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Habitable Worlds Could Have Formed Before the First Galaxies 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.Read More →

Hubble Takes a 2.5 Gigapixel Image of Andromeda 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 willRead More →

Black Holes are Spinning Faster Than Expected 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 problemRead More →

Webb Sees Light Echoes in a Supernova Remnant 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 – interstellarRead More →

NASA is Building a Space Telescope to Observe Exoplanet Atmospheres 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 observatoryRead More →

New Glenn Reaches Orbit, but Doesn’t Recover the Booster 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 – toRead More →

Astronomers are Watching a Newly Forming Super Star Cluster 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 aRead More →

Sticks and Stones: The Molecular Clouds in the Heart of the Milky Way 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 aRead More →

Review: Dwarf Lab’s New Dwarf 3 Smartscope 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 recentlyRead More →

The Los Angeles Fires Got Extremely Close to NASA’s JPL Facility 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 asRead More →