March 28
A Name Restored
Sun Position
The Sun is in Aries at roughly +5.5° declination; the Northern Hemisphere days are now comfortably ahead of nights, and the Southern Hemisphere's evening twilight is arriving noticeably earlier.
Sky Highlight
Virgo continues to dominate the southeastern spring sky, and the galaxy-rich region between Virgo and Coma Berenices is fully accessible in the evening by late March. The Coma Berenices star cluster itself (an open cluster about 280 light-years away) is visible to the naked eye as a soft haze.
Deep Sky Object
M60 (NGC 4649), a large elliptical galaxy at the eastern end of the Virgo Cluster, about 55 million light-years away, notable for the compact ultra-massive black hole at its center and for a small companion spiral galaxy (NGC 4647) in near contact. Visible from both hemispheres in spring.
Featured Star
Minelauva (δ Vir) carries the IAU's formally approved name for the same red giant as Auva, 202 light-years away, spectral class M3III, a slow irregular variable in Virgo. The name Minelauva traces through a long chain of transcription from Arabic to Latin to modern catalogs; the IAU's 2016 formalization resolved a long ambiguity over which of two candidate names was the correct one for this star.
Around This Date
- March 28, 1802Heinrich Olbers discovered Pallas, the second asteroid ever found, demonstrating that the space between Mars and Jupiter contained a population of small bodies rather than a single missing planet.
- March 28, 1979The Three Mile Island nuclear accident began; several physicists and nuclear engineers who studied the event went on to apply the same probabilistic risk methods to assessments of spacecraft failure, an unexpected cross-disciplinary link.
The same red giant, the same uncertain pulse, but now carrying a name the IAU finally agreed on after centuries of transcription drift.