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FOAP Newsletter October 2025 |
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President's Message
Happy Autumn! As the days grow shorter, we have more opportunities to enjoy the nighttime sky. I hope you find time at least a few evenings each week to go outside and look up! My message is short this month as this newsletter is full of the latest on FOAP events, local happenings, and the latest in Science and Space news. I am very pleased to welcome our 2025-26 Student Advisors. This is the second year of our secondary student volunteer program and we are excited to work with this year’s cohort. Read more about the program and the students in the article below. Tomorrow - October 4 - is International Observe the Moon Night! Learn more about this annual event by reading Kathi Overton’s article in this newsletter. We will have clear nights in the DMV for easy observing of our moon. I look forward to saying hello to many of you at the planetarium and thank all of our members for your continued support! Theresa Carroll Schweser
President |
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Arlington Students Launch Science Project
By Kathi Overton
A group of Arlington high school students got to have their science project launched into space and sent to the International Space Station on August 24. The project was one of several student experiments on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sending supplies and other cargo to the space station.
The project was created by students from Yorktown, Arlington Tech, and Washington-Liberty, and studies the behavior of a yellow slime mold in a 3D maze in a micro-gravity environment. It was developed at a Go For Launch! Event in 2024, sponsored by the STEM oriented Higher Orbits organization and Amazon’s Project Kuiper. Learn more at these online sites:
Arlington Public Schools Article
Specific Article on the 2024 Go For Launch event
Go For Launch Info from Higher Orbits
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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral, with a science project by Arlington students on board.
Image: NASA TV |
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Great Picnic - But Mars is Missing!
By Kathi Overton
The weather was great, and several members joined us at the FOAP Member Picnic on September 14. There was a lot of food - including many tasty desserts brought by members! Children of all ages enjoyed playing the comet toss game and launching antacid powered mini-rockets! The festivities were held near the solar system themed sprayground at Hayes Park – where some of our attendees noted that Mars seems to be missing! The Friends have sent a friendly inquiry to the Parks and Recreation department to see if they know where the missing planet went… Stay tuned! We’re already planning another event in December, where members will be invited to attend a free planetarium show. |
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It’s fun to build and launch your own mini-rocket!
Photo by Kathi Overton |
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David M Brown Public Planetarium Shows for October!
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October is a Busy Month for the Friends!
There are multiple events on the Friends’ calendar this month. We hope to see you at some of them! |
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October 12, 5:00pm – 7:30pm
October 18, 3:00pm – 7:00pm
October 18 & 19 |
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FOAP Combined Federal Campaign By Maryclare Whitehead The CFC campaign will go forward in 2026. If you are a federal employee or retired from the federal service, please consider donating to Friends of Arlington’s David M. Brown Planetarium.
Your donations support FOAP in its mission to promote and support Arlington’s David M. Brown Planetarium as an accessible community resource for all people to learn, engage, and be inspired by the wonders of science and the universe.
We use all donations to obtain planetarium shows, provide student scholarships, fund teacher continuing science education, and engage with you at community events.
Thank you so much for your support!
FOAP Charity Code - 39066
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October 4th is a day when many will look at the Moon!
Photo by: Kathi Overton |
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AFAC Donations By Dawn Darling
Enjoy the show, and help our community at the same time! This year, FOAP is supporting our local non-profit, AFAC, by collecting non-perishable food at each of our shows this season. To get a sense of the expanding number of community members seeking help this year, here is some data from Charlie Meng, AFAC's CEO, from this summer: Last year, AFAC distributed over 5.5 million pounds of free groceries, and overspent their budget by $1.2 million. In early July, over 4,000 families came to AFAC in one week alone. This included 3,296 school aged children. How can you help? AFAC is most in need of the following low sugar & low salt items:
- Canned fruits
- Canned tuna
- Canned soups
- Canned vegetables
- Canned tomatoes
- Peanut butter (in plastic jars)
- Cereal
Thank you for bringing donations for AFAC to our weekend public shows! |
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FOAP's Student Advisor Program Launches Second Cohort By Dawn Darling
After the strong success of our inaugural student advisor group last year, FOAP is thrilled to announce our second cohort of student advisors. Fifteen students in Grades 10-12 from across Arlington are joining us this year. They will be working alongside our seven returning students, for a total of 22 students volunteering their time, energy and talents to the planetarium and our events this year!
By being a student advisor, students have the opportunity to participate in many experiences. Of course, assisting at shows is a given, and the backbone of the program. However, additional opportunities include helping out at FOAP events throughout the year and assisting with programming and activities. Interested students will learn how to operate the portable dome as well as telescopes, gain confidence in public speaking, and be a face and voice of the planetarium! Students have the opportunity to request a letter of recommendation for their contributions, and can list the experience on their college applications.
Don't forget to say hello to our advisors at the next show! They will be wearing a black FOAP shirt and will look forward to seeing you! |
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What is a Black Hole? By NASA
A black hole is a region in space where the pulling force of gravity is so strong that light is not able to escape. The strong gravity occurs because matter has been pressed into a tiny space. This compression can take place at the end of a star’s life. Some black holes are a result of dying stars.
Because no light can escape, black holes are invisible. However, space telescopes with special instruments can help find black holes. They can observe the behavior of material and stars that are very close to black holes.
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How Do Black Holes Form?
Primordial black holes are thought to have formed in the early universe, soon after the big bang. Stellar black holes form when the center of a very massive star collapses in upon itself. This collapse also causes a supernova, or an exploding star, that blasts part of the star into space. Scientists think supermassive black holes formed at the same time as the galaxy they are in. The size of the supermassive black hole is related to the size and mass of the galaxy it is in. |
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How Big Are Black Holes?Black holes can come in a range of sizes, but there are three main types of black holes. The black hole’s mass and size determine what kind it is.
The smallest ones are known as primordial black holes. Scientists believe this type of black hole is as small as a single atom but with the mass of a large mountain.
The most common type of medium-sized black holes is called “stellar.” The mass of a stellar black hole can be up to 20 times greater than the mass of the sun and can fit inside a ball with a diameter of about 10 miles. Dozens of stellar mass black holes may exist within the Milky Way galaxy.
The largest black holes are called “supermassive.” These black holes have masses greater than 1 million suns combined and would fit inside a ball with a diameter about the size of the solar system. Scientific evidence suggests that every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its center. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is called Sagittarius A. It has a mass equal to about 4 million suns and would fit inside a ball with a diameter about the size of the sun. |
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Jokes for Kids Only!
Q. What’s the Moon’s favorite kind of bagel?
A. Cinna-moon raisin! Q. Why doesn't the dog star laugh at jokes? A. It’s far too Sirius! Q. Why do we know that the Earth is a good friend of the Moon A. Because we have seen them hanging around together for years!
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What's in the Sky this Month By Mike Rhee |
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Black Holes: Trapping Even Light By Jennifer Bartlett
A black hole is not so much a “hole” in space as a region of extremely dense matter, distorting space-time in its vicinity. Its matter is so compacted that the speed necessary to escape its gravitational attraction is greater than the speed of light, which is to say not even light escapes. If no light from the “hole” reaches us, then we cannot “see” it, so we say that it is “black.”
The most massive stars, several times more massive than our Sun, burn through all their available fuel quickly. When nuclear fusion no longer produces energy in the stellar core, the star collapses and the resulting explosion ejects the outer layers of the star. The remainder is compressed into a sphere of zero radius, producing infinite density.
This theoretical point is known as the singularity. The escape velocity from this singularity exceeds the speed of light at a distance proportional to the amount of mass involved. This “surface” beyond which we do not see into the black hole is known as the “event horizon.” For a non-rotating black hole, the distance between the singularity and the event horizon is the Schwarzschild radius. Working from Albert Einstein’s (1875-1955) General Theory of Relativity, Karl Schwarzschild (1873-1916) predicted the existence of collapsed stars that could not emit light. For our Sun to become a black hole, it would have to shrink to a ball less than 4 miles in diameter, smaller than the District of Columbia.
In addition to dying stars, large quantities of interstellar gas and dust may collapse to form black holes. Astronomers theorize that this mechanism could create the supermassive black holes detected in the centers of some galaxies. A third mechanism for creating black holes would be density fluctuations in the early universe. Such primordial black holes would probably have been very small and, as such may not have survived to the present day.
More about black holes
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/black-holes/
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NASA public domain infographic
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Cygnus X-1: Seeing a black hole By Jennifer Bartlett
If almost everything we know about the universe comes to us through light and no light reaches us from a black hole, how do we see and identify black holes? We look for their effects on their surroundings. Cygnus X-1 is a powerful x-ray source first detected by Geiger counters carried aloft by sounding rockets in 1963. Uhuru, the first x-ray space telescope, showed in 1970 that the brightness of Cygnus X-1 varied over periods shorter than a second. The source must be small, possibly planet sized, because it can be no larger than light can travel during a fluctuation period. The following year, radio observations associated the x-ray radiation with a supergiant star that is not hot enough to produce them. In 1972, two groups independently detected a massive, dark companion to the supergiant by analyzing the Doppler shifts in its spectrum. With the mounting evidence, the astronomical |
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Chandra image of Cygnus X-1, public domain
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Black Hole at the Beginning of Time
By Jennifer Bartlett
Anthony Taylor and his group at the University of Texas at Austin have been studying a distant galaxy, memorably named CAPERS-LRD-z9, with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). They are seeing it when the universe was only about 0.5 billion years old. The gas in its center is moving at thousands of miles per second, the signature of gas falling into a supermassive black hole or an active galactic nucleus (AGN). They estimate a black hole 38 million times more massive than our Sun is consuming this gas. Either the initial black hole was more than 10,000 solar masses or it has been growing faster than is theoretically possible. CAPERS-LRD-z9 is an example of a new class of galaxy, the Little Red Dots (LRD), detected by JWST. LRD are common when the universe was between 600 million and 1.5 billion years old. Most of their light appears to come from an AGN rather than stars. Stay tuned for more discussion of these galaxies and their evolution.
More about CAPERS-LRD-z9
https://earthsky.org/space/monster-black-hole-earliest-universe-capers-lrd-z9/
Press release for image, can use with credit
https://news.utexas.edu/2025/07/26/meet-the-universes-earliest-confirmed-black-hole-a-monster-at-the-dawn-of-time/ |
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NASA Little Red Dot composite image, public domain
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This message has been sent to you from the Friends of Arlington's Planetarium.
Friends of Arlington's David M. Brown Planetarium
P.O. Box 7029
Arlington, VA 22207 USA
Copyright (C) 2025 Friends of Arlington's David M. Brown Planetarium (FOAP). All rights reserved.
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