial body.”

Colorado Fossils Show How Mammals Raced to Fill Dinosaurs' Void

Some 66 million years ago, mammals caught their lucky break. An asteroid crashed into what is now Chicxulub, Mexico, and set off a catastrophic chain of events that led to the annihilation of nonavian dinosaurs. That day began their furry ascension to the top of a brave new world, the one from which our species would one day emerge. But little is known about the time period directly after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, or K-Pg event, because the fossil record is lacking.

The next shower you might be able to see is the Perseids. Active between July 17 and Aug. 26, the show peaks around Monday night into Tuesday morning, or Aug. 12 to 13.

The Perseids light up the night sky when Earth runs into pieces of cosmic debris left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle. The dirty snowball is 17 miles wide and takes about 133 years to orbit the sun. Its last go-round was in 1992.

Usually between 160 and 200 meteors dazzle in Earth’s atmosphere every hour during the display’s peak. They zoom through the atmosphere at around 133,000 mph and burst about 60 miles overhead. However, the moon will be close to full, which could obscure viewing in some places.

— Where meteor showers come from

If you spot a meteor shower, what you’re usually seeing is an icy comet’s leftovers that crash into Earth’s atmosphere. Comets are sort of like dirty snowballs: As they travel through the solar system, they leave behind a dusty trail of rocks and ice that lingers in space long after they leave. When Earth passes through these cascades of comet waste, the bits of debris — which can be as small as grains of sand — pierce the sky at such speeds that they burst, creating a celestial fireworks display. A general rule of thumb with meteor showers: You are never watching the Earth cross into remnants from a comet’s most recent orbit. Instead, the burning bits come from the previous passes. For example, during the Perseid meteor shower you are seeing meteors ejected from when its parent comet, Comet Swift-Tuttle, visited in 1862 or earlier, not from its most recent pass in 1992.

That’s because it takes time for debris from a comet’s orbit to drift into a position where it intersects with Earth’s orbit, according to Bill Cooke, an astronomer with NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office.

— How to watch

The best way to see a meteor shower is to get to a location that has a clear view of the entire night sky. Ideally, that would be somewhere with dark skies, away from city lights and traffic. To maximize your chances of catching the show, look for a spot that offers a wide, unobstructed view.

Bits and pieces of meteor showers are visible for a certain period of time, but they really peak visibly from dusk to dawn on a given few days. Those days are when Earth’s orbit crosses through the thickest part of the cosmic stream. Meteor showers can vary in their peak times, with some reaching their maximums for only a few hours and others for several nights. The showers tend to be most visible after midnight and before dawn.

It is best to use your naked eye to spot a meteor shower. Binoculars or telescopes tend to limit your field of view. You might need to spend about half an hour in the dark to let your eyes get used to the reduced light. Stargazers should be warned that moonlight and the weather can obscure the shows. But if that happens, there are usually meteor livestreams like the ones hosted by NASA and by Slooh.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/science/meteor-shower-perseids.html" id="f1563fb9-3633-3016-af07-f751f3fbb250">The New York Times</a>.

Perseids Meteor Shower Will Peak in Night Skies

All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you’re lucky, you might be able to catch a glimpse.

Tyrannosaurs weren’t always tyrants. For millions of years, the ancestors of the regal T. rex were relegated to second-class predator status while a different dinosaur dynasty ruled over what is now North America: towering allosaurs.

But the allosaurs went extinct during the late Cretaceous, allowing tyrannosaurs to seize the throne and then evolve into large killing machines like T. rex and Tarbosaurus.

To better understand how and when tyrannosaurs became giants, paleontologists have sought examples of their lineage from when they were small. Their latest discovery is a tiny tyrannosaur that lived in the shadow of larger predators some 96 million years ago.

Called Moros intrepidus, the new species is the oldest Cretaceous-period tyrannosaur ever found in North America and among the smallest in the world, measuring only about as big as a deer. Because scientists have previously found large tyrannosaurs in North America that date to 81 million years ago, the newly discovered species helps narrow the window of when tyrannosaurs became huge.

“We now know it took less than 15 million years for them to go from these subsidiary secondary players in the environment to top of the food chain,” said Lindsay Zanno, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University. She and her colleagues published their discovery Thursday in the journal Communications Biology.

In 2012, while Zanno was fossil hunting in central Utah, she noticed a dinosaur leg bone sticking out from a rocky hillside. The next year, she and her team excavated the fossilized remains. Although the bones were poorly preserved, she could tell by how thin they were that they belonged to a theropod, which is the major group of carnivorous dinosaurs that include allosaurs and tyrannosaurs.

Her colleague Aaron Giterman at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences painstakingly pieced the leg together over the course of a year. After examining the dinosaur’s tiny foot and upper leg, Zanno determined it belonged to a tyrannosaur. From hip to toe it measured about 4 feet long, and the dinosaur was estimated to weigh about 170 pounds. T. rex, for comparison, strutted around on legs that were about 12 feet long and weighed more than 10,000 pounds.

The next steps were to find whether the tiny tyrannosaur belonged to a new species or was a juvenile of a known species.

Aurore Canoville, a postdoctoral researcher in Zanno’s lab, collected small samples from the bones. Using a microscope, she identified growth marks in the bone tissue that provided clues to the dinosaur’s age, much like tree rings. Canoville saw evidence suggesting the tyrannosaur was at least 6 or 7 years old. The growth marks, she said, were also spaced closer and closer together, indicating the tyrannosaur was nearing full maturity when it died.

“When we found out it was actually almost an adult, we could tell that it was a new species of a very small tyrannosaur,” Canoville said. Their findings also suggested that the dinosaur was most likely an agile hunter.

Thomas Carr, a paleontologist from Carthage College in Wisconsin who was not involved in the study, said the finding “lifts the lid on what the earliest tyrannosaurs in North America really looked like.”

Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland who was also not involved in the paper, said the discovery pushed the tyrannosaur mystery forward in time.

“When did these second-tier hunters become the bus-sized bone-crunchers that terrorize our imaginations?” Brusatte said. “It must have happened sometime between about 90 and 80 million years ago, and we’re going to need new fossils from this time to figure it out.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/science/tiny-tyrannosaur-fossil.html" id="7a1dd3eb-c45d-3adf-a072-116bbe68ce83">The New York Times</a>.

(Trilobites)

Tiny Tyrannosaur Hints at How T. Rex Became King

No mammal may be more perplexing than the platypus.

Attached to its furry, otter-like body are four webbed feet, several sharp claws, a beaver tail and, of course, that iconic duckbill. The females lay eggs, and males sport venom-secreting spurs on their hind legs. One could only imagine how dumbfounded the first people to stumble upon these creatures were.

But if you were to wager a guess, they probably had a similar expression to that of Ryosuke Motani when he initially encountered the fossilized remains of the extinct marine reptile called Eretmorhipis carrolldongi.

Like the platypus, this recently discovered prehistoric creature had a duckbill. But then nature made it even weirder, adding plates on its back like a stegosaurus, a long tail like a crocodile, large paddlelike limbs and a tiny head with teeny eyes.

“It’s a pretty strange chimera of features,” said Motani, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Davis. “When I first saw it, I just said ‘What?!’ and didn’t speak for a while.”

Motani and a team of researchers led by Long Cheng, a paleontologist at the Wuhan Center of China Geological Survey, examined two specimens of the new species that had been found in China’s Hubei province. They published their findings Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.

The first specimen was discovered about a decade ago, but it was missing a head. The second was unearthed by Cheng in 2015. Both specimens date to about 247 million years ago during the early Triassic, a time before dinosaurs ruled Earth.

Though the sea creature measured about 2 feet long, its eye sockets were only about 1 centimeter wide. That surprised the researchers. Prehistoric marine reptiles, like the ichthyosaurs, typically had big eyes that helped them spot prey in the dim waters where they swam. The scientists concluded that E. carrolldongi most likely did not rely on sight to catch its meals. Also, its small head ruled out the possibility that it made much use of sound underwater.

“What sense could it have used?” said Olivier Rieppel, a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago and an author of the paper. “If it isn’t hearing, it isn’t seeing and it isn’t smelling, what’s left?”

The answer was practically poking them in the face: the duckbill.

Because the snout looked very similar to that of the platypus, the team concluded that the prehistoric reptile may have used its muzzle to feel out prey like a platypus. This would be an example of convergent evolution, which is when two unrelated organisms independently develop similar features because of the evolutionary pressures of their environments. Most likely the marine reptile’s food of choice in the lagoons where it lived was small shrimp.

“When the time came for feeding it just flicked its head to the right or left and if it hits something, it eats,” Motani said.

If their finding is confirmed, that would make E. carrolldongi the earliest known example of an amniote — the group that includes mammals, reptiles and birds — that uses touch over sight to hunt.

Their finding also leaves the door open for another potential sensory similarity between the marine reptile and the platypus: electroreception, or the ability to find prey using electrical impulses.

But alas, until the team uncovers fossilized soft tissue, they will never know whether or not E. carrolldongi and the platypus shared a superpower.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/science/platypus-fossil-duckbill.html" id="f17ca0c3-0642-3458-af2a-59318fd66530">The New York Times</a>.

And You Thought the Platypus Was Odd

You might have heard that this eclipse is also being called a “Super Blood Wolf Moon.” But as astronomers know, no number of edgy modifiers could make this display of cosmic clockwork any cooler.

Unlike a total solar eclipse, when the moon moseys between the sun and the Earth, it’s our planet that slides between the sun and the moon during a total lunar eclipse. As the Earth blocks the sun, only slivers of light make it through the planet’s atmosphere and to the moon.

“If you were standing on the surface of the moon when this event was happening, and you were staring back at the Earth, what you would see is this beautiful reddish-orangish tinted ring,” said Jackie Faherty, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History.

That ring of light is made up of every sunrise and sunset happening on Earth at that moment in time. It’s the same light that makes the moon look red to those of us on Earth during the eclipse.

Who can see the lunar eclipse?

This eclipse will be visible in the night sky across North and South America. Skywatchers in parts of Europe and Africa will see part of or the entire eclipse in their predawn skies.

Winter storms and cloudy skies could make viewing the moon difficult in parts of the United States. But in the New York area, a weather forecast suggested that there might be breaks in cloud cover around midnight for those willing to brave frigid temperatures.

People living in Asia and Australia will not see this eclipse, unfortunately.

When can I see the eclipse?

The opening act starts Sunday night at 9:36 p.m. Eastern Standard Time as the moon first enters Earth’s outer shadow, also called the penumbra. Darkness will creep up the lower left portion of the moon, almost imperceptibly.

At about 10:34 p.m., the moon will start to enter Earth’s inner shadow, or the umbra. This marks the beginning of the partial lunar eclipse, when it will appear as if something took a bite out of the moon.

At 11:41 p.m., the moon will enter totality and turn completely red as it is devoured by Earth’s umbral shadow. It will stay this way for about one hour, and at 12:12 a.m. on Monday, it will reach the darkest part of Earth’s shadow, appearing to be at its most coppery red.

“The moon becomes 10,000 times dimmer than what it was,” said Brian Murphy, director of the Holcomb Observatory and Planetarium at Butler University in Indianapolis. “Because it is so dim at that point, you’ll be able to see stars right around the moon.” That’s interesting, he said, because full moons tend to be so bright that they outshine stars in their celestial neighborhood.

As it begins to exit the umbral shadow at 12:44 a.m., the moon will start to brighten. By 2:48 a.m., the moon will return to its usual brightness, and the eclipse will be completely over.

People on the West Coast have a better time slot to watch the show because totality will occur between 8:41 p.m. and 9:44 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.

Where should I go to watch and what will I need?

That’s the best thing about this celestial show: As long as you’re located on the half of the planet that will experience the eclipse, you can watch it from nearly anywhere, weather permitting.

Dark skies are always a plus, but your backyard or city street will work just fine. No need for fancy equipment, as your two eyes are all you need.

But if you want to enhance your experience, binoculars will let you better see the whole picture as the moon’s surface changes color.

What if it’s too cold to go outside or too cloudy to see?

You can watch the lunar eclipse online. The Slooh Community Observatory, a telescope broadcast service, will livestream the event from the Canary Islands and Chile starting around 10:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Sunday. Timeanddate.com will also host a broadcast.

Why is it being called a ‘Super Blood Wolf Moon’?

This lunar eclipse has been given a name that sounds like it belongs to a heavy metal band. But it’s really all glitter, not gold. So let’s break it down:

— Super

The term “supermoon” has come to loosely mean a full moon near perigee, or the point when it is closest to Earth in its elliptical orbit. Normally when this happens, most people can’t tell, as the moon appears only slightly bigger than it does any other night.

But when compared with the moon at apogee, when it is farthest away from the Earth, the differences come into focus. For example, on Monday during perigee, the moon will be approximately 222,040 miles away from our planet, in contrast to Jan. 9, when it was at apogee and about 252,350 miles away. A “supermoon” is about 14 percent larger than one at apogee and 30 percent brighter.

But this term was actually first coined in 1979 by an astrologist named Richard Nolle, not by an astronomer.

— Blood

This is an embellishment of the coppery-red tint that the moon takes on during any lunar eclipse. Sometimes it’s more brown.

— Wolf

The “wolf” title has been attributed to the Native Americans’ name for January’s full moon. According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, the term comes from the “Algonquin tribes who lived in regions from New England to Lake Superior.” But this sourcing is suspect.

“The ‘wolf’ part, it’s almost like this stereotypical, romanticized version of the native culture,” said Annette Lee, an expert in indigenous astronomy at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota who is also mixed-race Lakota.

The term, she said, is an oversimplification that sort of groups hundreds of distinct Native American tribes together into one blob. For example, the Ojibwe tribe — which historically lived around Lake Superior and is a part of the Algonquin-language family — called both the month of January and its full moon the “Great Spirit Moon,” she said. In their language, it is “Gichi-manidoo-giizis,” according to Ojibwe.net.

“I think the problem with ‘The Wolf Moon’ is that it takes something that is really important and really meaningful out of its cultural context,” she said. As a result, “it doesn’t have the substance that it needs for people to really learn about the culture in a dignified way.”

What else is happening in the sky this year?

There are two more “supermoons” on Feb. 19 and March 21 this year, though neither will be a “blood moon.”

There will also be two solar eclipses — a total solar eclipse visible in parts of South America in July and a year-ending annular, or “ring of fire,” eclipse on Dec. 26, which will be visible over the Arabian Peninsula and India.

Nov. 11 also marks a Mercury transit, which is when people at points on the East Coast can watch the solar system’s innermost planet make a six-hour long trek across the sun.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/science/lunar-eclipse-supermoon.html" id="2f4bad61-9a41-3a20-a004-e4e22223faf0">The New York Times</a>.

Skygazers across the Western Hemisphere will be treated to celestial eye candy on Sunday night into early Monday morning as the full moon turns coppery red during a total lunar eclipse. It will be the only total lunar eclipse of the year, and that in itself should be reason enough to stay up late and marvel as the moon gets swallowed by Earth’s shadow.

How to Watch the Lunar Eclipse and Supermoon on Sunday Night

“The ‘wolf’ part, it’s almost like this stereotypical, romanticized version of the native culture,” said Annette Lee, an expert in indigenous astronomy at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota.

If you spot a meteor shower, what you’re really seeing is the leftovers of icy comets crashing into Earth’s atmosphere. Comets are sort of like dirty snowballs: As they travel through the solar system, they leave behind a dusty trail of rocks and ice that lingers in space long after they leave. When Earth passes through these cascades of comet waste, the bits of debris — which can be as small as grains of sand — pierce the sky at such speeds that they burst, creating a celestial fireworks display.

A general rule of thumb with meteor showers: You are never watching the Earth cross into remnants from a comet’s most recent orbit. Instead, the burning bits come from the previous passes. For example, during the Perseid meteor shower, you are seeing meteors ejected from when its parent comet, Comet Swift-Tuttle, visited in 1862 or earlier, not from its most recent pass in 1992.

The name attached to a meteor shower is usually tied to the constellation in the sky from which they seem to originate, known as their radiant. For instance, the Orionid meteor shower can be found in the sky when stargazers have a good view of the Orion constellation.

— How to Watch

While the International Meteor Organization lists a variety of meteor showers that could be seen, below you’ll find the showers that are most likely to be visible in the sky during 2019.

— The Quadrantids

The Quadrantids give off their own New Year’s fireworks show. Compared with most other meteor showers, they are unusual because they are thought to have originated from an asteroid. They tend to be fainter with fewer streaks in the sky than others on this list.

— The Lyrids

There are records from ancient Chinese astronomers spotting these bursts of light more than 2,700 years ago. They blaze through the sky at about 107,000 mph and explode about 55 miles up in the planet’s atmosphere. This shower comes from Comet Thatcher, which journeys around the sun about every 415 years. Its last trip was in 1861 and its next rendezvous near the sun will be in 2276.

— The Eta Aquariids

The Eta Aquariids are one of two meteor showers from Halley’s comet. Its sister shower, the Orionids, will peak in October. Specks from the Eta Aquariids streak through the sky at about 148,000 mph, making it one of the fastest meteor showers. Its display is better seen from the Southern Hemisphere, where people normally enjoy between 20 and 30 meteors per hour during its peak. The Northern Hemisphere tends to see about half as many.

— The Southern Delta Aquariids

They come from Comet 96P Machholz, which passes by the sun every five years. Its meteors, which number between 10 and 20 per hour, are most visible predawn, between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. It tends to be more visible from the Southern Hemisphere.

— The Perseids

Usually between 160 and 200 meteors dazzle in Earth’s atmosphere every hour during the display’s peak. They zoom through the atmosphere at around 133,000 mph and burst about 60 miles overhead.

— The Orionids

The Orionids are an encore to the Eta Aquariid meteor shower, which peaks in May. Both come from cosmic material spewed from Halley’s comet. Since the celestial celebrity orbits past Earth once every 76 years, the showers this weekend are your chance to view the comet’s leftovers until the real deal next passes by in 2061.

— The Leonids

The Leonids are one of the most dazzling meteor showers and every few decades it produces a meteor storm where more than 1,000 meteors can been seen an hour. Cross your fingers for some good luck — the last time the Leonids were that strong was in 2002. Its parent comet is called Comet-Temple/Tuttle and it orbits the sun every 33 years.

— The Geminids

The Geminids, along with the Quadrantids that peaked in January, are thought to originate not from comets, but from asteroid-like space rocks. The Geminids are thought to have been produced by an object called 3200 Phaethon. If you manage to see them, this meteor shower can brighten the night sky with between 120 and 160 meteors per hour.

— The Ursids

The Ursids tend to illuminate the night sky around the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. They only shoot around 10 to 20 meteors per hour. They appear to radiate from Ursa Minor, and come from Comet 8P/Tuttle.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/science/meteor-showers-2019.html" id="ea848c71-476f-3b57-af95-8ed074ed2e1c">The New York Times</a>.

All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you’re lucky, you might be able to catch one.

Meteor Showers That Will Light Up Night Skies in 2019

A general rule of thumb with meteor showers: You are never watching the Earth cross into remnants from a comet’s most recent orbit. Instead, the burning bits come from the previous passes. For example, during the Perseid meteor shower you are seeing meteors ejected from when its parent comet, Comet Swift-Tuttle, visited in 1862 or earlier, not from its most recent pass in 1992.

While the International Meteor Organization lists a variety of meteor showers that could be seen, below you’ll find the showers that are most likely to be visible in the sky during 2018.

The Eta Aquariids are one of two meteor showers from Halley’s comet. Its sister shower, the Orionids, will peak in October. Specks from the Eta Aquariids streak through the sky at about 148,000 mph, making it one of the fastest meteor showers. Its display is better seen from the Southern Hemisphere where people normally enjoy between 20 and 30 meteors per hour during its peak. The Northern Hemisphere tends to see about half as many.

All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you’re lucky you might be able to catch one.

Birds are famous for their colorful feathers, which they use to fly, flirt and keep warm. But long before avians ever flapped their wings, flying reptiles called pterosaurs seized the skies.

Among paleontologists, it was a long-running assumption that the winged creatures lacked feathers. But a team of researchers has found what they believe to be tiny structures hiding in the fossils of two pterosaurs from China that they say are feathers — not as elegant, but comparable to the plumage on birds and dinosaurs.

More specimens may be needed to confirm the finding, which other paleontologists questioned. But if true, it would push back the origins of feathers by about 70 million years, and also be the first time that feathers have been identified on an animal that was neither a bird nor a dinosaur.

“The feather has deeper origins, not of a bird but maybe from the ancestors of birds, dinosaurs and pterosaurs,” said Baoyu Jiang, a paleontologist from Nanjing University in China and leader of the team that collected the fossils. Their research was published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology &amp; Evolution.

Some pterosaurs towered as tall as giraffes and had wingspans as wide as F-16 fighter jets. While sometimes pictured as scaly beasts, the fossil record has long revealed fuzzy pterosaurs enrobed in fluffy coats made of tiny structures called pycnofibers. Unlike bird feathers, which contain a central shaft with smaller shafts branching off, pterosaur pycnofibers were thought to be simple strands, similar to hair or fur.

In the latest study, Jiang and Zixiao Yang examined fossils collected in China, of short-tailed juvenile pterosaurs that were about the size of pigeons.

Both specimens were mostly covered in hollow, unbranched pycnofibers that resemble fur. But the team then found one type of branched structure, which looked like a curved painter’s brush, on the neck, part of the forelimb and foot area and tail of one of the specimens. A second structure, found on the head of the same specimen, had a central shaft that branched off near the midpoint almost like a fraying rope. And the last, which was found on both pterosaurs’ wing membranes, looked straggly like down feathers on a chicken.

In contrast with the sleek, aerodynamically designed feathers seen on modern birds, these feathers were most likely for insulation, the researchers said.

Some paleontologists had previously pegged the origin of feathers to dinosaurs somewhere around 180 million years ago in the Early and Mid-Jurassic. While these pterosaur specimens were about 160 to 165 million years old, their lineage dated back to about 230 million years ago, and the new finding adds further evidence to the idea that there was a common ancestor of birds, dinosaurs and pterosaurs that was either feathered or at least had the genes to grow them.

The researchers shared their finding with Maria McNamara, a paleobiologist at University College Cork in Ireland who performed a scanning electron microscope analysis.

“When I first saw these specimens and the branching I didn’t believe it,” McNamara said.

Her views were changed, she said, when she saw the systematic arrangement of the featherlike branches. But other scientists have retained their skepticism.

“I would not say that the evidence is overwhelming, but certainly some of the images show what appear to be branching filaments,” said Matthew Shawkey, an evolutionary biologist at Ghent University in Belgium. “But of course many things in nature branch, such as branches on a tree, so this does not mean that they are in fact feathers.”

“I would not use the term feathers to describe these structures,” said Julia Clarke, a paleontologist from the University of Texas at Austin, who added she would prefer using another name for them, like branched filaments or branched integumentary structures.

Jingmai O’Connor, a paleontologist from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, cautioned that it was difficult to interpret feathers and featherlike structures from flattened fossils.

“I don’t know if the described morphologies of the pycnofibers in this specimen are valid,” O’Connor said. “In dinosaurs, similar claims of unusual feather morphotypes have been made that are slowly being refuted one by one. Only time and better specimens will tell.”

Nicholas St. Fleur

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