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The ISS’s orbit is slowly decaying. While it might seem a permanent fixture in the sky, the orbiting space laboratory is only about 400 km above the planet. There might not be a lot of atmosphere at that altitude. However, there is still some, and interacting with that is gradually slowing the orbital speed of the station, decreasing its orbit, and, eventually, pulling it back to Earth. That is, if we didn’t do anything to stop it. Over the 25-year lifespan of the station, hundreds of tons of hydrazine rocket fuel have been carried to it to enable rocket-propelled orbital maneuvers to keep its orbit from decaying. But what if there was a better way – one that was self-powered, inexpensive, and didn’t require constant refueling?

A new paper from Giovanni Anese, a PhD student at the University of Padua, and his team focuses on such a concept. It uses a new idea called a Bare Photovoltaic Tether (BPT), which is based on an older idea of an electrodynamic tether (EDT) but has some advantages due to the addition of solar panels along its length.

The basic idea behind a BPT, and EDTs more generally, is to extend a conductive boom out into a magnetic field and use the natural magnetic forces in the environment to provide a propulsive force. Essentially, it deploys a giant conductive rod into a magnetic field and uses the force on an electric field created in that rod to transfer force to where the rod is connected. It’s like the wind picking up an umbrella if the umbrella were a massive conductive rod and the wind were the planet’s natural magnetic field.

Fraser interviews Rob Hoyt from Tethers Unlimited, one of the companies offering commercial EDTs for satellites.

Electrodynamic tethers are not a new concept. They were initially introduced in 1968 by Giuseppe Colombo and Mario Grossi at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics. Several demonstration missions have already taken flight, such as the TSS-1R that launched on the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1996 and successfully deployed a 10-km long tether from the shuttle. Another experiment called the Plasma Motor Generator took place on the Russian space station Mir in 1999, which, instead of using an electromotive force to prove orbital stationkeeping, generated power directly from the tether itself.

Engineers have long considered using an EDT to perform stationkeeping duties on the ISS. However, a technical quirk made it impractical. To get the right sort of forces, the tether would need to be pointed “downward” toward the Earth or “upward” away from the planet.

No matter the direction in which the tether is pointed, it will still require power to operate. Without its magnetic field, caused by the electrical current running through it, it would act as a further drag rather than a boost. Therefore, a traditional EDT must be tied to a power system. However, if an EDT is deployed upward on the ISS, this power system would inhibit the approach corridors of capsules attempting to dock with the station. 

MiTEE is a concept mission from the University of Michigan utilizing Electrodynamic tethers.

This necessitates a downward-facing EDT so it can be connected to the ISS’s power system. While that does work, according to a prior paper published by the authors, it is less than ideal as downward-facing tethers are typically used in de-orbiting maneuvers rather than orbit-boosting ones. 

Enter the BPT. The main difference between it and a traditional EDT is that its surface is at least partially covered in solar panels. If there are enough of them, these solar panels can completely power the system, allowing an upward-facing BPT to operate without being tied into the ISS’s power grid and keeping the approach lanes clear for arriving spacecraft. 

Mr. Anese and his team studied different options in terms of length and solar panel coverage, disregarding the tether’s weight, as the difference in weight between the tether and the ISS itself was several orders of magnitude. They found that they could counteract the relatively small force that causes a 2km/month orbital drop from the ISS by utilizing a 15 km long tether around 97% covered in solar panels, at least on one side.

Fraser discusses orbital station-keeping for the ISS with Michael Rodruck

A 15 km tether might sound absurdly long, and admittedly, if pointing back to the Earth, it would cover a relatively large percentage of the total distance back to the ground. However, it is well within the realm of technological feasibility, especially given that Atlantis deployed that 10 km tether almost 30 years ago.

To prove their point, the authors turned to a software package called FLEXSIM, which allowed them to simulate the orbital dynamics of an ISS attached to different lengths of BPT. The tethers they chose were only 2.5cm wide, and the solar panels were only 4.23% efficient, though that is likely affected by the fact they had to be small and flexible. With that length of solar panels, the system could provide 8.3 kW of power for the whole tether, enough to boost the ISS’s orbital path.

There are some nuances about the effects of solar activity on the forces contributing to the orbital boost, but overall, the system, at least in theory, does seem to work. However, much discussion around the ISS lately has been about its end of life, which could come as early as 2031. So, while there are still a few good years left in the station, it likely won’t benefit as much from the BPT system as it would have a few decades ago. That being said, there will likely be a replacement in orbit someday, and it could benefit from such a system from the outset, which could save hundreds of tons of fuel in orbit over its lifetime.

Learn More:
Anese et al – Bare Photovoltaic Tether characteristics for ISS reboost
UT – Satellites Equipped With a Tether Would be Able to De-Orbit Themselves at the end of Their Life
UT – A New Satellite Is Going to Try to Maintain Low Earth Orbit Without Any Propellant
UT – SpaceX Reveals the Beefed-Up Dragon That Will De-Orbit the ISS

Lead Image:
Force diagram of the BPT tether system on the ISS.
Credit – Anese et al.

The post A Tether Covered in Solar Panels Could Boost the ISS’s Orbit appeared first on Universe Today.

What came first, galaxies or planets? The answer has always been galaxies, but new research is changing that idea.

Could habitable planets really have formed before there were galaxies?

In the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, there were no heavy elements. There was only hydrogen, which comprised about 75% of the mass, and helium, which comprised the remaining 25%. (There were probably also trace amounts of lithium, even beryllium.) There was nothing heavier, meaning there was nothing for rocky planets to form from. After a few hundred million years, the first stars and galaxies formed.

As successive generations of stars lived and died, they forged heavier elements and spread them out into the Universe. Only after that could rocky planets form, and by extension, habitable planets. That’s been axiomatic in astronomy.

However, new research that’s yet to be published suggests that habitable worlds could’ve formed in the early stages of the Cosmic Dawn, prior to galaxies forming. Its title is “Habitable Worlds Formed at Cosmic Dawn,” and it’s available at the pre-press site arxiv.org. The lead author is Daniel Whalen from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth in the UK.

The research hinges on primordial supernovae, the first stars in the Universe to explode. These massive stars lived fast and died young in cataclysmic explosions. They peaked at about redshift 20 when population III stars, which were extremely massive, exploded as pair-instability supernovae. Simulations show that these stars formed in dark matter haloes where the temperature allowed large amounts of molecular hydrogen to gather.

According to Whalen and his co-researchers, when these stars exploded, low-mass stars formed in the aftermath. Planetesimals formed around those stars, leading to the formation of potentially habitable, rocky worlds. This all happened before the first galaxies formed. These results are based on simulations the research team performed with Enzo.

It starts with a star forming with about 200 solar masses. It lives for only about 2.6 million years before it explodes as a PI supernova. The explosion enriches the supernova bubble to high metallicity. In the aftermath, hydrostatic instabilities cause a dense core to form about 3 million years later, with 35 solar masses.

“All known prerequisites for planet formation in this core are fulfilled: dust growth, dust enhancement in a dead zone, the onset of the streaming instability, and conversion of dust to planetesimals,” the authors explain.

This figure from the research shows a PI supernova exploding (a) and a dense core forming (b) about 3 million years later containing 35 solar masses. Image Credit: Whalen et al. 2025.

Here’s where this study differs from previous ones. Since the PI supernova explodes and creates high-metallicity gas, the gas cools more quickly. That allows the next star to form sooner, and hence, planetesimals and planets.

Eventually, a protostar with 0.3 solar masses formed. Then planetesimals formed between 0.46 and 1.66 AU from their star. Life needs water, and the researchers’ simulations also showed that the young solar system contained an amount of water similar to our own Solar System.

This figure from the research shows the protoplanetary disk. Gas, dust and planetesimal distributions are shown 39 kyr after the formation of the protostar in (a) – (c), respectively, where b and c show the central 4 AU of the disk. The green dashed circles indicate where water can exist in liquid form. Image Credit: Whalen et al. 2025.

Planetesimals formed in the circumstellar disk around the low-mass star, and over time, they combined to form planets. Since the original primordial supernovae created elements like carbon, oxygen, and iron, all of the necessary ingredients were likely present to form rocky planets, even life.

The remarkable part is that this could’ve happened before the first galaxies formed. If true, it would change our understanding of the Universe and of life. However, this is just one simulation. How could observations support it?

“These planets could be detected as extinct worlds around ancient, metal-poor stars in the Galaxy in future exoplanet surveys,” Whelan and his fellow researchers write in their paper.

According to the authors, if conditions were just right, rocky planets could have formed even earlier than their simulations show. If that’s true, then it changes the entire course of events in the evolution of the Universe.

However, this is only a single study. And it hinges on primordial supernovae. Did they even exist? There’s at least some evidence that they did.

Clearly, attempting to observe primordial supernovae is extremely difficult. They occurred so long ago that they’re extraordinarily distant and faint. It’s likely impossible with current technology.

Also, there is much uncertainty about the Population III stars that were the progenitors of primordial supernovae. Their exact masses, lifetimes, and explosion mechanisms are uncertain. Astronomers don’t have a clear understanding of the early Universe’s extreme conditions. It’s still evolving, as is our understanding of supernovae. Combined, that’s a lot of uncertainty.

An artist’s illustration of some of the Universe’s first stars. Called Population 3 stars, they formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Image Credit: By NASA/WMAP Science Team – https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/fuse_fossil_galaxies.html (image link), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1582286

Still, all of these challenges don’t mean that primordial supernovae didn’t exist. So astronomers can’t rule them out, nor can they rule out very early habitable planets.

As things stand, there’s no way to prove or disprove this research. However, it does open another line of thinking and new possibilities.

The post Habitable Worlds Could Have Formed Before the First Galaxies appeared first on Universe Today.

The Andromeda galaxy is our closest galactic neighbour, barring dwarf galaxies that are gravitationally bound to the Milky Way. When conditions are right, we can see it with the naked eye, though it appears as a grey smudge. It’s the furthest object in the Universe that we can see without telescopic help.

The Hubble Space Telescope has created a massive 2.5-gigapixel panorama of Andromeda. It took 10 years and more than 1,000 orbits to capture all of the images.

We’re stuck inside the Milky Way and will never escape it. (Yes, there’s a tiny possibility we will in some far-off future.) The ESA’s powerful Gaia telescope has given us our best look at our own galaxy from inside it, but even it has its limitations.

That’s one of the reasons that observing Andromeda, also known as M31, is important. Like the Milky Way, M31 is also a barred spiral. By observing M31 in detail, we can learn more about our own galaxy. M31 is like a proxy for the Milky Way, and astronomers’ chief tool for studying our galactic proxy is the Hubble.

“With Hubble we can get into enormous detail about what’s happening on a holistic scale across the entire disk of the galaxy. You can’t do that with any other large galaxy,” said principal investigator Ben Williams of the University of Washington.

The image is a mosaic comprising at least 2.5 billion pixels. It resolves about 200 million individual stars, all of them hotter than our Sun. That’s only a small fraction of the galaxy’s stellar population, as dim stars like red dwarfs aren’t detected. The image contains bright blue star clusters, background galaxies, foreground stars, satellite galaxies, and dust lanes.

This is the largest photomosaic ever made by the Hubble Space Telescope. Andromeda is seen almost edge-on, tilted by 77 degrees relative to Earth’s view. The galaxy is so large that the mosaic is assembled from approximately 600 separate fields of view taken over 10 years of Hubble observing. The Andromeda galaxy is shown at the top of the visual. It is a spiral galaxy that spreads across the image. It is tilted nearly edge-on to our line of sight so that it appears very oval. The borders of the galaxy are jagged because the image is a mosaic of smaller, square images against a black background. The outer edges of the galaxy are blue, while the inner two-thirds are yellowish with a bright, central core. Five callout squares highlight interesting features of the galaxy. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, B. Williams (U. of Washington)

This vast image is the result of two observing programs: the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Southern Treasury (PHAST) and the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT). PHAT and PHAST have made a large contribution to galactic science. PHAT started acquiring the images for this mosaic about a decade ago, and now we have this new image thanks to both efforts.

New research in the Astrophysical Journal presents the latest results from PHAST, including the new image. It’s titled “PHAST. The Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Southern Treasury. I. Ultraviolet and
Optical Photometry of over 90 Million Stars in M31.” the lead author is Zhuo Chen from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Andromeda is not only our nearest neighbour but also the nearest spiral to us and the largest galaxy in the Local Group. Those facts aren’t just answers to trivia questions. They explain why astronomers can study the galaxy in detail, including assessing its stellar population, without some of the problems they face observing other galaxies.

“M31 studies circumvent complications from line-of-sight reddening, uncertain distances, and background/foreground confusion,” the researchers write in their paper. “Furthermore, such studies can be put into the context of the surrounding local environment, such as the ISM structure, the star formation rate (SFR), and the metallicity of the stars and gas, and even larger environment as mapped by
the Pan-Andromeda Archeological Survey.”

“Thus, M31 provides a unique and interesting comparison to the detailed information we have for our
Milky Way,” the authors explain.

This is a zoom-in of the full-resolution version of the image. You can download the full image and explore it for yourself here. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, B. Williams (U. of Washington)

One of the main takeaways from this massive observing effort is that the southern disk, which hadn’t been studied as intently as the northern disk, is fundamentally different from its counterpart. The southern disk appears to be more disturbed, indicating that it shows the effects of M31’s merger history more than the northern disk. The presence of M32, an early-type dwarf galaxy, hints at some of that merger history.

This image from the research shows the locations of the 13 “bricks” in PHAST (grey) and the 23 bricks from PHAT (blue.) Each of the new PHAST bricks consists of 15 HST pointings, each of which includes observations in two HST cameras: the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3. M32 is marked with an arrow in Brick 28. Image Credit: Chen et al. 2025.

Astronomers think that M32 could be what’s left of a galaxy that merged with Andromeda. Its properties are difficult to explain with our galaxy formation models. It could be the remnant core of a much more massive galaxy that was absorbed by Andromeda about two or three billion years ago.

“Andromeda’s a train wreck. It looks like it has been through some kind of event that caused it to form a lot of stars and then just shut down,” said study co-author Daniel Weisz at the University of California, Berkeley. “This was probably due to a collision with another galaxy in the neighborhood.”

One strong piece of evidence for that merger is the Giant Southern Stream. It’s a tidal debris stream made up of stars in Andromeda’s halo that could be a remnant from the ancient merger. The metallicity of its stars is generally lower than the stars in Andromeda’s bulge and disk.

This figure from older research shows Andromeda’s Giant Southern Stream and its proximity to M32. Image Credit: The Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey (PandAS).

The only way to understand Andromeda’s history is by surveying its stars. Thanks to PHAT and PHAST, astronomers now know 200 million individual stars. The observations are limited to stars brighter than the Sun, but the images are still scientifically rich. Together, they hint at a galaxy in transition.

“Andromeda looks like a transitional type of galaxy that’s between a star-forming spiral and a sort of elliptical galaxy dominated by aging red stars,” said Weisz. “We can tell it’s got this big central bulge of older stars and a star-forming disk that’s not as active as you might expect given the galaxy’s mass.”

“This detailed look at the resolved stars will help us to piece together the galaxy’s past merger and interaction history,” added PHAST’s Principal Investigator Ben Williams.

This figure from the research shows how the stellar density varies between regions in Andromeda. The zoom-in panels highlight the rich detail available at full HST resolution. Image Credit: Chen et al. 2025.

PHAST, together with PHAT, is a rich resource for astronomers studying Andromeda and, by extension, barred spirals everywhere, including our own Milky Way. However, before long, astronomers will get even better looks at Andromeda.

If all goes well, NASA will launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in the near future. It’s an infrared telescope with a wide field of view, though it has the same size mirror. In a single exposure, the Roman can capture the equivalent of 100 high-resolution Hubble images, maybe more. It will help astronomers study the Giant Southern Stream in detail, along with other things, and will provide critical clues to Andromeda’s history.

The post Hubble Takes a 2.5 Gigapixel Image of Andromeda appeared first on Universe Today.

There’s a Universe full of black holes out there, spinning merrily away—some fast, others more slowly. A recent survey of supermassive black holes reveals that their spin rates reveal something about their formation history.

If you want to describe a supermassive black hole’s characteristics, there are two important numbers to use. One is its mass and the other is its spin rate. Some black hole spin rates are thought to be very close to the speed of light. According to Logan Fries, a PhD student at the University of Connecticut, those numbers are tough to get. “The problem is that mass is hard to measure, and spin is even harder,” he said. Yet, having accurate numbers is important if we want to understand black hole evolution.

Fries and his colleagues in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s Reverberation Mapping Project took on a tough job. They measured the spin rates of black holes over cosmic history. “We have studied the giant black holes found at the centers of galaxies, from today to as far back as seven billion years ago,” said Fries, a primary author of a paper about this work. The mapping project also made detailed observations of the associated accretion disks. Those are the areas nearest the black hole where matter accumulates and heats up as it spirals in. Measuring that region is important since knowing the black hole’s mass and its accretion disk’s structure provides data that allows them to measure the spin rate. Astronomers typically estimate the spin rate by observing how matter behaves as it falls into the black hole.

The typical morphology of supermassive black holes. This artist’s impression depicts one surrounded by an accretion disc. Credit: ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser/N. Bartmann Black Holes and their Archaeology

The results of the SDSS Survey of mass measurements of hundreds of black holes were a surprise, according to Fries. That’s because the spin rates reveal something about the black holes’ formation history. “Unexpectedly, we found that they were spinning too fast to have been formed by galaxy mergers alone,” he said. “They must have formed in large part from material falling in, growing the black hole smoothly and speeding up its rotation.”

Fries described his work at a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society. “I have read research papers that examine black hole spin, theoretically, from the lens of like black hole mergers, and I was curious if spin could be observationally measured,” said Fries. He pointed out that the history of black hole growth requires more precise measurements than have been available. And, they’re not easy, according to Fries’s thesis advisor, Physics professor Jonathan Trump. “The challenge lies in separating the spin of the black hole from the spin of the accretion disk surrounding it,” said Trump. “The key is to look at the innermost region, where gas is falling into the black hole’s event horizon. A spinning black hole drags that innermost material along for the ride, which leads to an observable difference when we look at the details in our measurements.”

Examples of black holes and accretion disks with various spin configurations: retrograde (black hole rotates in the opposite direction as the accretion disk), zero spin (does not rotate), and prograde (black hole rotates in the same direction as the accretion disk) from top to bottom, respectively. Examples of spectral energy distributions (SEDs) for each spin configuration are shown to the right of each cartoon with a vertical line drawn at the peak of the SED. The differences in the peak of the SEDs and how bright they are for different spin configurations demonstrate how astronomers measure black hole spin by fitting these models to observational data. (Contributed image using NASA illustrations)

Digging into the mass and spin of a black hole requires spectral measurements. Those made by the SDSS contain subtle shifts in the spectra toward shorter wavelengths of light. That shift is a major clue to the black hole’s rotation rate. “I call this approach ‘black hole archaeology,'” said Fries “because we’re trying to understand how the mass of a black hole has grown over time. By looking at the spin of the black hole, you’re essentially looking at its fossil record.”

What The Black Holes Tell Us

So, what does that fossil record tell us? First of all, it challenges the prevailing wisdom that black holes are always created in galaxy collisions. In other words, when galaxies merged, so did their central black holes. Each galaxy brings a rotation rate and orientation to the merger. The rotations could just as easily cancel each other out as they are to add together. If that is true, then the astronomers should have seen a wide range of spins. Some black holes should have a lot of spin, others… not so much.

The big surprise is that many black holes appear to spin very quickly. Even more amazing, the most distant ones seem to be spinning faster than the ones nearest to us (i.e. the “nearby” Universe). It’s as if they spin faster in the early Universe, and more slowly in more recent epochs. “We find that about 10 billion years ago, black holes acquired their mass primarily through eating things,” Fries explained.

The early fast spin rate implies that most supermassive black holes (like the one in our own Milky Way Galaxy) built up over time by taking in gas and dust in a very smooth and controlled manner. In other words, the more they eat (in the way of stars and gas), the faster their spin rate. It also turns out that merger growth actually slows the spin of supermassive black holes. That could explain why those we measure today have a mix of spin rates, rather than the more uniform rates of earlier epochs.

Future Directions

The idea of black holes forming smoothly over time provides a new direction for black hole research. Observations by JWST will help give more targets to study. Surveys such as the SDSS Reverberation Mapping project will follow up with more precise measurements of the huge supermassive black holes JWST continually finds as it studies the Universe.

For More Information

Spinning Black Holes Reveal How They Grew
‘Black Hole Archaeology’: Understanding How Black Holes Gained Their Mass

Black Hole Archaeology: Mapping the Growth History of Black Holes Across Cosmic Time (PDF of AAS presentation)

The post Black Holes are Spinning Faster Than Expected appeared first on Universe Today.

Supernovae are one of the most useful events in all of astronomy. Scientists can directly measure their power, their spin, and their eventual fallout, whether that’s turning into a black hole or a neutron star in some cases or just a much smaller stellar remnant. One of these events happened around 350 years ago (or around 11,000 years ago from the star’s perspective) in the constellation Cassiopeia. The James Webb Space Telescope recently caught a glimpse of the aftereffects of the explosion, and it happened to shed light (literally) on a familiar area of study – interstellar gas.

The supernova in Cassiopeia ejected a massive amount of X-rays and ultraviolet light into the area surrounding the now-dead star. That energy is now hitting a clump of gas gathered in the interstellar medium about 350 light years from the star. An effect called a “light echo” is created in the process.

A light echo can be thought of as a giant photographer’s bulb. A bright flash (i.e., the energy from the supernova) travels in an ever-extending sphere outwards, gradually illuminating everything in its path, then moving on and leaving the objects it just passed back in darkness. As the material is illuminated, telescopes back on Earth can see this otherwise invisible matter existing in the interstellar medium.

Evolution of the lit-up gas and dust cloud over the course of months.
Credit – STScI YouTube Channel

The Cassiopeia A explosion caused dozens of light echoes, but one in particular caught the attention of astronomers. From our perspective, gas and dust located past the now-dead star have been gradually lit up as the flash from the supernova passes through it, creating a spectacular image.

Spitzer, one of NASA’s great observatories that ended its observations in 2020, examined this same clump of gas and dust back in 2008. Its image was fascinating but not as complete as the one by its successor, JWST.

The image from JWST, admittedly falsely colored since humans can’t see infrared light, is spectacular, both aesthetically and scientifically. It shows a series of “sheets” that are remarkably small for an interstellar structure, measuring only about 400 AU across. They seem to be influenced by interstellar magnetic fields, as video of still images shows them twisting and writhing around.

Image from Spitzer of the dust cloud taken in 2008.
Credit – NASA / JPL-Caltech / Y. Kim (U of Arizona / U of Chicago)

Another feature of the image is described as “knots in wood grain” in a press release from the Webb telescope researchers. It also twists and moves over months as if dragged by some invisible force.

Light echoes can also be seen in the visible light range. However, infrared wavelengths, which are better thought of as the heat emitted from this gas and dust as the light echo passes through it, are more capable of showing the 3D structure as the wavelengths themselves aren’t blocked by the dust as visible light would be.

Consistently taking images over the course of months also provides another advantage. As Armin Rest of the Space Telescope Science Institute puts it, “We have three slices taken at three different times,” comparing the layered result as equivalent to a CT scan commonly used in medicine.

Context for the area of the image in the Cassiopeia
Credit – NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI

While the first picture from these studies might be fantastic, there is plenty of science left to do on these clouds of matter. Future work will continue to watch as the supernova flash-bulb illuminates and darkens different parts of the collected material. Some of that might even be destroyed, as the high-power supernovae that are strong enough to cause infrared light echoes could potentially vaporize some of the matter it hits.

JWST will continue to monitor the evolving situation, but a helping hand is coming. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, due to launch in 2027, will help scan the sky for evidence of other infrared light echoes. JWST will then follow up with closer observations using its powerful infrared instruments. If we’re lucky, we’ll see plenty more astonishing pictures soon, like the ones released last week.

Learn More:
Webb Space Telescope – NASA’s Webb Reveals Intricate Layers of Interstellar Dust, Gas
UT – A Fast-Moving Star is Colliding With Interstellar gas, Creating a Spectacular bow Shock
UT – Local Interstellar Gas Mapped in 3-D
UT – A Black Hole Has Cleared Out Its Neighbourhood

The post Webb Sees Light Echoes in a Supernova Remnant appeared first on Universe Today.

The exoplanet census continues to grow. Currently, 5,819 exoplanets have been confirmed in 4,346 star systems, while thousands more await confirmation. The vast majority of these planets were detected in the past twenty years, owing to missions like the Kepler Space Telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the venerable Hubble, the Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits (CoRoT) mission, and more. Thousands more are expected as the James Webb Space Telescope continues its mission and is joined by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST).

In the meantime, astronomers will soon have another advanced observatory to help search for potentially habitable exoplanets. It’s called Pandora, a small satellite that was selected in 2021 as part of NASA’s call for Pioneer mission concepts. This observatory is designed to study planets detected by other missions by studying these planets’ atmospheres of exoplanets and the activity of their host stars with long-duration multiwavelength observations. The mission is one step closer to launch with the completion of the spacecraft bus, which provides the structure, power, and other systems.

Funded by NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers, Pandora is a joint effort between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The mission will study planets detected by other observatories that rely on Transit Photometry (aka. the Transit Method), where astronomers monitor stars for periodic dips in brightness that indicate the presence of orbiting planets. Pandora will then monitor these planets for future transits and obtain spectra from their atmospheres – a process known as Transit Spectroscopy.

Using this method, scientists can determine the chemical composition of exoplanet atmospheres and search for indications of biological activity (aka. “biosignatures”). During its year-long primary mission, the SmallSat will study 20 stars and their 39 exoplanets in visible and infrared light. The mission team anticipates Pandora will observe at least 20 exoplanets 10 times for 24 hours, during which transits will occur, and the satellite will obtain spectra from the exoplanets’ atmospheres.

In particular, Pandora will be looking to determine the presence of hazes, clouds, and water. The data it obtains will establish a firm foundation for interpreting measurements by Webb and future missions to search for habitable worlds. Daniel Apai, a co-investigator of the mission, is a professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the U of A Steward Observatory and Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, who leads the mission’s Exoplanets Science Working Group. As he said in a U of A News release:

“Although smaller and less sensitive than Webb, Pandora will be able to stare longer at the host stars of extrasolar planets, allowing for deeper study. Better understanding of the stars will help Pandora and its ‘big brother,’ the James Webb Space Telescope, disentangle signals from stars and their planets.” 

The concept for the telescope emerged to address a specific problem with Transit Spectroscopy. During transits, telescopes capture far more than just the passing through the planet’s atmosphere. They also capture light from the star itself. In addition, stellar surfaces are not uniform and have hotter, brighter regions (faculae) and cooler, darker regions (stellar spots) that change in size and position as the star rotates. This produces “mixed signals” that make it difficult to distinguish between light passing through the planet’s atmosphere and light from the star – which can mimic the signal produced by water.

Pandora will disentangle these signals by simultaneously monitoring the host star’s brightness in visible and infrared light. These observations will provide constraints on the variations in the star’s light, which can used to separate the star’s spectrum from the exoplanet’s. With the completion of the spacecraft bus, Pandora is one step closer to launch thanks to the completion of the spacecraft bus, which provides the structure, power, and other systems vital to the mission.

The completion of the bus was announced on January 16th during a press briefing at the 245th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in National Harbor, Maryland. “This is a huge milestone for us and keeps us on track for a launch in the fall,” said Elisa Quintana, Pandora’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “The bus holds our instruments and handles navigation, data acquisition, and communication with Earth — it’s the brains of the spacecraft.” Said Ben Hord, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow who discussed the mission at the 245 AAS:

“We see the presence of water as a critical aspect of habitability because water is essential to life as we know it. The problem with confirming its presence in exoplanet atmospheres is that variations in light from the host star can mask or mimic the signal of water. Separating these sources is where Pandora will shine.”

“Pandora’s near-infrared detector is actually a spare developed for the Webb telescope, which right now is the observatory most sensitive to exoplanet atmospheres. In turn, our observations will improve Webb’s ability to separate the star’s signals from those of the planet’s atmosphere, enabling Webb to make more precise atmospheric measurements.”

Unlike Webb and other flagship missions, Pandora can conduct continuous observations for extended periods because the demand for observation time will be low by comparison. Therefore, the Pandora satellite will fill a crucial gap between exoplanet discovery provided by flagship missions and exoplanet characterization. The mission is also a boon for the University of Arizona since Pandora’s science working group is led from there, and Pandora will be the first mission to have its operations center at the U of A Space Institute.

Further Reading: U of A News

The post NASA is Building a Space Telescope to Observe Exoplanet Atmospheres appeared first on Universe Today.

On Thursday, January 16th, at 02:03 AM EST, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket took off on its maiden flight from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This was a momentous event for the company, as the two-stage heavy-lift rocket has been in development for many years, features a partially reusable design, and is vital to Bezos’ plan of “building a road to space.” While the company failed to retrieve the first-stage booster during the flight test, the rocket made it to orbit and successfully deployed its payload -the Blue Ring Pathfinder – to orbit (which has since begun gathering data).

According to the most recent statement by Blue Origin, the second stage reached its final orbit following two successful burns of its two BE-3U engines. The successful launch of NG-1 means that Blue Origin can now launch payloads to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), a huge milestone for the commercial space company. “I’m incredibly proud New Glenn achieved orbit on its first attempt,” said Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp in a company statement. “We knew landing our booster, So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance, on the first try was an ambitious goal. We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring. Thank you to all of Team Blue for this incredible milestone.”  

The rocket is named in honor of NASA astronaut John Glenn, a member of the Mercury 7 and the first American astronaut to orbit Earth as part of the Liberty Bell 7 mission on July 21st, 1961. This is in keeping with Blue Origin’s history of naming their launch vehicles after famous astronauts, such as the New Shepard rocket. This single-stage suborbital launch vehicle is named in honor of Alan Shepard, the first American astronaut to go to space as part of the Freedom 7 mission on May 5th, 1961.

Unlike the New Shepard, a fully reusable vehicle used primarily for space tourism and technology demonstrations and experiments, the New Glenn has a reusable first stage designed to land at sea on a barge named Jacklyn, or Landing Platform Vessel 1 (LPV1). While the second stage is not currently reusable, Blue Origin has been working on a reusable second stage (through Project Jarvis) since 2021. While development began on the New Glenn in 2013, the rocket has been stuck in “development hell” since 2016, shortly after it was first announced.

As a result, Blue Origin began lagging behind its main competitor (SpaceX) and missed out on several billion dollars worth of contracts. This included the company’s failure to secure a National Security Space Launch (NSSL) procurement contract and the U.S. Space Force’s termination of their launch technology partnership in late 2020. In 2021, the ongoing delay led to Jeff Bezos announcing that he would step down as CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to take the helm at Blue Origin. By February 2024, the first fully-developed New Glenn rocket was unveiled at Launch Complex 36.

This mission not only validated the launch vehicle that is vital to the company’s future plans in space. It also served as the first of several demonstrations required to be certified for use by the National Security Space Launch program. “The success of the NG-1 mission marks a new chapter for launch operations at the Eastern Range, redefining commercial-military collaboration to maintain SLD 45’s position as the world’s premier gateway to space,” wrote Airman 1st Class Collin Wesson of the U.S. Space Force (USSF) Space Launch Delta 45 (SLD 45) Public Affairs, shortly after the launch.

These plans include the launch of Amazon’s proposed constellation of internet satellites (Project Kuiper) and the creation of the Orbital Reef – a proposed commercial space station under development by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. They have also secured a contract with NASA to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission, two satellites that will study how solar wind interacts with Mars’ magnetic environment and drives atmospheric escape. NASA has also contracted with Blue Origin to provide payload and crewed launch services for the Artemis Program.

Artist’s concept of the Blue Moon Mk. II lander. Credit: Blue Origin

This includes the cargo lander Blue Moon Mark 1 and the Mark 2 that will transport the Artemis V astronauts to the lunar surface. This flight and those that will follow place Blue Origin among other commercial space companies poised to break up the near-monopoly SpaceX has enjoyed for over a decade. Said Jarrett Jones, the Senior VP for Blue Origin’s New Glenn:

“Today marks a new era for Blue Origin and for commercial space. We’re focused on ramping our launch cadence and manufacturing rates. My heartfelt thanks to everyone at Blue Origin for the tremendous amount of work in making today’s success possible, and to our customers and the space community for their continuous support. We felt that immensely today.” 

Further Reading: Blue Origin

The post New Glenn Reaches Orbit, but Doesn't Recover the Booster appeared first on Universe Today.

Six or seven billion years ago, most stars formed in super star clusters. That type of star formation has largely died out now. Astronomers know of two of these SSCs in the modern Milky Way and one in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), and all three of them are millions of years old.

New JWST observations have found another SSC forming in the LMC, and it’s only 100,000 years old. What can astronomers learn from it?

SSCs are responsible for a lot of star formation, but billions of years have passed since their heyday. Finding a young one in a galaxy so close to us is a boon for astronomers. It gives them an opportunity to wind back the clock and see how SSCs are born.

New research published in The Astrophysical Journal presents the new findings. It’s titled “JWST Mid-infrared Spectroscopy Resolves Gas, Dust, and Ice in Young Stellar Objects in the Large Magellanic Cloud.” The lead author is Omnarayani (Isha) Nayak from the Space Telescope Science Institute and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

At about 160,000 light-years away, the LMC is close in terms of galactic neighbours. It’s also face-on from our vantage point, making it easier to study. The N79 region in the LMC is a massive star-forming nebula about 1600 light-years across. The JWST used its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and found 97 new young stellar objects (YSOs) in N79, where the newly discovered super star cluster, H72.97-69.39, is located.

This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope shows N79, a region of interstellar atomic hydrogen that is ionized and is captured here by Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). N79 is a massive star-forming complex spanning roughly 1630 light-years in the generally unexplored southwest region of the LMC. At the longer wavelengths of light captured by MIRI, Webb’s view of N79 showcases the region’s glowing gas and dust. Star-forming regions such as this are of interest to astronomers because their chemical composition is similar to that of the gigantic star-forming regions observed when the Universe was only a few billion years old, and star formation was at its peak. Image Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, M. Meixner CC BY 4.0 INT

Stellar metallicity increases over time as generations of stars are born and die. The LMC’s metallic abundance is only half that of our Solar System, meaning the conditions in the new SSC are similar to when stars formed billions of years ago in the early Universe. This is another of those situations in astronomy where studying a particular object or region is akin to looking into the past.

“Studying YSOs in the LMC gives astronomers a front-row seat to witness the birth of stars in a nearby galaxy. For the first time, we can observe individual low-mass protostars similar to the Sun forming in small clusters—outside of our own Milky Way Galaxy,” said Isha Nayak, lead author of this research. “We can see with unprecedented detail extragalactic star formation in an environment similar to how some of the first stars formed in the universe.”

The YSOs near the SSC H72.97-69.39 (hereafter referred to as H72) are segregated by mass. The most massive YSOs are concentrated near H72, while the less massive are on the outskirts of N79. The JWST revealed that what astronomers used to think were single massive young stars are actually clusters of YSOs. These observations confirm for the first time that what appear to be individual YSOs are often small clusters of protostars.

A composite image created using JWST NIRCam and ALMA data. Light from stars is shown in yellow, while blue and purple represent the dust and gas fueling star formation. Image Credit: NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/S.Dagnello

This finding brings attention to the complex processes of early star formation. “The formation of massive stars plays a vital role in influencing the chemistry and structure of the interstellar medium (ISM),” the authors write in their published research. “Star formation takes place in clusters, with massive stars dominating the luminosity.”

One of the five young stars is over 500,000 times more luminous than the Sun. As revealed by the JWST Near InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), it’s surrounded by more than 1,550 young stars.

This Spitzer image from the new research shows the N79 region in the LMC. N79 consists of three giant molecular clouds. Spitzer data showed that each of the red circles is a massive young stellar object of at least eight solar masses. However, the JWST has revealed that three of them, with the exception of the one in N79W, aren’t individual YSOs; they’re clusters. Together, they could make up a very young super star cluster. Image Credit: Nayak et al. 2025.

Previous Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations hinted at what might contribute to the formation of SSCs. ALMA showed that colliding filaments of molecular gas at least one parsec long are in the region. These filaments could be behind H72’s formation.

This figure from previous research shows ALMA observations of the region near the super star cluster H72. Each one shows carbon monoxide in a different velocity channel. The white “x” shows the location of H72. “Scrolling through the channels it is clear there is a filament in the northeast to southwest direction and a distinct filament in the northwest to southeast direction,” the authors explain. Image Credit: Nayak et al. 2019.

This work highlights JWST’s power to resolve complex star formation locations in other galaxies. Not only did the JWST show us that what appeared to be individual YSOs are actually groups of stars, but it allowed the researchers to determine their mass accretion rates and chemical properties. The JWST’s new data gives astronomers new insights into complex chemistry, including the presence of organic molecules, dust, and ice in star-forming regions.

The post Astronomers are Watching a Newly Forming Super Star Cluster appeared first on Universe Today.

The Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) at the heart of the Milky Way holds a lot of gas. It contains about 60 million solar masses of molecular gas in complexes of giant molecular clouds (GMCs), structures where stars usually form. Because of the presence of Sag. A*, the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole (SMBH), the CMZ is an extreme environment. The gas in the CMZ is ten times more dense, turbulent, and heated than gas elsewhere in the galaxy.

How do star-forming GMCs behave in such an extreme environment?

Researchers have found a novel way to study two of the GMCs in the CMZ. The clouds are named “Sticks” and “Stones” and astronomers have used decades of X-ray observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory to probe the 3D structures of the pair of clouds.

University of Connecticut Physics Researcher Danya Alboslani and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Samantha Brunker are both with the Milky Way Laboratory at the University of Connecticut. They’ve produced two manuscripts presenting their new X-ray tomography method and their results. Brunker is the lead author of “3D MC I: X-ray Tomography Begins to Unravel the 3-D Structure of a Molecular Cloud in our Galaxy’s Center,” and Alboslani is the lead author of “3D MC II: X ray echoes reveal a clumpy molecular cloud in the CMZ.” Brunker and Alboslani are also co-authors on each paper. Alboslani also presented her results at the recent 245th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

When gas from elsewhere in the galaxy reaches Sgr A*, it forms an accretion ring around the SMBH. As the gas heats up, it releases X-rays. These X-ray emission are only intermittent, and in the past, some of these episodes have been very intense. The X-ray travel outward in all directions, and while we didn’t have the capability to observe them, they interacted with GMCs near the CMZ. The clouds first absorbed them the re-emitted them in a phenomenon called fluorescence.

“The cloud absorbs the X-rays that are coming from Sgr A* then re-emits X-rays in all directions. Some of these X-rays are coming towards us, and there is this very specific energy level, the 6.4 electron volt neutral iron line, that has been found to correlate with the dense parts of molecular gas,” says Alboslani. “If you imagine a black hole in the center producing these X-rays which radiate outwards and eventually interact with a molecular cloud in the CMZ, over time, it will highlight different parts of the cloud, so what we’re seeing is a scan of the cloud.”

The Central Molecular Zone; the Heart of the Milky Way. Image Credit: Henshaw / MPIA

The center of the galaxy is choked with dust that obscures our view of the region. Visible light is blocked, but the powerful X-rays emitted by Sgr A* during accretion events are visible.

Typically, astronomers only see two dimensions of objects in space. According to Battersby, their new X-Ray tomography method allows them to measure the GMCs’ third dimension. Battersby explains that while we typically only see two spatial dimensions of objects in space, the X-ray tomography method allows us to measure the third dimension of the cloud. It’s because we see the X-rays illuminate individual slices of the cloud over time. “We can use the time delay between illuminations to calculate the third spatial dimension because X-rays travel at the speed of light,” Battersby explains.

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has been observing these X-rays for two decades, and as it observes them it sees different “slices” of the clouds, just like medical tomography. The slices are then built up into a 3D image. These are the first 3D maps of star-forming clouds in such an extreme environment.

This figure from Brunker’s paper on the “Sticks” cloud illustrates how the X-ray tomography works. Each coloured line represents a different “slice” of the cloud from a specific year. Image Credit: Brunker et al. 2025.

The X-ray tomography method has one weakness. The X-ray observations aren’t continuous, so there are gaps. There are also some structures visible in submillimeter wavelengths that aren’t seen in X-rays. To get around that, the pair of researchers used data from the ALMA and the Herschel Space Observatory to compare the structures seen in the X-ray echoes to those seen in other wavelengths. The structures that are missing in X-rays but visible in submillimeter wavelengths can also be used to constrain the duratio of X-ray flares that illuminated the clouds.

“We can estimate the sizes of the molecular structures that we do not see in the X-ray,“ says Brunker, “and from there we can place constraints on the duration of the X-ray flare by modeling what we would be able to observe for a range of flare lengths. The model that reproduced observations with similar sized ‘missing structures’ indicated that the X-ray flare couldn’t have been much longer than 4-5 months.”

This figure from Brunker’s paper shows ALMA observations, which show the presence of H2CO (formaldehyde) combined with Chandra’s X-ray observations. Blue is X-rays and pink is ALMA data. Purple is where they overlap. Each panel is from a different year. Image Credit: Brunker et al. 2025.

“The overall morphological agreement, and in particular, the association of the densest regions in both X-ray and molecular line data is striking and is the first time it has been shown on such a small scale,” says Brunker.

Detecting a third dimension of the clouds in this extreme environment could open new avenues of discovery.

“While we learn a lot about molecular clouds from data collected in 2D, the added third dimension allows for a more detailed understanding of the physics of how new stars are born,” says Battersby. “Additionally, these observations place key constraints on the global geometry of our Galaxy’s Center as well as the past flaring activity of Sgr A*, central open questions in modern astrophysics.”

When it comes to how new stars from, there are many unanswered questions. While we know turbulence in GMCs can inhibit star formation, the exact mechanism is unkown. Astronomers are also uncertain how environmental factors affect star formation. There are many others and some of them can be answered by watching how GMCs behave in extreme environments.

There are also many questions regarding Sgr A*’s X-ray flaring. Astronomers aren’t certain how factors like magnetic reconnection events near the black hole and hot spots in the accretion flow affect X-ray flaring. They also aren’t certain why X-ray flaring occurs in random intervals. That’s just a sample of unanswered questions that could be addressed by studying GMCs in the galactic centre.

If all large galaxies contain SMBHs, which seems increasingly likely, then all large galaxies have CMZs that are extreme environments. The CMZs and the SMBHs are the heart of galaxies, and astrophysicists are keen to understand the processes that play out there, and if stars are able to form there.

“We can study processes in the Milky Way’s Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) and use our findings to learn about other extreme environments. While many distant galaxies have similar environments, they are too far away to study in detail. By learning more about our own Galaxy, we also learn about these distant galaxies that cannot be resolved with today’s telescopes,” says Alboslani.

Alboslani presents her results in this video from AAS 245. Her presentation begins at the 32:40 mark.

The post Sticks and Stones: The Molecular Clouds in the Heart of the Milky Way appeared first on Universe Today.

DwarfLab’s new Dwarf 3 smartscope packs a powerful punch in a small unit.

Dwarf Lab’s Dwarf 3 smartscope.

In the past decade, amateur astronomy has witnessed nothing short of a revolution, as smartscopes have come to the fore. In half a century of skywatching, we’ve used just about every iteration of GoTo system available, starting with the now almost prehistoric ‘push-and-point’ AstroMaster units of the 90s. Strange to think, these were the hot new thing for telescopes in the 90s… though you still often had to perform a visual spiral search to actually find the target.

We recently had a chance to put Dwarf Lab’s new Dwarf 3 smartscope through its paces, and were impressed with what we’ve seen thus far. The small telescope even has personality: my wife said it actually looked like Johnny 5 from the 80s movie Short Circuit on start up (!)

We’ve also had the chance to use Unistellar and Vaonis units in the past, and were curious to see how the tiny Dwarf 3 would compare.

Smartscope Revolution

The specifications for the small unit are impressive:

The Dwarf 3 has two ‘eyes’: a 35mm (telephoto) and a 3.4mm wide-angle lens. The focal lengths for the two are 150mm (telephoto) and 6.7mm for the wide-angle (an effective equivalent of 737mm/45mm for the two).

The optics feature Sony IMX 678 Stravis 2 sensors, a CMOS chip with an effective 8.4x megapixel array, an upgrade from the IMX 415 used in the Dwarf 2.

Modern GoTo systems really put me out of a job…and that’s probably a good thing. I learned how to find things the ‘old way’ by starhopping and peering at a star chart under a red light. Dwarf 3 and other smartscopes use a method known as ‘plate-solving,’ looking at sections of the sky on startup and comparing them to a database versus the GPS position. The Dwarf Lab app features a digital planetarium view, to give even a novice user a common sense feel for the sky.

Dwarf 3 was spot on with pointing, and even maps out local obstructions on startup as no-go zones. Startup was quick, and the app is intuitive to use.

Using Dwarf 3 The Andromeda galaxy and satellite galaxies, as seen in the Dwarf Lab app.

You can use the planetarium sky feature with its grid overlay to manually aim the telescope at a given point in Right Ascension and Declination, handy for, say, if a new bright comet appears in the sky. Newer comets such as G3 ATLAS were in the updated database.

I’d rate the compactness of the unit and ease of use and portability for travel as a big plus. The unit only weighs 1.3 kilograms (2.8 pounds), and attaches to a standard camera tripod. Though the unit needs a stable, level site to operate, it never protested, balked or failed to deliver even when moderate vibrations were present.

Visible (VIS), Astro, and Dual band filters are built in to the optics, and the unit comes with a magnetic snap in place solar filter.

Solar viewing with the Dwarf Labs app.

The battery life for the telescope is advertised as 4-6 hours, and the unit has a generous 10000 mAh built-in battery. The Dwarf 3 also has an internal storage capacity of 128Gb (gigabytes). I used the telescope in sub-freezing January temperatures for about an hour during the Mars occultation, without a problem.

The unit will also output and support JPEG, PNG, TIFF and FITS files, though of course, larger FITS files will also take up more storage room.

The scope hooks to your phone via wifi/bluetooth, and even features an NFC ‘smart-touch’ connection capability. Though you need a wireless connection to control the telescope from your tablet or phone, the unit will work in the field as a standalone unit. That is, without a network connection.

Putting the Dwarf 3 Through Its Paces

On startup and initialization the scope gives two views: one wide and one telephoto, about 2.93x 1.65 degrees across. The Pleiades filled up the view nicely. The wide view works great as a finderscope for manually slewing to targets. The manual slew rate is variable as well.

The Pleiades (M45) with the Dwarf 3 telescope; the system easily captured some of the dusty reflection nebulae surrounding the young stars.

The telescope can be used in both terrestrial and astronomical applications. I could even envision the unit installed in a mini-‘bird house’ style observatory on a balcony or rooftop, allowing the user to sit inside and remotely observe the sky. These days, it’s rare that a new piece of tech inspires out-of-the-box thinking as to what might be possible, but the Dwarf 3 does just that.

Of course, with such a wide view, the Dwarf 3 really shines in deep-sky astrophotography. This is true even from brightly lit downtown areas, a real plus.

The Orion Nebula… imaged with the Dwarf 3 under the bright downtown lights of Bristol, Tennessee.

A sunglasses-looking filter magnetically snaps in place over both lenses for solar viewing. Like a standard rich-field refractor, the Dwarf 3 also delivers decent lunar views, but planets will appear as small dots.

Using a camera control app with Real Time Streaming Protocol capability will allow users to live stream the Dwarf 3 and record and broadcast live views. This would be handy for streaming eclipses or occultations live.

Dwarf 3: Deep-Sky Downtown Astronomy

What we like: The Dwarf 3 is very portable, and packs a lot in a small package. As I get older, I take a dim view of lugging gear outside, cobbling things together and contorting to view and tend to troubleshooting things in the dark, all for maybe an hour’s use. The Dwarf 3 is light and easy to deploy, allowing me to spend more precious time actually observing. Smartscopes also work great at public star parties, as I can simply narrate the wonders of what we’re seeing, while the GoTo system does all of the grunt work.

The Moon occults the Pleiades (a composite of two images).

What we don’t like: You have to remember to download the images before shutting down the unit… this a tiny step to remember for sure, in an otherwise outstanding product.

How does Dwarf 3 stack up against other smart telescopes out there? Well, the biggest difference is the price: at $499, it’s a fraction of the cost of most competitors out there. Increasingly, the argument that ‘yeah, but you could buy a (insert the name of a telescope/camera) for that price’ doesn’t hold up. Of course, it’s hard to beat the physics of optics in terms of resolution with smaller units. Increasingly, smaller units get around this by simply staring at faint light sources for longer, and letting deep sky images stack and build up.

Bottom line: The Dwarf 3 is definitely worth the price, either as a quick travel-scope for the seasoned observer, or a beginner scope to show users the wonders of the cosmos.

The post Review: Dwarf Lab’s New Dwarf 3 Smartscope appeared first on Universe Today.

The wildfires raging around Los Angeles have made plenty of headlines lately, though they are slowly starting to get under control. NASA was a part of that effort, tracking the fire’s evolution via the Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-3 (AVIRIS-3) as they raged through southern California. As they were doing so, they likely realized that these fires posed an extreme risk to one vital part of NASA itself – the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

JPL is one of NASA’s most prolific centers, nestled in the hills around Pasadena, California. Employees there are responsible for missions as wide-ranging as Psyche, which will soon visit the “Queen of the asteroid belt,” and Ingenuity, the helicopter that performed the first-ever powered flight on another planet.

Despite having their eyes set on the heavens, JPL’s engineers, technicians, and administrators still have to deal with earthly matters occasionally. It receives around $2.4 billion annually in funding from NASA, representing around 10% of the agency’s budget. However, over the past years, the center has laid off almost 1,000 employees out of the approximately 6,000 that work there. Those layoffs were mainly due to budgetary constraints and difficulties with some missions they were planning, such as the struggling Mars Sample Return mission.

New report on the efforts to save JPL.
Credit – KCAL News YouTube Channel

But the LA fires, particularly one that started in nearby Eaton Canyon, brought home a much more immediate concern—a threat to the center’s physical survival. The Eaton Canyon fire, which started on the morning of January 7th in the nearby town of Altadena, expanded to over 10,000 in little more than a day.

As firefighters scrambled to contain the blaze, it began to burn developed areas, such as the northern side of Altadena itself. On January 11th, NASA sent a B200 aircraft over the area with AVIRIS-3 to capture an image of the first, which you can see in the headline of this article. If you look closely, on the left-hand side of the image, you can see three letters—JPL.

Using a very unscientific measuring technique based on the kilometer scaling provided in the picture, it looks like the first got within one single km of one of the world’s foremost propulsion research labs. Admittedly, there seemed to be a physical barrier labeled as the “Hahamongna watershed” between JPL and the fire, but given the drought that the LA region has been suffering through lately, it is dubious how effective that barrier might have been.

Wildfires cause very personal tragedies, as discussed in this story about JPL employees.
Credit – KCAL News YouTube Channel

Luckily, as of this reporting, the Eaton fire has largely been contained and is no longer expanding. So it seems that JPL has been spared, at least in this round of southern California’s seemingly never-ending cycle of fires. However, almost 5,000 structures were destroyed in nearby towns – some of them undoubtedly belonging to JPL employees. 

While the center itself might have been spared, its employees will undoubtedly be dealing with the fallout of these fires for some time to come. NASA has started a Disaster Response Coordination System, where the agency uses its Earth-monitoring know-how to support other agencies dealing with disasters on the ground. This time, though, some of its best engineers and support staff might have to deal with their own personal tragedies before being able to help the agency that employs them.

Learn More:
NASA – Eaton Fire Leaves California Landscape Charred
UT – NASA’s JPL Lays Off Another 325 People
UT – NASA’s JPL Lays Off Hundreds of Workers
UT – NASA is Keeping an Eye on InSight from Space

Lead Image:
Map of the fires showing it proximity to JPL and downtown Pasadena.
Credit – NASA

The post The Los Angeles Fires Got Extremely Close to NASA’s JPL Facility appeared first on Universe Today.

Dark matter may have to go on a diet, according to new research.

By now we have a vast abundance of evidence for the existence of dark matter. That’s because cosmological observations just aren’t adding up. All our measures of luminous matter fall far short of the total gravitational effects we see in galaxies, clusters, and the universe as a while.

Dark matter far outweighs the regular matter in the cosmos, but we still don’t know the identity of this mysterious particle. Because of that, it could have a wide variety of masses, anything from a billionth of the mass of the lightest known particles to mass ranges far, far heavier.

Most searches for dark matter have focused on masses roughly in the range of the heavier known particles, because several extensions to known physics predict particles like that. But those searches have thus far come up short, making physicists wonder if the dark matter might be much lighter than expected…or much heavier.

But heavier dark matter runs into some serious issues, according to a new paper appearing on the preprint server arXiv.

The problem is that we expect to dark matter to at least sometimes, rarely, interact with normal matter. In the extremely early universe, dark matter and regular matter talked to each other much more often. But as the cosmos expanded and cooled, the interactions broke down, freezing out dark matter and leaving it behind as a relic background.

Almost all models of dark matter predict that it talks to normal matter through some interaction involving the Higgs boson, the famous particle finally detected by the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. The Higgs boson is responsible for the mass of many particles.

But interactions in physics are two-way streets. Many particles acquire their mass through their interaction with the Higgs, and in turn the mass of the Higgs is modified by its interaction with the other particles. But those particles are so light that the back-reaction isn’t very strong, so usually we don’t have to worry about it.

But if the dark matter is much heavier, somewhere around ten times the mass of the heaviest known particles, then its own interactions will cause the Higgs to balloon up in mass, making it far heavier than measurements suggest.

There are possibilities to get around this restriction. The dark matter might not interact with regular particles at all, or through some exotic mechanism that doesn’t involve the Higgs. But those models are few are far between, and require a lot of fine-tuning and extra steps.

This means that the dark matter, whatever it is, might just be an ultra-light particle, rather than an ultra-heavy one.

The post Dark Matter Can’t Be Too Heavy appeared first on Universe Today.

According to new research, the earliest seeds of structures may have been laid down by gravitational waves sloshing around in the infant universe.

Cosmologists strongly suspect that the extremely early universe underwent a period of exceptionally rapid expansion. Known as inflation, this event expanded the universe by a factor of at least 10^60 in less than a second. Powering this event was a new ingredient in the cosmos known as the inflaton, a strange quantum field that ramped up, drove inflation, and then faded away.

Inflation didn’t just make the universe big. It also laid down the seeds of the first structures. It did so by taking the quantum foam, the subatomic fluctuations in spacetime itself, and expanding that along with everything else. Slowly over time those fluctuations grew, and hundreds of millions of years later they became the first stars and galaxies, ultimately leading to the largest structure in the universe, the cosmic web.

But mysteries remain. We do not know the identity of the inflaton, or what powered it, or why it turned off when it did. And we have no conclusive evidence that inflation actually happened.

So researchers are always looking for alternatives, especially ones that don’t invoke some new and mysterious ingredient. In a recent paper, a team of astrophysicists describe a model where inflation happens, leading to the large-scale structure of the universe, all without an inflaton.

The model described by the researchers is set in the backdrop of an expanding universe that is accelerating in its expansion, just like the modern-day universe is. In that expanding universe, the quantum foam releases gravitational waves. Those ripples in space spread outwards, colliding with each other and amplifying themselves.

Gravitational waves usually can’t create structures on their own, but the researchers found that in certain special cases the gravitational waves can amplify each other in just the right way. When that happens, the imprints they make in space are nearly the same at a wide variety of length scales.

This is precisely what cosmologists observe in the cosmic microwave background, the leftover light from the early universe. This radiation contains a faint impression of the echoes of inflation, and it shows that whatever set the seeds of structure, it had to have that kind of pattern.

There are slight differences between the kinds of structures generated in this inflation-without-inflaton scenario and traditional inflation. In this first paper, the researchers did not yet calculate how strong those differences are, but an important next step is to explore the observational consequences of this model and see if it’s worth investigating further.

The post Space Itself May Have Created Galaxies appeared first on Universe Today.

Researchers have discovered how to make a new kind of metamaterial reconfigure itself without tangling itself up in knots, opening up the possibility of a broad array of space applications.

Metamaterials are a hot topic in engineering. These are materials inspired from biological systems. Many living structures start from simple, repeatable patterns that then grow into large, complex structures. The resulting structures can then have properties that the small subcomponents don’t. For example, individual bone cells or coral polyp skeletons aren’t very strong, but when they work together they can support huge animals or gigantic underwater colonies.

One promising kind of metamaterial is known as a Totimorphic lattice. This lattice starts from a triangular shaped structure. On one side is a fixed beam with a ball joint in the center. An arm attaches to that ball joint, and the other end of the arm is attached to the ends of the fixed beam with two springs. Many of these shapes attached together can morph into a wide variety of shapes and structures, all with very minimal input, giving the Totimorphic lattice incredible flexibility.

In a recent paper, scientists with the European Space Agency’s Advanced Concepts Team found a way to reconfigure Totimorphic lattices without having them tangle up on themselves. They discovered this using a series of computer simulations, creating an optimization problem for the algorithm to solve. With the algorithm in hand, they could then take any configuration of the lattice and change it to another in an optimal, efficient way.

The researchers showed off their technique with two examples. The first was a simple habitat structure that could change its shape and stiffness, which could allow future astronauts to deploy the same kind of metamaterial to build a variety of structures, and reconfigure them as mission needs changed.

The second example was a flexible space telescope that could change its focal length by adapting the curvature of its lens. This would enable a single launch, with a single vehicle, to serve a variety of observing needs.

As of right now, this is all hypothetical. Totimorphic lattices don’t exist in practice, only as curious mathematical objects. But this research is crucial for advancing humanity into space. The cost and difficulty of launching materials into space mean that we need flexible, adaptable structures that are cheap to launch and easy to deploy.

This research is yet another example of how we can draw inspiration from nature, in this case investigating the surprising properties of metamaterials, to bring ourselves into a future in space.

The post A Flexible, Adaptable Space Metamaterial appeared first on Universe Today.

SpaceX’s seventh flight test of its massive Starship launch system brought good news as well as not-so-great news.

The good news? The Super Heavy booster successfully flew itself back to the Texas launch site and was caught above the ground by the launch tower’s chopstick-style mechanical arms. That’s only the second “Mechazilla” catch to be done during the Starship test program. The bad news is that the upper stage, known as Ship 33, was lost during its ascent.

“Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn. Teams will continue to review data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause,” SpaceX said in a post-mission posting to X. “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability.”

Today’s test marked the first use of an upper stage that was upgraded with a redesign of the avionics, the propulsion system and the forward control flaps. Ship 33’s heat shield featured next-generation protective tiles as well as a backup layer of heat-resistant material. SpaceX had removed some of the tiles for this flight as a stress test for the heat shield.

During the webcast, an onscreen graphic suggested that Ship experienced engine problems during its ascent. “We saw engines dropping out on telemetry,” launch commentator Dan Huot said.

In a posting to X, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said preliminary indications were that there was “an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity.”

“Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area,” Musk wrote. “Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.”

After Ship’s breakup, eyewitnesses posted videos showing a glittering hail of debris falling to Earth. Reuters reported that at least 20 commercial aircraft had to divert to different airports or alter their course to dodge the debris.

In response to an emailed inquiry, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was aware of the anomaly that occurred during today’s flight test and would be assessing the operation. “The FAA briefly slowed and diverted aircraft around the area where space vehicle debris was falling,” the agency said via email. “Normal operations have resumed.”

Just saw the most insane #spacedebris #meteorshower right now in Turks and Caicos ?@elonmusk? what is it?? pic.twitter.com/a7f4MbEB8Q

— Dean Olson (@deankolson87) January 16, 2025

A view of Starship as seen from an airplane ?pic.twitter.com/MfmavSCKUa

— Jenny Hautmann (@JennyHPhoto) January 17, 2025

If Ship had made it to space, it would have deployed 10 Starlink simulators that were about the same size and weight as SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellites. This was meant to test the procedure that SpaceX plans to use to put scores of Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit during a single Starship mission.

At the end of the flight test, Ship would have made a controlled re-entry and splashdown into the Indian Ocean.

Starship is the world’s most powerful launch system, with the booster’s 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines providing liftoff thrust of 16.7 million pounds. That’s more than twice the thrust of the Apollo-era Saturn V rocket, and almost twice the thrust of NASA’s Space Launch System, which was first launched in 2022 for the uncrewed Artemis I moon mission.

When fully stacked, Starship stands 403 feet (123 meters) tall. The system is meant to be fully reusable. Flight tests began in 2023, and SpaceX has made gradual progress. The first successful catch of the Super Heavy booster thrilled observers last October — and like that catch, today’s catch drew cheers from SpaceX employees watching the launch.

This year, SpaceX aims to demonstrate full reuse of Super Heavy and Ship, and promises to fly “increasingly ambitious missions.” The Starship system would be used for large-scale satellite deployments — and eventually for missions beyond Earth orbit. A customized version of Starship is slated to serve as a crewed lunar landing system for NASA’s Artemis III mission, which is currently scheduled for no earlier than mid-2027.

Musk envisions sending Starships on missions to Mars, perhaps starting in 2026. “These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars,” he said last September in a posting to X.

“If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years,” Musk said. “Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years.”

The post SpaceX Catches Booster But Loses Ship in Starship Test Flight appeared first on Universe Today.

We can judge the value of any scientific endeavour based on how much of our knowledge it overturns or transforms. By that metric, the ESA’s Gaia mission is a resounding success. The spacecraft gave us a precise, 3D map of our Milky Way galaxy and has forced us to abandon old ideas and replace them with compelling new ones.

Currently, we’re marking the end of the Gaia mission, our best effort to understand the Milky Way. Gaia is an astrometry mission that’s built an impressive map of the Milky Way by taking three trillion observations of two billion individual objects in the galaxy, most of them stars, over an 11-year period. Measuring the same objects repeatedly means Gaia’s map is 3D and shows the proper motion of stars throughout the galaxy. Rather than a static map, it reveals the galaxy’s kinetic history and some of the changes it’s gone through.

Gaia showed us our galaxy’s turbulent history, including the streams of stars stemming from past disruptive events. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar

We’ve waited a long time for such a detailed look at our galaxy.

Radio astronomy, which gained momentum in the 1950s, helped us understand the structure of the Milky Way. Radio telescopes could see through intervening dust clouds and detect the distribution of hydrogen in the galaxy. In 1952, astronomers began the first major radio survey of the Milky Way. Astronomers theorized that the galaxy had a spiral structure, and finally, they detected the spiral arms, revealing the Milky Way’s basic structure.

In a 1958 paper, the authors wrote that “The distribution of the hydrogen evidently shows great irregularities. Nevertheless, several arms can be followed over considerable lengths.”

This figure shows the hydrogen distribution in the plane of the Milky Way’s disk. Though it appears outdated to our modern eyes and isn’t visually intuitive, it was exciting at the time. Image Credit: From “The galactic system as a spiral nebula” by Oort et al. 1958.

Astronomers also used RR Lyrae and Cepheids, two types of variable stars with known intrinsic brightnesses (standard candles), to calculate their distances. This allowed them to trace the Milky Way’s structure. Globular clusters also helped astronomers map the Milky Way.

In the 1980s, infrared telescopes like NASA’s IRAS peered through cosmic dust to help find features like the Milky Way’s central bar. Then, in 1989, the ESA’s Hipparcos mission was launched. Hipparcos was an astrometry mission and was Gaia’s predecessor. Though not nearly as precise, and though it only measured 100,000 stars, it was finally able to measure their proper motions. It revealed more details of the Milky Way and helped confirm its barred spiral form. It also provided some insights into our galaxy’s history and evolution.

But astronomers craved more detailed knowledge. Gaia was launched in 2013 to meet this need, and it’s been a total success.

Gaia is a tribute to ingenuity. We’re effectively trapped inside the Milky Way, and no spacecraft can get beyond it to capture an external view of the galaxy. Gaia has given us that view without ever leaving L2.

While many prior efforts to trace the Milky Way’s structure depended on sampling select stellar populations, Gaia precisely measured the position and motion of almost two billion stars throughout the galaxy.

Gaia’s map of the Milky Way has become iconic. This image is constructed from Gaia data that’s mapping two billion of the galaxy’s stars. It also mapped stars in the Large and Small Magellanic clouds. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC

Gaia’s work has culminated in artist impressions of the Milky Way based on its voluminous data. These impressions show that the Milky Way has multiple arms and that they’re not as prominent as we thought.

Gaia’s observations have given us a much more detailed and precise look at the Milky Way’s spiral arms. It has identified previously unknown structures in the arms, including fossil arms in the outer disk. These could be remnants of past tidal arms or distortions in the disk, or remnants of ancient interactions with other galaxies. Gaia has also found many previously unknown filamentary structures at the disk’s edge.

The Gaia mission has also allowed us to finally see our galaxy from the side. We’ve learned that the galactic disk has a slight wave to it. Astronomers think this was caused by a smaller galaxy interacting with the Milky Way. The Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal galaxy could be responsible for it.

The Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy has been orbiting the Milky Way for billions of years. According to astronomers, the three known collisions between this dwarf galaxy and the Milky Way have triggered major episodes of star formation, one of which may have given rise to our Solar System. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia

Alongside the compelling science, artists have created illustrations based on Gaia data that really hit home. The stunning side view of our galaxy is one of the most accurate views of the Milky Way we’ve ever seen.

This artist’s reconstruction of Gaia data shows the Milky Way’s central bulge, galactic disk, and outer reaches. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar

Gaia has updated our understanding of the galaxy we live in and brought its history to life. Even if it had no more to offer beyond today, it would still be an outstanding, successful mission. But even though its mission is over, we still don’t have all of its data.

Its final data release, DR5, will be available by the end of 2030.

Who knows what else the mission will show us about our home, the Milky Way galaxy.

The post The Most Accurate View of the Milky Way appeared first on Universe Today.

One of the most exciting developments in modern astronomy is how astronomers can now observe and study the earliest galaxies in the Universe. This is due to next-generation observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), with its sophisticated suite of infrared instruments and spectrometers, and advances in interferometry – a technique that combines multiple sources of light to get a clearer picture of astronomical objects. Thanks to these observations, astronomers can learn more about how the earliest galaxies in the Universe evolved to become what we see today.

Using Webb and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international team led by researchers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) successfully detected atomic transitions coming from galaxy GHZ2 (aka. GLASS-z12), located 13.4 billion light-years away. Their study not only set a new record for the farthest detection of these elements This is the first time such emissions have been detected in galaxies more than 13 billion light-years away and offers the first direct insights into the properties of the earliest galaxies in the Universe.

The galaxy was first identified in July 2022 by the Grism Lens-Amplified Survey from Space (GLASS) observing program using the JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). A month later, follow-up observations by ALMA confirmed that the galaxy had a spectrographic redshift of more than z = 12, making it one of the earliest and most distant galaxies ever observed. The exquisite observations by both observatories have allowed astronomers to gain fresh insights into the nature of the earliest galaxies in the Universe.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Credit: C. Padilla, NRAO/AUI/NSF

Jorge Zavala, an astronomer at the East Asian ALMA Regional Center at the NAOJ, was the lead author of this study. As he explained in an ALMA-NAOJ press release:

“We pointed the more than forty 12-m antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the 6.5-m James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) for several hours at a sky position that would appear totally empty to the naked human eye, aiming to catch a signal from one of the most distant astronomical objects known to date. And [we] successfully detected the emission from excited atoms of different elements such as Hydrogen and Oxygen from an epoch never reached before.”

Confirming and characterizing the physical properties of distant galaxies is vital to testing our current theories of galaxy formation and evolution. However, insight into their internal physics requires detailed and sensitive astronomical observations and spectroscopy – the absorption and emission of light by matter- allowing scientists to detect specific chemical elements and compounds. Naturally, these observations were challenging for the earliest galaxies, given that they are the most distant astronomical objects ever studied.

Nevertheless, the ALMA observations detected the emission line associated with doubly ionized oxygen (O III), confirming that the galaxy existed about 367 million years after the Big Bang. Combined with data obtained by Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) instruments, the team was able to characterize this object effectively. Based on their observations, the team discovered that GHZ2 was experiencing extreme bursts of star formation 13.4 billion years ago under conditions that differ considerably from what astronomers have seen in star-forming galaxies over the past few decades.

For instance, the relative abundance of heavier elements in this galaxy (metallicity) is significantly lower than that of most galaxies studied. This was expected given the dearth of heavier elements during the early Universe when Population III stars existed, which were overwhelmingly composed of hydrogen and helium. These stars were massive, hot, and short-lived, lasting only a few million years before they went supernova. Similarly, the team attributed GHZ2’s high luminosity to its Population III stars, which are absent from more evolved galaxies.

The scattered stars of the globular cluster NGC 6355 are strewn across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, E. Noyola, R. Cohen

This luminosity is amplified by the fact that GHZ2, which is a few hundred million times the mass of the Sun, occupies a region of around 100 parsecs (~325 light-years). This indicates that the galaxy has a high stellar density similar to that of Globular Clusters observed in the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies. Other similarities include low metallicity, the anomalous abundances of certain chemicals, high star formation rates, high stellar mass surface density, and more. As such, studying galaxies like GHZ2 could help astronomers explain the origin of globular clusters, which remains a mystery.

Said Tom Bakx, a researcher at Chalmers University, these observations could pave the way for future studies of ancient galaxies that reveal the earliest phases of galaxy formation:

“This study is a crown on the multi-year endeavor to understand galaxies in the early Universe. The analysis of multiple emission lines enabled several key tests of galaxy properties, and demonstrates the excellent capabilities of ALMA through an exciting, powerful synergy with other telescopes like the JWST.”

Further Reading: ALMA, AJL

The post Webb and ALMA Team Up to Study Primeval Galaxy appeared first on Universe Today.

Triple star systems are more common than might be imagined – about one in ten of every Sun-like star is part of a system with two other stars. However, the dynamics of such a system are complex, and understanding the history of how they came to be even more so. Science took a step towards doing so with a recent paper by Emily Leiner from the Illinois Institute of Technology and her team.

They examined a star called WOCS 14020 in the star cluster M67, which is about 2,800 light years away from Earth. It is currently orbiting a massive white dwarf star with a mass of about .76 times that of the Sun (about 50% heavier than a typical white dwarf). That pairing hints at a much more interesting past.

Dr. Leiner and her team believe that WOCS 14020 was originally part of a triple star system—specifically, that it orbited a binary pair of much larger stars. Around 500 million years ago, the two stars in the binary merged, briefly creating a much more massive star that pushed some of its material onto its third companion star.

Fraser talks about stellar collisions, which caused WOCS 14020’s current state.

Absorbing that material caused WOCS 14020 to start speeding up its spin. It now rotates once every four days, rather than typically once every thirty days, which is common to other Sun-like stars. This faster rotation feature is key to Dr. Leiner and her team’s classification of the star – a “blue lurker.”

To understand what that classification means, we must first understand another type of star, the blue straggler. Blue stragglers are stars that also have gained mass from another star and appear hotter, brighter, and “bluer” than they would be expected to be given their age. In this case, all three features are directly tied together, as a hotter star is more likely to be brighter and would give off more light in the blue part of the visible spectrum, though it would still appear almost exactly like the Sun to the naked eye.

Blue lurkers are a sub-set of blue stragglers – they also gained mass from a star, but they spin faster instead of being hotter and brighter. This makes this difficult to distinguish in a cluster like M67, as they blend in better with the other surrounding stars, hence the name “lurker.” However, they are relatively rare – out of the 400 main sequence stars in M67, only around 11 are estimated to be “blue lurkers.” That puts the total, even in a space as congested as M67, at only around 3% of stars. Blue lurkers likely make up less than 1% of the general population.

A video explaining blue straggler stars.
Credit – Cosmos:elementary YouTube Channel

Since their evolutionary histories are likely to advance our understanding of the dynamics of the systems that created them, astronomers will spend more time analyzing these blue lurkers when they find them. Unique cases like WOCS 14020, where astronomers have a pretty good idea of the system’s evolutionary history, are instrumental in that regard, and the paper, which was presented at the ongoing 245th American Astronomical Society meeting, was a step towards that greater understanding.

Learn More:
STScI – NASA’s Hubble Tracks Down a ‘Blue Lurker’ Among Stars
Leiner et al – The Blue Lurker WOCS 14020 : A Long-Period Post-Common-Envelope Binary in M67 Originating from a Mergerina Triple System
UT – Blue Straggler Stars are Weird
UT – A Rare Opportunity to Watch a Blue Straggler Forming

The post Colliding Stars, Stellar Siphoning, and a now a “Blue Lurker.” This Star System has Seen it All appeared first on Universe Today.

Black holes are among the most mysterious and powerful objects in the Universe. These behemoths form when sufficiently massive stars reach the end of their life cycle and experience gravitational collapse, shedding their outer layers in a supernova. Their existence was illustrated by the work of German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild and Indian-American physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar as a consequence of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. By the 1970s, astronomers confirmed that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) reside at the center of massive galaxies and play a vital role in their evolution.

However, only in recent years were the first images of black holes acquired by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). These and other observations have revealed things about black holes that have challenged preconceived notions. In a recent study led by a team from MIT, astronomers observed oscillations that suggested an SMBH in a neighboring galaxy was consuming a white dwarf. But instead of pulling it apart, as astronomical models predict, their observations suggest the white dwarf was slowing down as it descended into the black hole – something astronomers have never seen before!

The study was led by Megan Masterson, a PhD student from the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. She was joined by researchers from the Nucleo de Astronomia de la Facultad de Ingenieria, the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA-PU), the Center for Space Science and Technology (CSST), and the Joint Space-Science Institute at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), the Centro de Astrobiologia (CAB), the Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and multiple universities.

From what astronomers have learned about black holes, these gravitational behemoths are surrounded by infalling matter (gas, dust, and even light) that form swirling, bright disks. This material and energy is accelerated to near the speed of light, causing it to release heat and radiation (mostly in the ultraviolet) as it slowly accretes onto the black hole’s “face.” These UV rays interact with a cloud of electrically charged plasma (the corona) surrounding the black hole, which boosts the rays’ into the X-ray wavelength.

Since 2011, NASA’s XMM-Newton has been observing 1ES 1927+654, a galaxy located 236 million light-years away in the constellation Draco with a black hole of 1.4 million Solar masses Suns at its center. In 2018, the X-ray corona mysteriously disappeared, followed by a radio outburst and a rise in its X-ray output—what is known as Quasi-periodic oscillations (QPO). UMBC associate professor Eileen Meyer, a co-author of this latest study, also recently released a paper describing these radio outbursts.

“In 2018, the black hole began changing its properties right before our eyes, with a major optical, ultraviolet, and X-ray outburst,” she said in a NASA press release. “Many teams have been keeping a close eye on it ever since.” Meyer presented her team’s findings at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), which took place from January 12th to 16th, 2025, in National Harbor, Maryland. By 2021, the corona reappeared, and the black hole seemed to return to its normal state for about a year.

However, from February to May 2024, radio data revealed what appeared to be jets of ionized gas extending for about half a light-year from either side of the SMBH. “The launch of a black hole jet has never been observed before in real time,” Meyer noted. “We think the outflow began earlier, when the X-rays increased prior to the radio flare, and the jet was screened from our view by hot gas until it broke out early last year.” A related paper about the jet co-authored by Meyer and Masterson was also presented at the 245th AAS.

Artist’s impression of the ESA’s XMM-Newton mission in space. Credit: ESA-C. Carreau

In addition, observations gathered in April 2023 showed a months-long increase in low-energy X-rays, which indicated a strong and unexpected radio flare was underway. Intense observations were mounted in response by the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and other facilities, including XMM-Newton. Thanks to the XMM-Newton observations, Masterson found that the black hole exhibited extremely rapid X-ray variations of 10% between July 2022 and March 2024. These oscillations are typically very hard to detect around SMBHs, suggesting that a massive object was rapidly orbiting the SMBH and slowly being consumed.

“One way to produce these oscillations is with an object orbiting within the black hole’s accretion disk. In this scenario, each rise and fall of the X-rays represents one orbital cycle,” Masterson said. Additional calculations also showed that the object is probably a white dwarf of about 0.1 solar masses orbiting at a velocity of about 333 million km/h (207 million mph). Ordinarily, astronomers would expect the orbital period to shorten, producing gravitational waves (GWs) that drain the object’s orbital energy and bring it closer to the black hole’s outer boundary (the event horizon).

However, the same observations conducted between 2022 and 2024 showed the fluctuation period dropped from 18 minutes to 7, and the velocity increased to half the speed of light (540 million km/h; 360 million mph). Then, something truly odd and unexpected followed: the oscillations stabilized. As Masterson explained:

“We were shocked by this at first. But we realized that as the object moved closer to the black hole, its strong gravitational pull could begin to strip matter from the companion. This mass loss could offset the energy removed by gravitational waves, halting the companion’s inward motion.”

Artist’s impression of two neutron stars at the point at which they merge and explode as a kilonova. Credit: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick

This theory is consistent with what astronomers have observed with white dwarf binaries spiraling toward each other and destined to merge. As they got closer to each other, instead of remaining intact, one would begin to pull matter off the other, which slowed down the approach of the two objects. While this could be the case here, there is no established theory for explaining what Masterson, Meyer, and their colleagues observed. However, their model makes a key prediction that could be tested when the ESA’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) launches in the 2030s.

“We predict that if there is a white dwarf in orbit around this supermassive black hole, LISA should see it,” says Megan. The preprint of Masterson and her team’s paper recently appeared online and will be published in Nature on February 15th, 2025.

Further Reading: ESA, NASA, arXiv, AJL

The post Recent Observations Challenge our Understanding of Giant Black Holes appeared first on Universe Today.

Strange “right-handed” neutrinos may be responsible for all the matter in the universe, according to new research.

Why is the universe filled with something other than nothing? Almost all fundamental interactions in physics are exactly symmetrical, meaning that they produce just as much matter as they do antimatter. But the universe is filled with only matter, with antimatter only appearing in the occasional high-energy process.

Obviously something happened to tip the balance, but what?

New research suggests that the answer may lie in the ghostly little particles known as neutrinos.

Neutrinos are beyond strange. There are three varieties, and they each have almost no mass. Additionally, they are also all “left-handed”, which means that their internal spins orient in only one direction as they travel. This is unlike all the other particles, which can orient in both directions.

Physicists suspect that there may be other kinds of neutrinos out there, ones that as yet remain undetected. These “right-handed” neutrinos would be much more massive than the more familiar left-handed ones.

Back in the early universe, these two kinds of neutrinos would have mixed together more freely. But as the cosmos expanded and cooled, this even symmetry broke, rendering the heavy right-handed neutrinos invisible. In the process, the symmetry breaking would separate matter from antimatter.

This could be the exact mechanism needed to explain that primordial mystery of the universe. But the right-handed neutrinos have one more trick up their sleeves.

The researchers behind the paper propose that the right-handed neutrinos didn’t completely disappear from the cosmic scene. Instead, they mixed together to form yet another new entity: the Majoran, a hypothetical kind of particle that is its own anti-particle. The Majoran would still inhabit the cosmos, surviving as a relic of those ancient times.

A massive, invisible particle just hanging around the cosmos? That would be an ideal candidate for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up the mass of almost every galaxy.

This means that the interactions between different kinds of neutrinos could explain why all observed neutrinos are left-handed, why there is more matter than antimatter, and why the universe is filled with dark matter.

This is all hypothetical, but definitely worth pursuing. And if we ever discover evidence for right-handed neutrinos, we just might be on the right track to solving a number of cosmological mysteries.

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