Universe Today

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 →

Dark Matter Can’t Be Too Heavy 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 theRead More →

Space Itself May Have Created Galaxies 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 ofRead More →

A Flexible, Adaptable Space Metamaterial 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 kindRead More →

SpaceX Catches Booster But Loses Ship in Starship Test Flight 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 fromRead More →

The Most Accurate View of the Milky Way 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 twoRead More →

Webb and ALMA Team Up to Study Primeval Galaxy 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/submillimeterRead More →

Colliding Stars, Stellar Siphoning, and a now a “Blue Lurker.” This Star System has Seen it All 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 aboutRead More →

Recent Observations Challenge our Understanding of Giant Black Holes 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 theRead More →

An Even Ghostlier Neutrino May Rule the Universe 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 threeRead More →

The Gaia Mission’s Science Operations are Over The ESA has announced that Gaia’s primary mission is coming to an end. The spacecraft’s fuel is running low, and the sky-scanning phase of its mission is over. The ground-breaking mission has taken more than three trillion observations of two billion objects, mostly stars. The ESA launched Gaia in December 2013. It’s an astrometry mission that measures the positions, motions, and distances of stars with extreme accuracy. It created the largest and most accurate 3D map of space ever, including about one billion objects, mostly stars but also quasars, comets, asteroids, and planets. Gaia’s mission lasted twice asRead More →