Gravitational lensing occurs when things with mass create ripples and dents in the fabric of spacetime, and light has to follow along those lines, which sometimes create a magnifying glass effect. This both sounds and looks like something wild from science fiction, but it’s actually a very important tool in astronomy. The James Webb Space Telescope has been in the news a lot recently for just this: watching how light bends around massive galaxy clusters in space, revealing fainter, further away old galaxies behind them. 

Now, Slava Turyshev, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, is trying to harness one of these gravitational lenses closer to home, using our sun. In a new paper posted to the pre-print server arXiv, Turyshev computes all the detailed math and physics needed to show that it is actually possible to harness our sun’s gravity in this way, with some pretty neat uses. A so-called “solar gravitational lens” (SGL) could help us beam light messages into the stars for interstellar communication or investigate the surfaces of distant exoplanets.

“By harnessing the gravitational lensing effect of our star, astronomy would experience a revolutionary leap in observing capability,” says Nick Tusay, a Penn State astronomer not involved in the new work. “Light works both ways, so it could also boost our transmitting capability as well, if we had anyone out there to communicate with.”

When it comes to telescopes here on Earth, bigger is definitely better. To collect enough light to spot really faint far away objects, you need a huge mirror or lens to focus the light—but we can really only build them so big. This is where the SGL comes in, as an alternative to building bigger telescopes, instead relying on spacetime bent by the sun’s gravity to do the focusing for us. 

“Using the SGL removes the need to build larger telescopes and instead raises the problem of how to get a telescope out to the focal distance of the Sun (and how to keep it there),” explains Macy Huston, a Berkeley astronomer not involved in the new research. “And there’s a lot of work ongoing to try to solve this,” they add.

Turyshev is actively working on a mission design to send a one-meter telescope (less than half the size of the famous Hubble) out to the focus of the sun’s gravitational well. It’s quite a trek—this focal point is located about 650 AU out from our star, almost five times out from humanity’s current distance record holder, Voyager 1. To get out to such a huge distance in less than a lifetime, the team is relying on cutting-edge solar sail technology to move faster than ever before.

Currently, the James Webb Space Telescope is investigating the atmospheres of planets around other stars, and the future Habitable Worlds Observatory in the 2040s will hopefully be able to see enough detail in exoplanetary atmospheres to find hints of life. Turyshev’s mission would be the next big step towards confirming life on other worlds, hopefully launching around 2035. Once JWST and HWO identify possibly interesting worlds, the SGL telescope will then actually map the surface of an exoplanet in detail. Turyshev claims it would be able to see a planet blown up to 700 by 700 pixels—a huge improvement on direct imaging’s current 2 or 3 pixels. “If there is a swamp on that exoplanet, emitting methane, we’ll know that’s what is positioned on this continent on this island, for example,” he explains.

Looking further into the sci-fi future, this same SGL technology could be used not only “as a telescope we could use from the solar system to view other planetary systems in great detail” but also as an “interstellar communication network (for intentional communications),” says Huston. A laser positioned at the sun’s gravitational focus could send messages to other stars without losing as much signal as our current Earth-bound beacon tech.

“If we were to ever become an interstellar civilization, this [SGL] could potentially be the most effective means of communication between star systems,” says Tusay. Our radio transmissions, leaking out of Earth’s atmosphere since the early 1900s, rapidly become fainter the further away from our planet. Turyshev’s mathematical calculations show that signals sent from the SGL could be easily noticed at the distances of nearby stars, even when accounting for the noisy background of the real world. Transmission via the SGL is “not prohibited, it’s really encouraged by physics,” says Turyshev.

This tech wouldn’t solve all our interstellar roadblocks, though. We might be able to send messages, but we still don’t have a way of sending ourselves out amongst the stars to travel. There’d also be a huge delay in our galactic calls—more like sending a cross-country letter by horseback than FaceTiming with your friends. “Light still has a maximum speed,” reminds Tusay. As a result, sending a message to a star four light-years away would take four years to get there, and another four for the response to reach us. Still, the solar gravitational lens is one big step towards making our science fiction futures a reality.

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A new image from NASA’s almost two-year-old James Webb Space Telescope features new details of a portion of our galaxy’s dense center for the first time. The image includes some parts of the star-forming hotspot that astronomers are still trying to fully understand. The region is named Sagittarius C and is about 300 light-years away from Sagittarius A*, or the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

[Related: Gaze upon the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.]

“There’s never been any infrared data on this region with the level of resolution and sensitivity we get with Webb, so we are seeing lots of features here for the first time,” observation team principal investigator Samuel Crowe said in a statement. “Webb reveals an incredible amount of detail, allowing us to study star formation in this sort of environment in a way that wasn’t possible previously.” Crowe is an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

The image features roughly 500,000 stars and a cluster of young stars called protostars. These are stars that are still forming and gaining mass, while generating outflows that glow in the midst of an infrared-dark cloud. A massive previously-discovered protostar that is over 30 times the mass of our sun is located at the heart of this young cluster. 

The protostars are emerging from a cloud that is so dense that the light from stars behind it cannot reach the JWST. This light trick makes the region look deceptively less crowded. According to the team, this is actually one of the most tightly packed areas of the image. Smaller infrared-dark clouds dot the image where future stars are forming. 

“The galactic center is the most extreme environment in our Milky Way galaxy, where current theories of star formation can be put to their most rigorous test,” University of Virginia astronomer Jonathan Tan said in a statement. 

JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) also captured large-scale emission from ionized hydrogen that is surrounding the lower side of the dark cloud. According to Crowe, this is the result of energetic photons that are being emitted by young massive stars. The expanse of the region spotted by JWST came as a surprise to the team and needs more investigation. They also plan to further examine the needle-like structures in the ionized hydrogen, which are scattered in multiple directions.

“The galactic center is a crowded, tumultuous place. There are turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars, which then impact the surrounding gas with their outflowing winds, jets, and radiation,” Rubén Fedriani, a co-investigator of the project at the Instituto Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain, said in a statement. “Webb has provided us with a ton of data on this extreme environment, and we are just starting to dig into it.”

[Related: ‘Christmas tree’ galaxy shines in new image from Hubble and JWST.]

At roughly 25,000 light-years from Earth, the galactic center is close enough for the JWST to study individual stars. This allows astronomers to collect data on both how stars form, but also how this process may depend on the cosmic environment when compared to other regions of the galaxy. One question this could help answer is if there are more massive stars in the center of the Milky Way, as opposed to on the edges of the galaxy’s spiral arms.

“The image from Webb is stunning, and the science we will get from it is even better,” Crowe said. “Massive stars are factories that produce heavy elements in their nuclear cores, so understanding them better is like learning the origin story of much of the universe.”

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A team using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has observed two of the most distant galaxies astronomers have ever seen. At close to 33 billion light years away from Earth, these distant regions can offer insight into how the universe’s earliest galaxies may have formed. The findings are detailed in a study published November 13 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

[Related: ‘Christmas tree’ galaxy shines in new image from Hubble and JWST.]

The galaxies UNCOVER z-13 and UNCOVER z-12 are the second and fourth most distant galaxies ever observed and are located in a region called Pandora’s Cluster (Abell 2744). The two galaxies are among the 60,000 sources of light in Pandora’s Cluster that were captured in some of the first deep field images the JWST took in 2022. This region of space was selected for this kind of imaging due to its location behind several galaxy clusters. The light creates a natural magnification effect called gravitational lensing. This happens when the gravitational pull of the clusters’ combined mass warps the space-time around it. It then magnifies any light that passes nearby and offers a larger view behind the clusters.

Other galaxies confirmed at this distance generally appear in images as red dots. However, these new galaxies are larger and look more like a peanut and a fluffy ball, according to the team.

“Very little is known about the early universe, and the only way to learn about that time and to test our theories of early galaxy formation and growth is with these very distant galaxies,” study co-author and astronomer Bingjie Wang from Penn State University said in a statement. “Prior to our analysis, we knew of only three galaxies confirmed at around this extreme distance. Studying these new galaxies and their properties has revealed the diversity of galaxies in the early universe and how much there is to be learned from them.” 

Wang is also a member of the JWST UNCOVER (Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization) team that conducted this research. UNCOVER’s early goal is to obtain highly detailed images of the region around Pandora’s Cluster using JWST.

Since the light that is emitted from these galaxies had to travel for so long to reach Earth, it offers a window into the universe’s past. The team estimates that the light JWST detected was emitted by the two galaxies when the universe was about 330 million years old and that it traveled for about 13.4 billion light years to reach the space telescopes. 

However, the galaxies are currently closer to 33 billion light years away from Earth because of the expansion of the universe over this period of time. 

“The light from these galaxies is ancient, about three times older than the Earth,” study co-author, Penn State astronomer, and UNCOVER member Joel Leja said in a statement.  “These early galaxies are like beacons, with light bursting through the very thin hydrogen gas that made up the early universe. It is only by their light that we can begin to understand the exotic physics that governed the galaxy near the cosmic dawn.”

[Related: JWST takes a jab at the mystery of the universe’s expansion rate.]

The two galaxies are also considerably bigger than the three galaxies previously located at these extreme distances. While our Milky Way galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years across, galaxies in the early universe are believed to have been very compressed. A galaxy of 2,000 light years across like one of ones the team imaged came as a surprise.

“Previously discovered galaxies at these distances are point sources—they appear as a dot in our images,” Wang said. “But one of ours appears elongated, almost like a peanut, and the other looks like a fluffy ball. It is unclear if the difference in size is due to how the stars formed or what happened to them after they formed, but the diversity in the galaxy properties is really interesting. These early galaxies are expected to have formed out of similar materials, but already they are showing signs of being very different than one another.”

To make inferences about these early galaxies, the team used detailed models. They believed that in addition to being young (by space standards), the two galaxies also had few metals in their composition, and were growing rapidly and actively forming stars. 

“The first elements were forged in the cores of early stars through the process of fusion,” Leja said. “It makes sense that these early galaxies don’t have heavy elements like metals because they were some of the first factories to build those heavy elements. And, of course, they would have to be young and star-forming to be the first galaxies, but confirming these properties is an important basic test of our models and helps confirm the whole paradigm of the Big Bang theory.”

Astronomers will continue to use lensing clusters and the instruments aboard the JWST to continue to peel back the timeline of some of the universe’s first galaxies.  

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Two of the most powerful space telescopes in the universe have joined forces to showcase a panorama of colorful galaxy clusters about 4.3 billion light-years away from Earth. The image of  galaxy cluster MACS0416 is from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope and combines both visible and infrared light. 

[Related: Euclid telescope spies shimmering stars and galaxies in its first look at the ‘dark’ universe.]

According to NASA, MACS0416 is a pair of colliding galaxy clusters that will eventually combine to form an even bigger cluster. It includes numerous galaxies outside of the cluster and some other light sources that vary over time. The variation is likely due to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, where light is distorted and amplified from distant background sources.

Color coding

In the image, different colors represent the varying wavelengths of light. The shortest are blue, the intermediate are green, and the longest are red. The wavelengths range from 0.4 to 5 microns and the variation creates a particularly vivid landscape of galaxies.

The colors also give clues to how far away the galaxies are. The bluest galaxies are relatively close, tend to show intense star formation, and are best detected by Hubble. The more red galaxies tend to be further away and are best spotted by JWST. Some of the galaxies also appear very red because they have a large amount of cosmic dust that tends to absorb bluer colors of starlight.

“The whole picture doesn’t become clear until you combine Webb data with Hubble data,” Rogier Windhorst said in a statement. Windhorst is an astronomer at Arizona State University and principal investigator of the PEARLS program (Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science), which took the JWST observations.

Oh Christmas tree

While the images are pleasant to look like, they were also taken for a specific scientific purpose. The team was using their data to search for objects varying in observed brightness over time, known as transients. All of these colors twinkling together in the galaxy look like shining colorful lights on a Christmas tree. 

“We’re calling MACS0416 the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, both because it’s so colorful and because of these flickering lights we find within it. We can see transients everywhere,” said astronomer Haojing Yan of the University of Missouri in Columbia said in a statement. Yan is a co-author of one paper describing the scientific results published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The team identified 14 transients across the field of view. Twelve of the transients were located in three galaxies that are highly magnified by gravitational lensing. This means that they are likely to be individual stars or multiple-star systems that are very highly magnified for a short period of time. The other two transients are located within more moderately magnified background galaxies, so they are likely to be supernovae.

More observations with JWST could lead to finding numerous additional transients and in other similar galaxy clusters. 

Godzilla and Mothra 

One of the transients stood out in particular. The star system is located in a galaxy that existed roughly three billion years after the big bang and is magnified by a factor of at least 4,000. They nicknamed the star system Mothra in a nod to its “monster nature” of being both very bright and magnified. Mothra joins another lensed star the researchers previously identified that they nicknamed “Godzilla.” In Japanese cinema, Godzilla and Mothra are giant monsters known as kaiju.

In addition to the new JWST images, Mothra is also visible in the Hubble observations that were taken nine years ago. According to the team, this is unusual, because a very specific alignment between the foreground galaxy cluster and the background star is needed to magnify a star this much. The alignment should have been eliminated by the mutual motions of the star and the cluster.

An additional object within the foreground cluster could be adding more magnification. 

“The most likely explanation is a globular star cluster that’s too faint for Webb to see directly,” astronomer Jose Diego of the Instituto de Física de Cantabria in Spain said in a statement. “But we don’t know the true nature of this additional lens yet.” Diego is also a co-author of a paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics that details this finding. 

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On November 7, the European Space Agency (ESA) released the first five images taken with its premier Euclid space telescope. The images show spiral galaxies, star nurseries, and incredible celestial objects in incredibly sharp detail. 

[Related: Euclid space telescope begins its search through billions of galaxies for dark matter and energy.]

Perseus cluster of galaxies

IC 342 aka the ‘Hidden Galaxy’

Irregular galaxy NGC 6822

[Related: Your guide to the types of stars, from their dusty births to violent deaths.]

Globular cluster NGC 6397

The Horsehead Nebula

Dark matter and dark energy

In July, Euclid launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It’s on a mission of studying the mysterious influence of dark matter and dark energy on the universe and mapping one third of the extragalactic sky. According to the ESA, 95 percent of our cosmos appears to be made of these mysterious ‘dark’ entities. But we don’t understand what they are because their presence causes only very subtle changes in the appearance and motions of the things we can see.

“Dark matter pulls galaxies together and causes them to spin more rapidly than visible matter alone can account for; dark energy is driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe. Euclid will for the first-time allow cosmologists to study these competing dark mysteries together,” Carole Mundell, ESA Director of Science, said in a statement. “Euclid will make a leap in our understanding of the cosmos as a whole, and these exquisite Euclid images show that the mission is ready to help answer one of the greatest mysteries of modern physics.”

Euclid will observe the shapes, distances, and motions of billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years over the course of the next six years.

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Astronomers have discovered the most distant supermassive black hole ever observed. They had the help of a “cosmic magnifying glass,” or gravitational lensing. This happens when a massive celestial body creates a large curvature of spacetime so that the path of light around it can be bent as if by a lens.

The black hole is located in the galaxy UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. The galaxy cluster is about 13.2 billion-years-old. The team used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to find the telltale signature of a growing black hole. It started to form only 470 million years after the big bang when the universe was only 3 percent of its current age of about 13.7 billion years-old. The galaxy is much more distant than the cluster itself, at 13.2 billion light-years from Earth. 

[Related: Gravitational wave detector now squeezes light to find more black holes.]

Astronomers can tell that this black hole is so young because it is so giant. Black holes evaporate over time. Most black holes in galactic centers have a mass that is equal to roughly a tenth of the stars in their host galaxy, according to NASA. This early black hole is growing and as a mass that is on par with our entire galaxy. Astronomers have never witnessed a black hole at this stage before and studying it could help explain how some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed. The findings are detailed in a study published November 6 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

“We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” study co-author and astronomer Akos Bogdan said in a statement. Bogdan is affiliated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected,” Bogman added. This magnifying effect is known as gravitational lensing. The team took X-ray observations with Chandra for two weeks. They saw intense, superheated X-ray emitting gas—a supermassive black hole’s trademark—from the galaxy. The light coming from the galaxy and the X-ray from the gas around the supermassive black hole were magnified by the hot gas and dark matter coming from the galaxy cluster. This effect was like a “cosmic magnifying glass” and it enhanced the infrared light signals that the JWST could detect and allowed Chandra to see the faint X-ray source.

“There are physical limits on how quickly black holes can grow once they’ve formed, but ones that are born more massive have a head start. It’s like planting a sapling, which takes less time to grow into a full-size tree than if you started with only a seed,” study co-author and Princeton University astronomer Andy Goulding said in a statement. 

[Related: ‘Rogue black holes’ might be neither ‘rogue’ nor ‘black holes.’]

Observing this phenomenon could help astronomers answer how some supermassive black holes can hit enormous masses so soon after the explosion of energy from the big bang. There are two opposed theories for the origin of these supermassive black holes–light seed versus heavy seed. The light seed theory says that a star will collapse into a stellar mass black hole and then grow into a supermassive black hole over time. In the heavy seed theory, a large cloud of gas–not an individual star–collapses and condenses to form the supermassive black hole. This newly discovered black hole could confirm the heavy seed theory. 

“We think that this is the first detection of an ‘Outsize Black Hole’ and the best evidence yet obtained that some black holes form from massive clouds of gas,” study co-author and Yale University theoretical astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan said in a statement. “For the first time we are seeing a brief stage where a supermassive black hole weighs about as much as the stars in its galaxy, before it falls behind.”

The team plans to use this and more data coming in from the JWST and other space telescopes to create a better picture of the early universe. 

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Sometimes, amazing science happens in the background with little to no public attention. All those years of hard efforts and incremental progress are left unseen except by those living and working through it. Now, a new book detailing the making of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) aims to change that by sharing photographs, diagrams, and behind-the-scenes information of the science and pioneers behind the project. 

Inside the Star Factory: The Creation of the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s Largest and Most Powerful Space Observatory gives us a full-body summary of an astronomical feat that required more than 100 million hours of labor over the course of 30 years. It covers everything from the initial conception of the idea to the Christmas Day launch in 2021, providing a robust picture of what went into designing, engineering, and testing such a masterpiece. Science writer Christopher Wanjek provides an in-depth overview of the history of JWST, but even more, the book serves as an “illustrated guide [that] shows readers the heady world of scientific discovery at the very limits of human knowledge.”

All of the 100-plus images of the telescope’s construction were taken by Chris Gunn, who joined the project 15 years ago and was the only photographer given such extensive access to the development and launch of JWST. Over his long career, he’s focused on creating intricate images and videos related to science and technology, with previous experience capturing the last servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. His work puts faces to NASA’s biggest telescope endeavor, humanizing the entire assignment and showcasing those who dedicated so much of their time to a single goal. 

We had a chance to speak with Gunn about his new book to find out more about his process and experience. Here’s what he revealed. 

PopSci: How did you get involved with NASA and JWST? 

Gunn: I worked as a photographer on the last servicing mission to Hubble from 2006 to 2009. When that mission ended, I was asked to join the JWST team. I had never imagined being on such a long-term project. 

PopSci: What was the most challenging part about photographing the project? 

Gunn: The most challenging part about photographing this project was also the most exciting: the constantly evolving subject. Seeing parts of the observatory come together was amazing, but the trick was to keep a consistent look and feel in my photographs throughout the project. I started to pay more attention to the environments that I was shooting and bring elements of these environments into my compositions. When I could light my subjects, I took great care to do it subtly. Eventually, I realized that JWST’s geometry photographed beautifully but any distortion ate away at that beauty. Over time I became a more selective shooter with more restraint. 

PopSci: What’s your favorite moment (or moments) from your time with the team? 

Gunn: My favorite moments include the arrival of the first mirrors, the first time I saw the optical system deployed inside of NASA Johnson’s test chamber, and the mating of the optical system to the sunshield and main spacecraft bus. During each of these project milestones the cleanrooms were filled with a sense of awe and wonder. They aren’t particularly noisy in general, but they were super quiet for these moments. I had a sense that I was witnessing something great that humankind was achieving. 

PopSci: What were your go-to cameras and lenses? 

Gunn: One of the most interesting things about being on such a long-term project is seeing the progression in photographic technology as the years passed. I initially shot with Nikon’s D3s and D3X cameras, and finally settled on D4s for several years. Nikon’s 14-24mm 2.8 lens was my favorite lens early on. 

After the observatory was built, I switched to a medium-format Hasselblad-H camera boasting 50 megapixels. The Hassy gave me more resolution, and more importantly, allowed me to shoot with less distortion. Later in the project I acquired a mirrorless Hasselblad, which I used with adapted H lenses. The Hasselblad 50mm was probably my favorite lens as it offered a sharp, undistorted, and wide perspective. The medium format cameras also forced me to slow down and concentrate on composition. 

PopSci: Do you have a no. 1 photograph from the series? 

Gunn: I have quite a few favorites—they’re all in the book. If I had to choose one, it’s the image used for the cover. It was made at the tail end of a long day and depicts the one and only time that the secondary mirror was deployed using the flight motors. That’s the smaller mirror in the center. The center section of the primary mirror reflects the secondary mirror, and you can see the primary mirror in this reflection. Look closely and you also can see me in this reflection. The selfie was unintentional.

Buy Inside the Star Factory: The Creation of the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s Largest and Most Powerful Space Observatory here.

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Jupiter and its dynamic atmosphere are ready for another closeup in a new image taken with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Using the telescope’s data, scientists have discovered a new and never-before-captured high-speed jet stream. The jet stream sits over Jupiter’s equator above the main cloud decks, barrels at speeds twice as high as a Category 5 hurricane, and spans more than 3,000 miles. The findings were described in a study published October 19 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

[Related: This hot Jupiter exoplanet unexpectedly hangs out with a super-Earth.]

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system and its atmosphere has some very visible features, including the infamous Great Red Spot, which is large enough to swallow the Earth. The planet is ever-changing and there are still mysteries in this gas giant that scientists are trying to unravel. According to NASA, the new discovery of the jet stream is helping them decipher how the layers of Jupiter’s famously turbulent atmosphere interact with each other. Now, JWST is helping scientists look further into the planet and see some of the lower and deeper layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere where gigantic storms and ammonia ice clouds reside. 

“This is something that totally surprised us,” study co-author Ricardo Hueso said in a statement.  “What we have always seen as blurred hazes in Jupiter’s atmosphere now appear as crisp features that we can track along with the planet’s fast rotation.” Hueso is an astrophysicist at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain.

The research team analyzed data from JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) that was obtained in July 2022. The Early Release Science program was designed to take images of Jupiter 10 hours apart (one Jupiter day) in four different filters. Each filter detected different types of changes in the small features located at various altitudes of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

The resulting image shows Jupiter’s atmosphere in infrared light. The jet stream is located over the equator, or center, of the planet. There are multiple bright white spots and streaks that are likely very high-altitude cloud tops of condensed convective storms. Jupiter’s northern and southern poles are dotted by auroras that appear red and extend to the higher altitudes of the planet. 

“Even though various ground-based telescopes, spacecraft like NASA’s Juno and Cassini, and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have observed the Jovian system’s changing weather patterns, Webb has already provided new findings on Jupiter’s rings, satellites, and its atmosphere,” study co-author and University of California, Berkeley astronomer Imke de Pater said in a statement.  

The newly discovered jet stream travels at roughly 320 miles per hour and is located close to 25 miles above the clouds, in Jupiter’s lower stratosphere. The team compared the winds observed by JWST at higher altitudes with the winds observed at deeper layers by the Hubble Space Telescope. This enabled them to measure how fast the winds change with altitude and generate wind shears.

[Related: Jupiter formed dinky little rings, and there’s a convincing explanation why.]

The team hopes to use additional observations of Jupiter to determine if the jet’s speed and altitude change over time. 

“Jupiter has a complicated but repeatable pattern of winds and temperatures in its equatorial stratosphere, high above the winds in the clouds and hazes measured at these wavelengths,” Leigh Fletcher, a study co-author and planetary scientists at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. “If the strength of this new jet is connected to this oscillating stratospheric pattern, we might expect the jet to vary considerably over the next 2 to 4 years–it’ll be really exciting to test this theory in the years to come.”

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is showing off its imaging prowess again, this time with a stellar image of NGC 346. This is the brightest and biggest star-making region in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way called the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is about 21,000 light-years away in the southern constellation Tucana. 

[Related: JWST takes a jab at the mystery of the universe’s expansion rate.]

The image that looks like Edgar Allan Poe’s ominous raven in some angles was taken using Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). The blue wisps of light show emissions from molecules like silicates and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The red fragments highlight dust that is warmed by the largest and brightest stars in the center.

An arc at the center left might be a reflection of light from the star near the center of the arc, and similar curves appear to be associated with strats at the lower left and upper right. The bright patches and filaments denote areas with large numbers of protostars. While looking for the reddest stars, the research team found 1,001 pinpoint sources of light. Most of these are young stars still snuggled up in their dusty cocoons.

This SMC is more primeval than the Milky Way since it possesses fewer heavy elements. According to NASA, these elements are forged in stars through nuclear fusion and supernova explosions, compared to our own galaxy.

“Since cosmic dust is formed from heavy elements like silicon and oxygen, scientists expected the SMC to lack significant amounts of dust,” NASA wrote in a press release. “However the new MIRI image, as well as a previous image of NGC 346 from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera released in January, show ample dust within this region.”

Astronomers can combine JWST’s data in both the near-infrared and mid-infrared data to take a fuller census of the stars and protostars within this very dynamic region of space. This could help us better understand the galaxies that have existed billions of years ago, during an era known as Cosmic Noon. During Cosmic Noon, star formation was at its peak. Heavy element concentrations were lower, which we can see when we study the SMC.

[Related: The Whirlpool Galaxy’s buff, spiral arms grab JWST’s attention.]

This raven-like image is not the first JWST image that is picture perfect for spooky season. In September 2022, it released chilling new images of 30 Doradus aka the Tarantula Nebula. The nebula’s arachnid inspired nickname comes from its similar appearance to a burrowing tarantula’s silk-lined home. The Tarantula Nebula is about 161,000 light-years away from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy, which is home to some of the hottest and biggest stars known to astronomers.

JWST has also imaged the “bones” of  IC 5332, a spiral galaxy over 29 million light years away from the Earth in the constellation Sculptor. The uniquely shaped galaxy has a diameter of roughly 66,000 light years, making it slightly larger than our Milky Way galaxy. The MIRI aboard the new telescope observes the furthest reaches of the universe and can see infrared light, so it’s able to peer through the galaxy’s clouds of dust and into the “skeleton” of stars and gas underneath its signature arms. MIRI basically was able to take an x-ray of a galaxy, revealing IC 5332’s bones and a world that looks different, yet somewhat the same.

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In space, the brightness of a galaxy is typically determined by its mass. However, some new research suggests that less massive galaxies can actually glow just as brightly as larger ones. Due to irregular and brilliant bursts of star formation, some  younger galaxies appear deceptively large. The new findings are detailed in a study published October 3 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

[Related: Our universe mastered the art of making galaxies while it was still young.]

The first stellar images released by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2022 came with a bit of a quandary. To some astronomers, the young galaxies appeared to be too bright, too massive, and too mature to have formed so soon after the big bang, almost as if an infant grew into an adult after only a few years. 

“The discovery of these galaxies was a big surprise because they were substantially brighter than anticipated,” study co- author and Northwestern University astrophysicist Claude-André Faucher-Giguère said in a statement. “Typically, a galaxy is bright because it’s big. But because these galaxies formed at cosmic dawn, not enough time has passed since the big bang. How could these massive galaxies assemble so quickly? Our simulations show that galaxies have no problem forming this brightness by cosmic dawn.”

The period in cosmological history called Cosmic Dawn lasted from about 100 million years to 1 billion years after the big bang and is marked by the formation of the first stars and galaxies in the universe. 

“The JWST brought us a lot of knowledge about cosmic dawn,” study co-author and Northwestern University astrophysicist Guochao Sun said in a statement. “Prior to JWST, most of our knowledge about the early universe was speculation based on data from very few sources. With the huge increase in observing power, we can see physical details about the galaxies and use that solid observational evidence to study the physics to understand what’s happening.”

The team used advanced computer simulations to model how galaxies formed just after the big bang. Part of Northwestern’s Feedback of Relativistic Environments (FIRE) project, the simulations combine astrophysical theory and advanced algorithms to model how galaxies form. These models help researchers see how galaxies grow and change shape all while considering mass, energy, momentum, and chemical elements returned from stars. 

“The key is to reproduce a sufficient amount of light in a system within a short amount of time,” Sun said. “That can happen either because the system is really massive or because it has the ability to produce a lot of light quickly. In the latter case, a system doesn’t need to be that massive. If star formation happens in bursts, it will emit flashes of light. That is why we see several very bright galaxies.”

[Related: Your guide to the types of stars, from their dusty births to violent deaths.]

The simulations in the study created galaxies that were just as bright as the ones observed by JWST. They also found that the early galaxies formed at cosmic dawn likely had stars that formed in bursts. This is a concept called bursty star formation, where stars form in an alternating pattern. It begins with the formation of a bunch of stars at once, then millions of years with little to no stars, and then another burst of stars. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy followed a very different pattern of star formation at a steady rate.

According to Faucher-Giguère, bursty star formation is particularly common in low-mass galaxies. However, the details of why this happens are still the subject of other research. The team on this study believes that it happens when the initial bursts of stars explode as supernovae a few million years later. The gas is kicked out and then falls back inwards to form new stars and drives the cycle again. 

When the galaxies get massive enough, they have significantly stronger gravity. So when the  supernovae explode, they aren’t strong enough to eject gas from the star system and the gravity binds the galaxy together. The result is a more steady state.

“Most of the light in a galaxy comes from the most massive stars,” Faucher-Giguère said in a statement. “Because more massive stars burn at a higher speed, they are shorter lived. They rapidly use up their fuel in nuclear reactions. So, the brightness of a galaxy is more directly related to how many stars it has formed in the last few million years than the mass of the galaxy as a whole.”

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The dark side of the moon, despite its name, is a perfect vantage point for observing the universe. On Earth, radio signals from the furthest depths of space are obscured by the atmosphere, alongside humanity’s own electronic chatter, but the lunar far side has none of these issues. Because of this, establishing an observation point there could allow for unimpeded views of some of cosmic history’s earliest moments—particularly a 400 million year stretch known as the universe’s Dark Ages when early plasma cooled enough to begin forming the  protons and electrons that eventually made hydrogen.

After years of development and testing, just such an observation station could come online as soon as 2026, in part thanks to researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

[Related: Watch a rocket engine ignite in ultra-slow motion.]

The team is currently working alongside NASA, the US Department of Energy, and the University of Minnesota on a pathfinder project called the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night). The radio telescope is on track to launch atop Blue Ghost, private space company Firefly Aerospace’s lunar lander, as part of the company’s second moon excursion. Once in position, Blue Ghost will detach from Firefly’s Elytra space vehicle, then travel down to the furthest site ever reached on the moon’s dark side. 

“If you’re on the far side of the moon, you have a pristine, radio-quiet environment from which you can try to detect this signal from the Dark Ages,” Kaja Rotermund, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab, said in a September 26 project update. “LuSEE-Night is a mission showing whether we can make these kinds of observations from a location that we’ve never been in, and also for a frequency range that we’ve never been able to observe.”

More specifically, LuSEE-Night will be equipped with specialized antennae designed by the Berkeley Lab team to listen between 0.5 and 50 megahertz. To accomplish this, both the antennae and its Blue Ghost transport will need to be able to withstand the extreme temperatures experienced on the moon’s far side, which can span between -280 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of its shielded lunar location, however, LuSEE-Night will also need to beam its findings up to an orbiting satellite that will then transfer the information back to Earth.

“The engineering to land a scientific instrument on the far side of the moon alone is a huge accomplishment,” explained Berkeley Lab’s antenna project lead, Aritoki Suzuki, in the recent update. “If we can demonstrate that this is possible—that we can get there, deploy, and survive the night—that can open up the field for the community and future experiments.”

If successful, LuSEE-Night could provide data from the little known Dark Ages, which breaks up other observable eras such as some of the universe’s earliest moments, as well as more recent moments after stars began to form.

According to Berkeley Lab, the team recently completed a successful technical review, and is currently working on constructing the flight model meant for the moon. Once landed, LuSEE-Night will peer out into the Dark Age vastness for about 18 months beginning in 2026. 

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About 40 light years away, a system of seven Earth-sized planets orbit a star that is much cooler and smaller than our sun— the exoplanetary system called TRAPPIST-1. When these exoplanets were discovered in 2016, astronomers speculated that they could one day support humans. Three of those worlds are located in the star’s habitable zone, also called the “Goldilocks zone,” where the conditions for life could be “just right.” Now, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have made important progress in understanding the atmosphere of one of its potentially habitable planets.

[Related: JWST’s double take of an Earth-sized exoplanet shows it has no sky.]

JWST observations ruled out the possibilities for a clear, extended atmosphere, failing to detect elements such as hydrogen. The telescope’s new detections also cut through the interference of the star at the center of this system, avoiding what astronomers call stellar contaminations. The findings are detailed in a study published September 22 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The new study specifically sheds light on the nature TRAPPIST-1 b, the exoplanet that is closest to the system’s central star. The team from institutions in the United States and Canada used the JWST’s NIRISS instrument to observe TRAPPIST-1 b during two transits, when the planet passed in front of its star. 

The team used a technique called transmission spectroscopy to look deeper into the distant world. They saw the unique fingerprint left by the molecules and atoms that were found within the exoplanet’s atmosphere. “These are the very first spectroscopic observations of any TRAPPIST-1 planet obtained by the JWST, and we’ve been waiting for them for years,” study co-author and Université de Montréal doctoral student Olivia Lim said in a statement. 

In the past, stars at the center of solar systems may have hampered our understanding of far-off atmospheres. That’s because these suns can create “ghost signals” which fool observers into thinking they are seeing a particular molecule in the exoplanet’s atmosphere. This phenomenon, stellar contamination, is the influence of a star’s own features on the measurements of an exoplanet’s atmosphere.  A sun’s dark spots and bright faculae, or bright spots on its surface, can warp the chemical fingerprints that telescopes detect.

“In addition to the contamination from stellar spots and faculae, we saw a stellar flare, an unpredictable event during which the star looks brighter for several minutes or hours,” said Lim. “This flare affected our measurement of the amount of light blocked by the planet. Such signatures of stellar activity are difficult to model but we need to account for them to ensure that we interpret the data correctly.”

The team also used the observations to explore a range of atmospheric models for TRAPPIST-1 b. They ruled out the existence of cloud-free, hydrogen-rich atmospheres, which means that TRAPPIST-1 b likely does not have a clear and extended atmosphere around it. However, the data could not confidently rule out the possibility of a thinner atmosphere, perhaps made up of pure water, carbon dioxide, or methane. 

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope just identified its first exoplanet.]

According to the team, this result underscores the importance of taking stellar contamination into account when planning future observations of all exoplanetary systems. This consideration is especially true for systems like TRAPPIST-1, because the system is centered around a red dwarf star which can be particularly active with frequent flare events and dark spots.

More observations will be needed to determine exactly what kind of atmosphere is surrounding this exoplanet and if it could support human life. “This is just a small subset of many more observations of this unique planetary system yet to come and to be analyzed,” study co-author and Université de Montréal astronomer René Doyon said in a statement. “These first observations highlight the power of NIRISS and the JWST in general to probe the thin atmospheres around rocky planets.”

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has taken some new images of a star that exploded during the Reagan Administration. The space telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) helped capture the images of a world renowned supernova called Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A) in September 2022. The jaw-dropping new images were officially made public on August 31. 

[Related: An amateur astronomer spotted a new supernova remarkably close to Earth.]

Supernova 1987A is roughly 168,000 light-years away from Earth and located in the Large Magellanic Cloud–a satellite dwarf galaxy of the Milky Way. The supernova is the remnants of a blue supergiant star called Sanduleak–69 202. It was believed to hold a mass about 20 times that of the sun before the explosion was detected in February 1987. It is also the closest observed supernova since 1604, when Kepler’s Supernova illuminated the Milky Way. Supernova 1987A has been the target of observations at wavelengths ranging from gamma rays to radio waves for nearly 40 years. 

The latest image shows a central structure of inner ejecta similar to a keyhole. Clumpy gas and dust pack up the center that is ejected by the supernova explosion. According to NASA, the dust is so dense that even near-infrared light that Webb can detect can’t penetrate it, shaping the dark “hole” in the keyhole. 

Surrounding the inner keyhole is a bright equatorial ring which forms a band around the “waist” of the supernova which connects the two faint arms of hourglass-shaped outer rings. The equatorial ring is formed from material ejected tens of thousands of years before the supernova even exploded.. Bright hot spots in the ring appeared as the supernova’s shock wave hit it, and now exist externally to the ring, with diffuse emission surrounding it. These are where the supernova shocks hit more exterior material.

The Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-ray Observatory have also observed Supernova 1987A, but JWST’s sensitivity and spatial resolution abilities showed a new feature in this supernova remnant–small crescent-like structures. The crescents are believed to be part of the outer layers of gas that shot out from the supernova explosion. They are very bright, which may be an indication of an optical phenomenon called limb brightening. This results from being able to observe the expanding material in three dimensions. “The viewing angle makes it appear that there is more material in these two crescents than there actually may be,” NASA wrote in a press release.

Before JWST, the now-retired Spitzer telescope observed this supernova in infrared throughout its entire 16 year lifespan, providing astronomers with key data about how Supernova 1987A’s emissions evolved over time. However, Spitzer couldn’t observe the supernova with the same level of clarity and detail as JWST.  

[Related: JWST captures an unprecedented ‘prequel’ to a galaxy.]

There are still several mysteries surrounding this supernova, namely some unanswered questions about the neutron star that should have formed in the aftermath of the supernova explosion. There is some indirect evidence for the neutron star in the form of X-ray emission that was detected by NASA’s Chandra and NuSTAR X-ray observatories. Additionally, some observations taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array indicate the neutron star may be hidden within one of the dust clumps at the heart of the remnant.

JWST will continue to observe the supernova over time, using the NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) instruments that give astronomers the ability to capture new, high-fidelity infrared data over time. 

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a stellar new image of the Whirlpool Galaxy (aka M51 or NGC 5194), a grand-design spiral galaxy about 27 million light-years away from Earth. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), grand-design spiral galaxies like this one have prominent, well-developed spiral arms, unlike other spiral galaxies that have more ragged or disrupted spiral arms. 

[Related: Herschel Space Telescope’s First Images Give Promising Glimpse of What’s to Come.]

M51 lies in the constellation Canes Venatici (or The Hunting Dogs) and is trapped in a bit of a tumultuous relationship with the dwarf galaxy NGC 5195. The interaction between these two galactic neighbors has been one of the more well studied galaxy pairs in the sky. M51’s gravitational influence on its smaller companion is believed to be partially responsible for the grand nature of its prominent and distinct spiral arms. 

This new galactic portrait uses data from JWST’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). This new observation is one of a series of observations collectively titled Feedback in Emerging extrAgalactic Star clusTers (FEAST). The FEAST observations were designed for astronomers and the public to learn more about stellar feedback and star formation environments outside of the Milky Way galaxy. 

Stellar feedback describes the outpouring of energy from stars into the environments which form them. It is a crucial process in determining the rates at which stars form, and is important to building accurate models of star formation. 

“Stellar feedback has a dramatic effect on the medium of the galaxy and creates a complex network of bright knots as well as cavernous black bubbles,” the ESA wrote in a statement. 

In the new image, the dark red regions trace the filamentary warm dust permeating the medium of the galaxy. These rosy regions show the reprocessed light from complex molecules forming on dust grains. The orange and yellow portions show areas of ionized gas created by recently formed star clusters.

Before JWST became operative in 2022, other observatories including those made at the Atacama Large Millimetre Array in the Chilean desert and the Hubble Telescope gave astronomers a glimpse of star formation. These observations occurred at either the onset, when the dense gas and dust clouds where stars will form, or after the stars have been destroyed with their energy their natal gas and dust clouds. JWST is opening up a new observational window to the earlier stages of star formation and stellar light. 

“Scientists are seeing star clusters emerging from their natal cloud in galaxies beyond our local group for the first time. They will also be able to measure how long it takes for these stars to pollute with newly formed metals and to clean out the gas (these time scales are different from galaxy to galaxy),” wrote the ESA.

[Related: Our universe mastered the art of making galaxies while it was still young.]

More observations and study of these processes is expected to lead to a better understanding of how the whole star formation cycle and metal enrichment process are regulated within galaxies. It also could help present a more clear time scale for when planets and brown dwarfs form because once gas and dust is removed from newly formed stars, there isn’t any material left to form planets.

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just headed into its second year in service, and recently recorded new images of the Ring Nebula named Messier 57. This nebula is about 2,600 light-years away from Earth, located in the Lyra constellation. The images were released by an international team of astronomers who are part of the JWST Ring Nebula Project.

[Related: James Webb Space Telescope reconstructed a ‘star party,’ and you’re invited.]

The Ring Nebula is a common target for space enthusiasts and is known for a donut-shaped ring of dust and gas that can even be viewed with backyard telescopes in the summer months. 

“I first saw the Ring Nebula as a kid through just a small telescope,” Western University astrophysicist and member of the JWST Ring Nebula Imaging Project Jan Cami said in a statement. “I would never have thought that one day, I would be part of the team that would use the most powerful space telescope ever built, to look at this object.”

Messier 57 is known as a planetary nebula. These objects are the colorful remnants of dying stars that have tossed a majority of their mass at the end of their stellar lives. Nebulae like the Ring Nebula come in a variety of shapes and patterns, from something that looks like a lobster, to expanding bubbles, to cotton candy-like clouds. The Ring Nebula’s vibrant colors are shown in a whole new light with JWST’s NIRcam.

“We are amazed by the details in the images, better than we have ever seen before. We always knew planetary nebulae were pretty. What we see now is spectacular,” University of Manchester astrophysicist Albert Zijlstra said in a statement. 

The patterns in the Ring Nebula are the consequence of a complicated array of different physical properties that astronomers are still figuring out. The light from its hot and central star is illuminating the layers in the pattern. Similar to fireworks, different chemical elements within the Ring Nebula emit specific light colors. The colors help scientists understand the chemical evolution of these objects in better detail. 

“These images hold more than just aesthetic appeal; they provide a wealth of scientific insights into the processes of stellar evolution. By studying the Ring Nebula with JWST, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of the life cycles of stars and the elements they release into the cosmos,” member and co-lead scientist of the JWST Ring Nebula Imaging Project Nick Cox said in a statement.

[Related: This highly detailed image of the Cat’s Eye Nebula might finally help us understand how it formed.]

Investigating Messier 57 in this detail can also help astronomers better understand the sun. When stars of similar sizes to our solar system’s central star run out of the fuel needed for nuclear fusion, they can’t support themselves against their own gravity. This ends the balancing forces that kept the star stable for millions to billions of years.

The star’s outer layers are blasted outward as the core collapses, since nuclear fusion is still occurring in these outside layers. The star will initially become a red giant, which is expected to happen to our sun in about five billion years. Eventually, the outer shells will cool and disperse in the variety of shapes nebulae are famous for. 

“We are witnessing the final chapters of a star’s life, a preview of the Sun’s distant future so to speak, and JWST’s observations have opened a new window into understanding these awe-inspiring cosmic events,” astronomer and co-lead scientist of the JWST Ring Nebula Imaging Project Mike Barlow from University College London said in a statement. “We can use the Ring Nebula as our laboratory to study how planetary nebulae form and evolve.”

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The early universe was a stressful place for galaxies. Globs of tens to hundreds of neighboring galaxies, called galaxy clusters, would share a communal pool of hot gas—but not without drama. There was always another wayward galaxy crashing into the cluster, merging with one of the former occupants, and generally perturbing the gas pool, known as the intracluster medium.

That’s what makes the newly discovered galaxy cluster SPT2215 so special. Found about 8.4 billion-light years from Earth, astronomers recently captured views of SPT2215 as it existed when the universe was just 5 billion years old. On further study, they’ve deemed it one of the few “relaxed” galaxy clusters found from that period in the cosmos. It could lead scientists to revise how their models of how fast galaxies formed at the dawn of the universe.

[Related: These 6 galaxies are so huge, they’ve been nicknamed ‘universe breakers’]

“If the galaxy cluster is in the process of forming, we call it ‘disturbed’—it’s just kind of a mess,” says Michael Calzadilla, a PhD candidate in astrophysics at MIT and lead author of an April 19 paper in The Astrophysical Journal characterizing the newly discovered SPT2215 cluster with the help of multiple telescopes and flying observatories.

“If the gas is very round, very symmetrical, and looks kind of like a ball, it tells you that there haven’t been any recent interactions,” he says. “It’s very ‘relaxed.’” In other words, there are no galaxy mergers disrupting things, which seems to be the case with SPT2215.

Finding and studying relaxed galaxy clusters from the early universe can give astronomers clues to how galaxy and star formation differed between eight billion years ago and today. The discovery of SPT2215, however, came about unlike that of any other galaxy cluster. It began with an interesting shadow of microwave frequencies and ended with a bizarre thermostat reading.

An international team of dozens of scientists went looking for signs of distant galaxy clusters in the SPTpol Extended Cluster Survey, which uses the Sunyaev–Zel’dovich effect—the cosmic microwave background interacting with the hot communal gas from galaxies—to find relevant groups of stars.

The cosmic microwave background is the first light in the universe, a.k.a. the afterglow of the big bang, Cazadilla notes. When low-energy microwave photons encounter a galaxy cluster on their way to Earth, they’re scattered to higher energies by the gas, or the plasma inside of the galaxy cluster,” he says. The gaps left behind by those amped-up photons show up as shadows against the cosmic microwave background, giving a rough idea of where the cluster is. From there, astronomers have to do follow-up observations to tell the distance, and whether the cluster is disturbed or relaxed. In the case of SPT2215, Calzadilla and his colleagues used a collection of instruments including the Hubble Space Telescope, the infrared Spitzer Telescope, the Chandra X-ray observatory, and ground-based telescopes like the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile.

”You get more of the whole picture of what’s going on if you look at different wavelengths,” Calzadilla says. “Chandra is looking at X-ray wavelengths; Spitzer is looking at infrared wavelengths; and Hubble is looking at optical wavelengths that are kind of in the middle.”

The intracluster gas of a galaxy cluster typically cools over time, first emitting X-rays, then cooling to emit ultraviolet light, and finally, emitting electromagnetic wavelengths down to the infrared region, he explains. “We can catch each part of this process at different wavelengths, using these different telescopes.”

[Related: How a microwave helped astronomers solve the peryton mystery]

Normally, the cooling gas shared in a galaxy cluster slowly falls inward, forming and feeding a central galaxy that tends to dominate the others, Calzadilla says. The gas sustains star birth in that central galaxy, but also fuels the creation of a supermassive black hole at that galaxy’s center. When feeding, supermassive black holes will generate energetic outbursts, which push back against the cooling and inflating gas.

“It acts as a thermostat and regulates the temperature, in a sense of the galaxy cluster,” Calzadilla notes, slowing down the rate at which the gas cools.    

But what’s interesting about SPT2215, he adds, is that “it looks like that thermostat is having a hard time keeping up with the amount of cooling that’s going on.” That gives it a chillier aura than expected (starting at around 179,540 degrees Fahrenheit), with the gas being projected to cool much faster than in most other galaxy clusters found at a similar time in the universe. The central galaxy also exhibits more new, young stars than a cluster where a black hole kept the gas from cooling too quickly.        

Calzadilla thinks there could be a variety reasons SPT2215 is so cool, including the possibility “that maybe the black hole has only just now been turned on. It it takes a while for this cooling gas to make it to the central galaxy and into that black hole.”

While it would take further observations, perhaps with the James Webb Space Telescope or longer follow-ups with Hubble, to know for certain, “[SPT2215] could be telling us that galaxies are forming at a younger age than we thought,” in the early universe, Calzadilla says. “That’s challenging our timeline of when things happened.”

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The three-decade old Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a swarm of space boulders around the asteroid Dimorphos. If that name sounds familiar, it is the same asteroid that NASA deliberately slammed the 1,200 pound DART spacecraft into in September 2022.

[Related: NASA’s first attempt to smack an asteroid was picture perfect.]

The mission was the first time humans set out to change the movement of an object in space. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft slammed head-on into Dimorphos at 13,000 miles per hour on September 26, 2022 in an effort to change the asteroid’s velocity. The smashing results demonstrated how this kind of kinetic impact technology could be used to deflect asteroids heading towards the Earth. Dimorphos and the larger asteroid that it orbits, named Didymos, do not pose a known threat to Earth. 

The 37 free-flung boulders that Hubble has detected range in size from three 22 feet across. They are slowly drifting away from Dimorphos at slightly over half-mile per hour. The total mass in these detected boulders is about 0.1 percent the mass of Dimorphos.

“This is a spectacular observation–much better than I expected. We see a cloud of boulders carrying mass and energy away from the impact target. The numbers, sizes, and shapes of the boulders are consistent with them having been knocked off the surface of Dimorphos by the impact,” said University of California at Los Angeles planetary scientist David Jewitt said in a statement. “This tells us for the first time what happens when you hit an asteroid and see material coming out up to the largest sizes. The boulders are some of the faintest things ever imaged inside our solar system.”

According to Jewitt, this finding opens up a new dimension for studying the aftermath of the DART experiment when the European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft arrives at the binary asteroid in late 2026. Hera is scheduled to perform a detailed post-impact survey. 

The boulder cloud is also expanding and dispersing, and is expected to spread along Dimorphos and Didymos’ surface. NASA believes that the boulders are likely not shattered pieces of the asteroid caused by the impact. These pieces were already scattered across Dimorphos’ surface, based on the final close-up image that DART spacecraft took only two seconds before the collision. 

Jewitt estimates that the impact from DART shook off two percent of the boulders on the Dimorphos’ surface, and that the boulder observations made by Hubble also give an estimate for the size of the DART impact crater.

 “The boulders could have been excavated from a circle of about 160 feet across (the width of a football field) on the surface of Dimorphos,” he said. When Hera arrives in three years and five months, it will determine the actual crater size

[Related: Why scientists are studying the clouds of debris left in DART’s wake.]

It’s not fully clear how the boulders were lifted off Dimorphos’ surface, but they could have been part of an ejecta plume that Hubble and other observatories have photographed. It’s also possible that a seismic wave from the impact with DART may have rattled through the asteroid and shook it loose. 

“If we follow the boulders in future Hubble observations, then we may have enough data to pin down the boulders’ precise trajectories. And then we’ll see in which directions they were launched from the surface,” said Jewitt.

Asteroids present a real collision hazard to Earth, such as the one that caused the mass extinction event 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. Protecting the Earth from asteroids is also front of mind to respondents of a poll on Americans views on space exploration from Pew Research released on July 20. Sixty percent of respondents said that monitoring asteroids should be NASA’s top priority going forward, compared with only 12 percent who said that going to the moon again should be front and center. 

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The universe is a dusty place. Cosmic particles can range from the size of a single large molecule up to a bit larger than a grain of terrestrial sand, and these can accumulate in billowing clouds light-years wide. The general scientific understanding was that dust piles up gradually, produced by stars and supernovae over hundreds of millions of years. Dust is usually a fixture of mature galaxies, or so astronomers thought. 

But in a new paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, astronomers found a specific type of cosmic dust, high in carbon, in young distant galaxies just 800 million years after the Big Bang. That accumulation happened far earlier than current theories of dust formation suggest is possible. It’s a finding that could change how astronomers understand the creation of stars and evolution of galaxies in the early universe, and ultimately, how that young universe grew into the cosmos we know today. 

For a long time, astronomers treated the cosmic stuff the way we might view a dust bunny under a sofa: as a nuisance. Scientists tried to look beyond large clouds of cosmic dust, treated more like obstacles than subjects of study in their own right. “The way most astronomers interact with it is that [dust] actually absorbs a lot of the light that we’re trying to observe,” says lead study author Joris Witstok, a post-doctoral researcher with the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at Cambridge, in the UK. 

But that’s changed in recent years, thanks to observatories such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which uses infrared light to see through the clouds. Scientists have also come to appreciate the dust itself, realizing these tiny flecks of carbon, silicon, and other matter are responsible for large-scale processes in the universe, such as new star formation. 

”For example, in the Milky Way, we have these sites where new stars are forming, and they’re very dusty,” Witstok says. “There’s big clouds of gas and dust and the dust really helps to allow the gas to cool and contract and therefore form new stars.”

[Related: 5,000 tons of ancient ‘extraterrestrial dust’ fall on Earth each year]

It’s not that the early universe was dustless. Previous studies had found large quantities of dust in galaxies in the very early universe, according to Witstok. Astronomers are interested in this early dust because it represents when stars began to produce some of the first elements heavier than hydrogen.

“The first stars that started to convert hydrogen into helium, which was the only thing that was around all the way at the beginning, into the heavier elements like carbon, oxygen,” Witstok says. 

Large primordial stars may have expelled vast quantities of dust, made of these heavier elements, toward the end of their life cycles, or during supernovae explosions as they died. 

But previous studies hadn’t been able to detect carbonaceous dust—meaning it’s rich in carbon—at such early times. 

“The thing that is really a new discovery here is that we’re able to pinpoint the type of dust grains that we’re seeing,” Witstok says. ”What we’re actually able to tell is that there’s something producing, specifically, these carbon dust grains on a very short timescale. And that’s where the surprise lies.”

Spectrographic observations of dust nearer to Earth, within the Milky Way galaxy, made this discovery possible. Spectroscopy breaks light into a spectrum and looks for telltale signs of absorbed light at certain wavelengths associated with different elements and compounds—sort of like reading a unique rainbow. 

Carbonaceous dust produces a spectroscopic “bump” at a wavelength of 217.5 nanometers, a wavelength that places it in the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum. At least, that’s the wavelength of the light as it left its home galaxy billions of years ago. 

“Since it’s been traveling over roughly 13 billion years, while the universe is expanding, the light really gets stretched with that expansion,” Witstok says, a phenomenon known as redshift. Light that was ultraviolet gets stretched longer, so that the wavelength—about 1.5 to 2 micrometers—is now in the infrared, the part of the spectrum JWST is fine-tuned to measure. 

“That’s exactly why we couldn’t do this before,” Witstok says. “Because with JWST, we’re now for the first time able to look and make these very precise measurements in the infrared.”

[Related: Physicists figured out a recipe to make titanium stardust on Earth] 

Now that researchers have measured this carbonaceous dust at an earlier time in the universe than expected, they’re left trying to figure out what process could be producing it. There are two theories, Witstok says, though neither are perfect. 

The first is that supernovae in early galaxies make the dust, with dying stars expelling the material before their final fiery death throes. But the problem there, he says, is that violent forces unleashed by the supernovae might also destroy much of that dust.

Another source of the dust could be Wolf-Rayet stars, massive, hot, and fast-burning stars that can expel a large portion of their mass into space in less than a million years’ time. “But again, it’s the question of how much can they actually produce?” Witstok says. “Is it enough to explain what we’re seeing in the early universe?”

Witstok and his colleagues hope to answer those questions with computer simulations. Theorists can try to tweak models of supernovae and Wolf-Rayet stars to try to find the conditions that produce the carbonaceous dust seen in the JWST observations. 

And further observations of early galaxies may net answers as well, he says. “We could start to look at what might be hints of an unusual number of Wolf-Rayet stars within those galaxies, for example.”

Whatever is driving carbonaceous dust creation in the early universe may hold clues for understanding how galaxies in the more recent universe evolved, and how stars and planets form, too. ”Dust is this really key component of how galaxies evolve,” Witstok says. ”That we’re now starting to see more and more evidence of it forming very early on is telling us that perhaps this evolution is taking place more quickly than we previously thought. That then has a knock-on effect, down the line, as to how we get to the present.”

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In milliseconds, Google can serve up a fact that long eluded many of humanity’s deepest thinkers: The universe is nearly 14 billion years old. And many cosmologists continue to grow more confident in that number. In December of 2020, a collaboration of researchers working on the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile published their latest estimate: 13.77 billion years, plus or minus a few tens of millions of years. Their answer matches that of the Planck mission, a European satellite that made similar observations between 2009 and 2013.

The precise observations of ACT and Planck come after more than a millennium of humans watching the sky and pondering where it all could have come from. Somehow, primates with lifespans of less than a century got a handle on events that took place eons before their planet—and even the ancient stars and atoms that would form their planet—existed. Here’s a brief account of how humanity came around to figure out how old the universe is.

Antiquity: The beginning of creation

Every culture has a creation myth. The Babylonians, for instance, believed the heavens and the Earth to be hewn from the carcass of a slain god. But few belief systems specified when existence started existing (one exception is Hinduism, which teaches that the universe reforms every 4.3 billion years, not so far off from the actual age of the Earth).

The idea that stuck, at least in the West, came from the Greek philosophers, and it was actually something of a scientific step back. In the fourth and third centuries BCE, Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers went all in on the notion that the planets and stars were embedded in eternally rotating celestial spheres. For the next millennium or so, few expected the entire universe to have an age at all.

The clash between the night sky and the infinite universe became known as Olber’s paradox, named after Heinrich Olber, an astronomer who popularized it in 1826. An early version of the modern solution came, of all people, from the poet Edgar Allan Poe. We experience night, he speculated in his prose poem “Eureka” in 1848, because the universe is not eternal. There was a beginning, and not enough time has elapsed since then for the stars to fully light up the sky.

1900s: The early and modern universes come into view

But the resolution to Olber’s paradox took time to sink in. In 1917, when Einstein’s own theory of gravity told him that the universe likely grew or shrank over time, he added a fudge factor into his equations—the cosmological constant—to get the universe to hold still (allowing it to endure forever).

[Related: From the archives: The Theory of Relativity gains speed]

Meanwhile, larger telescopes had brought clearer views of other galaxies to astronomers’ eyepieces, prompting a fierce debate over whether they were looking at far-off “island universes,” or nearby star clusters inside the Milky Way. Edwin Hubble’s keen eyes settled the argument in the late 1920s, measuring intergalactic distances for the first time. He found that not only were galaxies immense and distant objects, they were also flying away from each other.

The universe was expanding, and Hubble clocked its expansion rate at 500 kilometers per second per megaparsec, a constant that now bears his name. With the expansion of the universe in hand, astronomers had a powerful new tool to look back in time and gauge when the cosmos started to grow. Hubble’s work in 1929 pegged cosmic expansion in such a way that the universe should be roughly 2 billion years old.

“The expansion rate is telling you how fast you can rewind the history of the Universe, like an old VHS tape,” says Daniel Scolnic, a cosmologist at Duke University. “If the rewind pace is faster, then that means the movie is shorter.”

But measuring the distances to far-flung galaxies is messy business. A cleaner method arrived in 1965, when researchers detected a faint crackling of microwaves coming from every direction in space. Cosmologists had already predicted that such a signal should exist, since light emitted just hundreds of thousands of years after the universe’s birth would have been stretched by the expansion of space into lengthier microwaves. By measuring the characteristics of this Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), astronomers could take a sort of snapshot of the young universe, deducing its early size and contents. The CMB served as unassailable evidence that the cosmos had a beginning.

“The most important thing accomplished by the ultimate discovery of the [CMB] in 1965 was to force us all to take seriously the idea that there was an early universe,” wrote Nobel prize laureate Steven Weinberg in his 1977 book, The First Three Minutes.

1990 to present: Refining the calculation

The CMB let cosmologists get a sense of how big the universe was at an early point in time, which helped them calculate its size and expansion today. Scolnic likens the process to noting that a child’s arm appears one foot long in a baby picture, and then estimating the height and growth speed of the corresponding adolescent. This method gave researchers a new way to measure the universe’s current expansion rate. It turned out to be nearly 10 times slower than Hubble’s 500 kilometers per second per megaparsec, pushing the moment of cosmic genesis further back in time. In the 1990s, age estimates ranged from 7 to 20 billion years old.

Painstaking efforts from multiple teams strove to refine cosmology’s best estimate of the universe’s expansion rate. Observations of galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993 pegged the current Hubble constant at 71 kilometers per second per megaparsec, narrowing the universe’s age to 9 to 14 billion years.

[Related: Stellar telescopes for your space-loving kids]

Then in 2003, the WMAP spacecraft recorded a map of the CMB with fine features. With this data, cosmologists calculated the universe’s age to be 13.5 to 13.9 billion years old. About a decade later, the Planck satellite measured the CMB in even more detail, getting a Hubble constant of 67.66 and an age of 13.8 billion years. The new independent CMB measurement from ACT got basically the same numbers, further bolstering cosmologists’ confidence that they know what they’re doing.

“Now we’ve come up with an answer where Planck and ACT agree,” said Simone Aiola, a cosmologist at the Flatiron Institute and member of the ACT collaboration, in a press release at the time. “It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable.”

Up next: A cosmological conflict

But as measurements of the early and modern universes have gotten more precise, they’ve started to clash. While studies based on the CMB baby picture suggest a Hubble constant in the high 60s of kilometers per second per megaparsec, distance measurements of today’s galaxies (which Scolnic compares to a cosmic “selfie”) give brisker expansion rates in the low to mid 70s. Scolnic participated in one such survey in 2019, and another measurement based on the brightness of various galaxies came to a similar conclusion (that the modern universe is speedily expanding) in January 2021.

Taken at face value, the faster rates these teams are getting could mean that the universe is actually around a billion years younger than the canonical 13.8 billion years from Planck and ACT. Or, the mismatch may hint that something deeper is missing from modern astronomy’s picture of reality. Connecting the CMB to the present day involves assumptions about the poorly understood dark matter and dark energy that appear to dominate our universe, for instance, and the fact that the Hubble constant measurements aren’t lining up could indicate that calculating the true age of the universe will involve more than just rewinding the tape.

[Related: How to weigh the universe, according to astronomers]

Another controversial estimate claims the universe could be 26.7 billion years old, so twice as ancient as currently thought. This is based on the unconfirmed notion that redshift light from distant galaxies can be altered by physical constants other than the expansion of space. One way to test this is through finite measurements from the James Webb Space Telescope.

“I am not certain about how we are deriving the age of the universe,” Scolnic says. “I’m not saying that it’s wrong, but I can’t say it’s right.”

This story has been updated. It was originally published on January 13, 2021.

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

A HIGH VALLEY in the mountains of West Virginia is home to one of the world’s largest radio telescopes: a white-paneled behemoth called the Green Bank Telescope whose dish is bigger than a football field and whose topmost point is almost as high as the Washington Monument’s. That telescope typically collects radio-wave emissions from cosmic phenomena such as black holes, pulsars, supernova remnants, and cosmic gases. When doing that work, it receives those emissions passively. But now it has had experience with a new, more active tool: a radar transmitter. 

Thanks to defense contractor Raytheon, the telescope has gotten practice emitting its own radio waves, using the big dish to direct them, and bouncing them off objects in space. The reflected signals were then collected by more radio telescopes—antennas spread across the planet that are part of a collection of instruments called the Very Long Baseline Array. Data from those radar signals can be used to produce detailed pictures of, and to learn more details about, the moon, the planets, asteroids, and space debris—a set of targets of interest to both science and the defense community.

Radar genesis

The collaboration is Steven Wilkinson’s fault. “I’m the instigator,” Wilkinson, principal technical fellow at Raytheon, confesses jokingly. Back in 2019, Wilkinson was working on ultraprecise clocks but needed to find a new funding stream. So he went to the American Astronomical Society meeting, hoping to talk to someone from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) about those clocks—a technology integral to the instrumentation of radio telescopes. The NRAO is a set of federally funded telescopes that astronomers from all over the world can use. 

At the meeting, Wilkinson met the director of NRAO, Tony Beasley, and Beasley did indeed want a partner—but not in timekeeping. He wanted a radar collaborator. “That is our core competency as a company,” says Wilkinson. “I just could not believe my ears.”

Always game for a new experiment, Wilkinson went back to Raytheon and attempted to convince the bosses to put a radar transmitter on the giant Green Bank Telescope—formerly part of the NRAO, now its own separate facility but often a partner in NRAO projects. (Disclosure: I worked at the Green Bank Observatory, which is where the Green Bank Telescope is located, as an educator from 2010 to 2012.) 

“For radar, you’re worried about sending a signal and then receiving it,” says Patrick Taylor, head of NRAO’s and Green Bank Observatory’s joint radar division. “So you lose a lot of your power going out and then coming back again. … In that sense, you need really large telescopes. And the largest telescopes in the world are radio telescopes.” The array of telescopes that would catch the returning signal, conveniently, belongs to NRAO.

By October of 2020, the joint Raytheon radio observatory team had built a 700-watt prototype transmitter—about as powerful as a household microwave oven—and placed it at the prime focus of the telescope.

With the system in place, the joint team has since performed three kinds of tests: experiments involving the moon, an asteroid, and space debris. “Those are the three main fields that we want to look at,” says Taylor. “Planetary-scale bodies, like the moon; small bodies, like asteroids and comets, for planetary science and planetary defense; and space debris, for, essentially, safety, security, and awareness of what’s out there around the Earth.” 

The system that illuminates all of these objects—natural and synthetic—is the same: Radar signals leave the telescope, bounce off the objects, and return to be collected by other telescopes.

Over the moon

The moon tests returned perhaps the most striking results, showing portraits of the Apollo 15 landing site and Tycho Crater in detail such as you might find on a United States Geological Survey quadrant map of Earth. The pictures, taken from hundreds of thousands of miles away, boast a similar level of detail to those shot with the high-tech camera aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which, as its name suggests, is in orbit around the moon. 

Later, the team shot radio waves at an asteroid 1.3 million miles from Earth. The rocky body was just about 0.6 miles wide—small enough to make for impressive pictures from afar, but too big for comfort if it were on a collision course with Earth. Finding such asteroids, keeping track of their orbits, and understanding their characteristics could help scientists both know if a global catastrophe is careening toward the planet and develop mitigation strategies if one is—a capability the Double Asteroid Redirection Test recently demonstrated. (That mission involved slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid in orbit with another asteroid, to see if the bump could change its trajectory. It was successful.) 

“Radar is not great for finding asteroids in the sense of discovering them,” says Taylor, “but radar is great for tracking, monitoring, and characterizing them after they are discovered by optical or infrared observatories.”

Importantly, though, both sides of the team—those from Raytheon and those from Green Bank Observatory and the NRAO—are also interested in using the radar system to check out space debris. Those objects would be ones that are far out, between geostationary orbit (around 22,000 miles from Earth) and lunar orbit. “With so many more payloads going to the moon, there’s going to be more and more junk out there,” says Taylor. “Especially if we start sending human payloads, which we’re obviously planning to do, you’re gonna want to be able to track that debris.”

Wilkinson cites as an example the recent rocket booster from the Artemis I mission, a precursor to sending humans back to the moon. “That would be something that we would try to go and find and image and do some cool stuff,” he says. 

Knowing the nature of debris is of interest to scientists and to civil projects that may venture far out, but it’s also relevant to defense: The Space Force, for instance, is keeping an eye on the problem, and the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) is even working on a program called the Cislunar Highway Patrol System (CHPS), which according to an AFRL statement will “search for unknown objects like mission related debris, rocket bodies, and other previously untracked cislunar objects, as well as provide position updates on spacecraft currently operating near the moon or other cislunar regions that are challenging to observe from Earth.”

Sure, you don’t want pieces of space trash to hurt astronauts or damage or destroy spacecraft. But military and intelligence officials are also, in general and specifically through programs like CHPS, trying to find out more about everyone’s spacecraft out there and what they’re up to. Powerful Earth-based radar, if it’s capable of surveilling debris, would be technologically capable of doing the same to active satellites too. 

Let’s dish

The team’s hope is that a higher-powered radar system would be a permanent fixture on the telescope now that the low-power prototype has done its demo job. The work can feed back into Raytheon’s other projects. “We could take a little bit more risk to develop technology and the things that we’re learning here and then fold that back into our other products,” says Wilkinson. This system could be a test bed, he says, for the company’s future tracking work in the space between geostationary orbit and the moon—a science experiment that could lead to the next generation of “space situational awareness” technology.

Both sides of the team are working on a conceptual design for the higher-power system with funding from the National Science Foundation. Flora Paganelli, a project scientist in NRAO’s radar division, says it’s the first time she’s been able to help craft a ground-based telescopic tool as it’s being built. Previously, she was a member of the Cassini Radar Science Team, and she also worked at the SETI Institute before joining NRAO. 

Having such input on this instrument is very significant right now. For researchers like Paganelli, such an instrument would augment science in a more significant way than it would have even just a few years ago. That’s because a few years ago, the US had two “planetary radars,” or systems that did work like surveilling the moon, planets, and asteroids.

Today, there’s just one—Goldstone, in California—because the other, at the iconic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, is no longer usable. Sadly, the telescope collapsed in 2020: The platform that hung above the dish crashed into its panels. Taylor worked there for years, before he did a stint at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and then came to NRAO. “Having a radar on the Green Bank Telescope, it’s something we considered for many years, essentially as a way to complement the other existing systems,” he says. 

Because there are no firm plans to rebuild Arecibo or something like it, Green Bank represents the best hope for a second such radar system in the United States. “It kind of went from something that could complement Arecibo to something that could step in and fill the void,” Taylor says of Green Bank’s system. Paganelli notes that the scientific community’s radar expertise could now coalesce there.

Wilkinson, though he comes from the corporate national security sphere, also has an inherent interest in astronomy, which makes this dual-use project exciting to him. Also exciting: astronomy’s openness. “A lot of the things we do here, typically, we can’t talk about,” says Wilkinson, of Raytheon. The universe’s secrets, on the other hand, are there to be discovered and shared, not kept. 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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Few scientific tools get introduced in a press conference by the commander-in-chief. But NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is no ordinary instrument. President Biden unveiled the first image from JWST in July 2022, revealing the sharpest, deepest infrared view of the universe ever taken. And that was only the beginning. 

The solar-powered device, which drifts at a stable point 930,000 miles away from Earth, has since captured giant galaxies from the cosmic dawn; helped researchers discover the most distant and active supermassive black hole; snapped glowing views of Saturn and Jupiter; and found a new world beyond our solar system. It has teased out the details of the atmospheres above exoplanets and made the first-ever in-space detection of a molecule called methyl cation, a building block for the more complex carbon compounds found on Earth. 

The telescope was built on several aerospace innovations. Its mirrors are plated in a microscopic film of gold, optimized to reflect light. Its imagers, which include the Near-Infrared Camera and Mid-Infrared Instrument, allow JWST to look beyond cosmic dust and sense weak and ancient light from up to 13 billion years ago, just 800,000 years after the universe was born. And thanks to far more recent technology, it’s also incredibly easy to set up alerts for when the JWST has captured a new image, so you never miss out.

These remarkable James Webb Space Telescope images show stars, galaxies, and space in all their sparkling glory. What are your favorites?

[Related: The best telescopes for kids]

This post has been updated. It was originally published in July 2023.

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It’s been almost one year since NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) released its first finds to the public. Now the JWST has its sights set on the ringed planet Saturn. On June 25, JWST used its hard working Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to capture stellar images of Saturn using near-infrared observations for the first time.

[Related: NASA hopes its snake robot can search for alien life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.]

The planet itself appears very dark at this infrared wavelength observed by the telescope. The methane gas in the planet absorbs almost all of the sunlight that is falling on the atmosphere. Its famed icy rings are still relatively bright, making Saturn look a bit more unusual.  

This new image was taken as part of Webb Guaranteed Time Observation program 1247. Several very deep exposures of the sixth planet from the sun, which were designed to test JWST’s capacity to detect faint moons around Saturn and its bright rings. Newly discovered Saturnian moons could help scientists paint a more complete picture of the planet’s current system and its past history. 

Saturn’s ring system is shown in clear detail along with several of the planet’s over 140 known moons—Dione, Enceladus, and Tethys. Deeper exposure will help the team probe some of Saturn’s more faint rings that aren’t visible in this image. These include the thin G ring and the diffuse E ring. The rings of Saturn are made up of rocky and icy fragments, with particles running in size from smaller than a single grain of sand up to some that are as large as mountains here on Earth. Researchers recently used JWST to explore the moon Enceladus, and found a large plume jetting from its southern pole that contains both particles and plentiful amounts of water vapor. This moon plume feeds Saturn’s E ring.

The image also shows Saturn’s atmosphere in some surprising and unexpected detail. The Cassini spacecraft observed the atmosphere at greater clarity, but this is the first time that the atmosphere has been observed this clearly at this particular wavelength (3.23 microns), which is unique to JWST. The planet’s northern hemisphere has large, dark, diffuse structures that don’t follow its lines of latitude, so according to NASA, this image is lacking the familiar striped appearance that is typically seen from Saturn’s deeper atmospheric layers. 

[Related: Saturn’s rings have been slowly heating up its atmosphere.]

Comparing Saturn’s northern and southern poles in this image shows differences that are typical with the known seasonal changes on the planet. Saturn is currently experiencing summertime in its northern pole, with the southern pole emerging from darkness at the end of its winter.  However, it also shows a particularly dark northern pole, due to an unknown seasonal process that is particularly affecting polar aerosols. There is a small hint of brightening towards the edge of Saturn’s disk that could be due to a process called high-altitude methane fluorescence. During this process, light is emitted after it is absorbed. It could also be due to emission from the trihydrogen ion (H3+) in the ionosphere or a combination of both processes. Spectroscopy from JWST could help confirm the reason behind this brightness.

This new yet to be peer-reviewed data on Saturn will add to the famed Pioneer 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, missions and the decades of work done by the Cassini spacecraft and the Hubble Space Telescope. 

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It’s an exhilarating and sobering thought: All the planets, galaxies, starlight, and other objects that we can see and measure in the universe make up just 5 percent of existence. The other 95 percent are eaten up by two enigmas, dark matter and dark energy, known to scientists by their apparent gravitational effects on the surrounding universe, but not directly detectible.

On July 1, however, a new European Space Agency mission could help scientists get a little closer to solving the twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. The Euclid space telescope will take flight from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station no earlier than 11:11 a.m. EDT atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. NASA will live stream the launch beginning at 10:30 a.m.

Following blastoff, Euclid will take about 30 days to reach its operational orbit around Lagrange Point 2 (L2), an area a million miles toward the outer solar system where Euclid can maintain a constant position relative to Earth. The James Webb Space Telescope also orbits L2.

[Related: A super pressure balloon built by students is cruising Earth’s skies to find dark matter]

Once on location and operational, Euclid will begin what is expected to be a six-year mission where it will survey around a third of the sky, carefully measuring the shapes of billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away to catch a glimpse at the ways dark matter and dark energy shape our cosmos. To do that, the roughly 4,600-pound space telescope will use its four-foot-wide primary mirror to collect and focus visible and near-infrared wavelengths of light on two instruments: the VISible instrument camera and Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, which helps determine the distance to far off galaxies.

“The awesomeness of how many galaxies Euclid will be able to measure and at what amazing precision—it’s just an amazing feat of human engineering,” says Lindley Winslow, a professor of physics at MIT who designs experiments to detect dark matter, but is not directly involved with this mission. “The fact that we can do precision cosmology is awesome.”

Cosmologists, who study the formation, evolution, and structure of the universe, have a model called Lambda-CDM that might explain why everything is the way it is. Lambda is the cosmological constant, the force that appears to be causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate and which scientists believe is related to or manifests in mysterious dark energy. CDM stands for “cold dark matter,” which interacts with normal matter gravitationally.

”Those are the two ingredients that have sculpted the universe that we know,” Winslow says. Dark energy drives universal expansion, while “in the early universe, it was this cold dark matter that pulled visible matter that we see now into potential wells, that then allowed it to contract and form galaxies and stars.”

Lambda-CDM helps us construe a lot of the large-scale universe, according to Winslow, but it doesn’t tell us how it fits together with the theory that explains how the small scale universe works: the Standard Model of particle physics. Euclid is one of several attempts to learn more about how the universe expands and revise Lambda-CDM.

“What we’re really interested in is, can we get more data? Winslow says. “And can we find something that Lambda-CDM doesn’t explain?”

To hunt for that evidence, Euclid will use a technique known as weak gravitational lensing. This is similar to the strong gravitational lensing technique employed by JWST, where the mass of a foreground object, such as a galaxy cluster, is used to magnify a more distant background object. With weak gravitational lensing, scientists are more interested in the way the mass of the foreground objects, including dark matter, creates subtle distortions in the shape of background galaxies.

“We’re using the background galaxies to learn about the matter distribution in the foreground,” says Rachel Mandelbaum, an astrophysicist at Carnegie Mellon University who is a member of the US portion of the Euclid Consortium, a group of thousands of scientists and engineers. “We’re trying to measure the effects of all of the matter between the distinct galaxy shape and us.”

[Related: Astronomers used dead stars to detect a new form of ripple in space-time]

This method will also help them measure the effects of dark energy, Mandelbaum adds. Since dark matter helps all other forms of matter clump together, and dark energy counteracts the gravitational effects of dark matter, by measuring how clumpy matter is over a range of distance from Earth, “we can measure how cosmic structure is growing and use that to infer the effects of dark energy on the matter distribution.”

Euclid will not be the first large sky survey using weak gravitational lensing to search for signs of dark matter and dark energy, but it will be the first survey of its kind in orbit. Previous studies, such as the Dark Energy Survey, have all been conducted by ground-based telescopes, according to Mandelbaum. Being up in space offers a different advantage.

“Ground-based telescopes see blurrier images than space-based telescopes because of the effects of the Earth’s atmosphere on the light of distant stars and galaxies,” Mandelbaum says. Euclid’s view from L2 will be helpful when “we’re trying to measure these very subtle distortions in the shapes of galaxies.” 

But dark matter and dark energy are tough enigmas to crack, and scientists can use all the data they can collect, from as many angles as possible. The Vera Rubin Observatory, currently under construction in Chile and scheduled to open in 2025, will host the ground-based Legacy Survey of Space and Time and scan the entire southern sky for similar phenomena. Efforts like these will help ensure the reproducibility of findings by Euclid, and vice versa, according to Mandelbaum.

”Euclid is a really exciting experiment within a broader landscape of surveys that are trying to get at the same science, but with very different datasets that have different assumptions,” she says. “They’re going to be doing somewhat different things that give us a different approach to answering these really fundamental questions about the universe.”

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Scientists have translated data from cosmic bodies and events into spectacular audio renditions for years, but NASA’s latest releases may be the first to feature accompanying real-time visual aides. Unveiled on Tuesday, a trio of brief “sonifications” derived from information gleaned by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope showcase the interplay between infrared light, space gas, and other interstellar materials to create gorgeous ambient soundscapes. Taken as a series, NASA’s “cosmic harmonies” provide new, awe-inspiring ways to view the universe.

“Because different telescopes can detect different types of light, each brings its own pieces of information to whatever is being observed,” NASA explained in its June 21 announcement. “This is similar in some ways to how different notes of the musical scale can be played together to create harmonies that are impossible with single notes alone.” According to NASA, the collaboration was overseen by Chandra X-ray Center visualization scientist Kimberly Arcand, astrophysicist Matt Russo, and musician Andrew Santaguida.

NASA offers three videos with each sonification shown via a moving cursor, rendering the telescopes’ 2D images into something akin to written musical scores. An image depicting the two-star system R Aquarii, for example, is shown with a radar-esque tracker moving clockwise from a central point around the picture. As the cursor passes over Hubble’s visible light and Chandra’s X-ray images, the volume increases. Meanwhile, the music pitch rises and falls depending on the sources’ distance from the image center.

“The ribbon-like arcs captured by Hubble create a rising and falling melody that sounds similar to a set of singing bowls (metal bowls that produce different sounds and tones when struck with a mallet), while the Chandra data are rendered to sound more like a synthetic and windy purr,” explained NASA scientists.

[Related: What we learn from noisy signals from deep space.]

Another image depicts “Stephan’s Quartet,” a cluster of four galaxies moving one another via gravitational pull, along with a fifth galaxy located at a different distance. As a tracking line moves downward across the image, additional background galaxies and stars are punctuated as different glass marimba notes alongside a host of other ambient, representational tones. Finally, the Messier 104 galaxy located within the Virgo cluster received its own sonifications based on multiple light readings—infrared, X-ray, and optical.

Check out the clips below:

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High altitude balloons have drawn a lot of fire lately. In February, the US military shot down a spy balloon potentially operated by the Chinese government and an “unidentified aerial phenomenon” that was later revealed to likely be a hobbyist balloon.

So, when people caught sight of another large balloon in the southern hemisphere in early May, there was concern it could be another spy device. Instead, it represents the future of astronomy: balloon-borne telescopes that peer deep into space without leaving the stratosphere.

“We’re looking up, not down,” says William Jones, a professor of physics at Princeton University and head of NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) team. Launched from Wānaka, New Zealand, on April 15, the nearly 10-foot-tall telescope has already circled the southern hemisphere four times on a football stadium-sized balloon made from polyethylene film. Its three onboard cameras also took stunning images of the Tarantula Nebula and Antennae galaxies to rival those of the Hubble Space Telescope. The findings from SuperBIT could help scientists unravel one of the greatest mysteries of the universe: the nature of dark matter, a theoretically invisible material only known from its gravitational effects on visible objects.

[Related: $130,000 could buy you a Michelin-star meal with a view of the stars]

Scientists can use next-level observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope to investigate dark matter, relying on their large mirrors and positions outside Earth’s turbulent atmosphere to obtain pristine views of extremely distant celestial objects. But developing a space telescope and launching it on a powerful rocket is expensive. Lofting Hubble into orbit cost around $1.5 billion, for instance, and sending JWST to Lagrange point 2 cost nearly $10 billion.

SuperBIT took just $5 million to launch—a price cut stemming from the relative cheapness of balloons versus rockets and the lower barrier of entry for skilled workers to build the system.

“The whole thing is run by students. That’s what makes projects such as these so nimble and able to do so much with limited resources,” Jones says, referring to the SuperBIT collaborative between Princeton, the University of Durham in the UK, and the University of Toronto in Canada. “We have no professional engineers or technicians working on this full time—only the grad students have the luxury of being able to devote their full-time attention to the project.”

SuperBIT is not the first telescope carried aloft with a balloon: That honor goes to Stratoscope I, which was built in 1957 by another astronomy group at Princeton. But SuperBIT is one of a handful of new observatories made possible by 20 years of NASA research into so-called super pressure balloons. That work finally culminated in tests flights beginning in 2015 and the groundbreaking launch of SuperBIT.

Traditional balloons contain a lifting gas that expands as the sun heats it and as atmospheric pressure changes with altitude. That changes the volume of the envelope and, in turn, the balloon’s buoyancy, making it impossible to maintain a constant altitude over time.

Superpressure balloons keep the lifting gas, typically helium, pressurized inside a main envelope so that volume and buoyancy remain constant across day and night. The balloon then uses a smaller balloon—a ballonet—inside or beneath the main envelope as a ballast, filling or emptying the pocket of compressed air to change altitude and effectively steer the ship.

The super pressure balloon carrying SuperBIT can maintain an altitude of 108,000 feet (higher than 99.2 percent of Earth’s atmosphere) while carrying the 3,500-pound payload of scientific instruments. Unlike JWST and other missions, the purpose of the SuperBIT telescope isn’t to see farther or wider swaths of the universe or to detect exoplanets. Instead, it’s hunting for signs of a more ubiquitous and enigmatic entity.  

“Dark matter is not made of any of the elements or particles that we are familiar with through everyday observations,” Jones says. That said, there’s a lot of it around us: It might make up about 27 percent of the universe. “We know this through the gravitational influence that it has on the usual matter—stars and gas, and the like—that we can see,” which make up around 5 percent of the universe, Jones explains.

Scientists estimate that the remaining 67 percent of the cosmos is made of dark energy, another largely mysterious material not to be confused with dark matter. Whereas the gravity of dark matter may help pull galaxies together and structure the way they populate the cosmos, dark energy may be responsible for the accelerating expansion of the entire universe.

Researchers probe extreme forces where dark matter might exist and calculate its presence by observing galactic clusters so massive their gravity bends the light that passes by them from more distant objects—a technique known as gravitational lensing. Astronomers can use this approach to turn galaxies into a sort of magnifying lens to see more distant objects than they normally could (something JWST excels at). It can also reveal the mass of the galactic clusters that make up the “lens,” including the amount of dark matter around them.

“After measuring how much dark matter there is, and where it is, we’re trying to figure out what dark matter is,” says Richard Massey, a member of the SuperBIT science team and a professor of physics at Durham University. “We do this by looking at the few special places in the universe where lumps of dark matter happen to be smashing into each other.”

Those places include the two large Antennae galaxies, which are in the process of colliding about 60 million light-years from Earth. Massey and others have studied the Antennae galaxies using Hubble, but it “gives it a field of view too small to see the titanic collisions of dark matter,” Massey says. “So, we had to build SuperBIT.”

Like Hubble, SuperBIT sees light in the visible to ultraviolet range, or 300- to 1,000-nanometer wavelengths. But while Hubble’s widest field of view is less than a tenth of degree, SuperBIT’s field of view is wider at half a degree, allowing it to image wider swaths of the sky at once. That’s despite it having a smaller mirror (half a meter in diameter compared to Hubble’s 1.5 meters).

SuperBIT has another advantage over space telescopes. With less time from development to deployment and without complex accessories needed to protect it from radiation, extreme temperatures, and space debris, the SuperBIT team was able to use far more advanced camera sensors than those on existing space telescopes. Where Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 contains a pair of 8-megapixel sensors, Jones says, SuperBIT contains a 60-megapixel sensor. The balloon-carried telescope is also designed to float down on a parachute after the end of each flight, which means scientists can update the technology regularly from the ground.

“We’re currently communicating with SuperBIT live, 24 hours a day, for the next 100 days,” Massey says. “It has just finished its fourth trip around the world, experiencing the southern lights, turbulence over the Andes, and the quiet cold above the middle of the Pacific Ocean.” The team expects to retrieve the system sometime in late August, likely in southern Argentina, according to Jones.

[Related on PopSci+: Alien-looking balloons might be the next weapon in the fight against wildfires]

SuperBIT may just be the beginning. NASA has already funded the development of a Gigapixel class Balloon Imaging Telescope (GigaBIT), which will sport a mirror as wide as Hubble’s. Not only is it expected to be cheaper than any space telescope sensing the same spectrum of light, GigaBIT would also be “much more powerful than anything likely to be put into space in the near term,” Jones says.

As to whether SuperBIT will crack the mystery of just what dark matter is, it’s too early to tell. After a few flights, the grad students will have to pore over the project’s findings.

“What will the [data] tell us? Who knows! That’s the excitement of it—and also the guilty secret,” Massey says. “After 2,000 years of science, we still have absolutely no idea what the two most common types of stuff in the universe are, or how they behave.”

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A team of more than 1,000 astronomers and college students just took a step closer to solving one of the long-lasting mysteries of astronomy: Why is the sun’s outer layer, known as the corona, so ridiculously hot? The solar surface is 10,000°F, but a thousand miles up, the sun’s corona flares hundreds of times hotter. It’s like walking across the room to escape an overzealous space heater, but you feel warmer far away from the source instead of cooler, totally contrary to expectations.

The research team used hundreds of observations of solar flares—huge ejections of hot plasma from our star’s surface—to determine what’s heating up the sun’s corona, in results published May 9 in The Astrophysical Journal. What’s really striking about this result, though, is how they did it: with the help of hundreds of undergrads taking physics classes at the University of Colorado, totaling a whopping 56,000 hours of work over multiple years.

Lead author James Paul Mason, research scientist and engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, calls this a “win-win-win scenario.” He adds, “We were able to harness a ton of brainpower and apply it to a real scientific challenge, the students got to learn firsthand what the scientific process looks like.”

[Related: Volunteer astronomers bring wonders of the universe into prisons]

The classroom project began in 2020, when University of Colorado physics professor Heather Lewandowski found herself teaching a class on experimental physics, which suddenly had to pivot online due to the COVID-19 pandemic—quite the challenge, especially for a hands-on science course. Luckily, Mason had an idea for a solar flare project that needed a lot of hands, and Lewandowski, who usually researches a totally different topic in quantum mechanics, saw that as an opportunity for her students. 

“The question of why the sun’s corona is so much hotter than the ‘surface’ of the sun is one of the main outstanding questions in solar physics,” says Lewandowski. There are two leading explanations for this dilemma, known as the coronal heating problem. One theory suggests that waves in the sun’s mega-sized magnetic field push heat into the corona. The other claims that small, unseen solar flares called nanoflares heat it up, like using a thousand matches instead of one big blow torch. 

Nanoflares are too small for our telescopes to spot, but by studying the sizes of other larger flares, scientists can estimate the prevalence of these little radiation bursts. And, although artificial intelligence is improving every day, automated programs can’t yet do the kind of analysis that Mason and Lewandowski needed. Groups of students in Lewandowski’s class each used data on a different solar flare, getting into nitty-gritty detail to measure how much energy each one dumped into the corona. Together, their results suggest nanoflares might not be powerful enough to heat up the corona to the wild temperatures we see.

[Related: Small ‘sparks’ on the sun could be key to forecasting dramatic solar weather]

The scientific result is only half of the news, though. Lewandowski and Mason pioneered a new way to bring real research into the classroom, giving students a way to not only learn about science, but do it themselves. This type of large-scale student research effort is more common in biology and chemistry, but was pretty much unheard of in physics—until now. “The students participated in all aspects of the research from literature review, meetings with the principal investigator, a proposal phase, data analysis, and peer review of their analysis,” says Lewandowski. The involvement of many students, and their work in groups, is also a reminder that “science is inherently a collaborative endeavor,” she adds.

“I hope that we inspire some professors out there to try this with their classes,” says Mason. “I’m excited to see what kinds of results they’re able to achieve.”

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Our asteroid belt is home to more than a million space rocks, varying in size from a dwarf planet to dust particles, which float between Jupiter and Mars. Astronomers have just discovered another such belt—but this one circles a different star, not our sun.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) detected this asteroid belt around the star Fomalhaut, only 25 light-years away. For years, scientists have studied Fomalhaut’s debris disk, a collection of rocky, icy, dusty bits from all the collisions that happen while planets are being created. This new data, published today in Nature Astronomy, shows the system in unprecedented detail, uncovering fingerprints of hidden worlds and evidence for planets smashing together.

Many telescopes have pointed to Fomalhaut over the years: the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in the high desert of Chile, and even the Hubble Space Telescope. Fomalhaut, which is much younger than our sun, may be a good likeness of our solar system near birth; since astronomers can’t time travel back to our sun’s formation, they instead observe other young stars, using these still-forming planetary systems as examples of what the process of making planets can look like.

Fomalhaut is an appealing choice to astronomers because it’s nearby, meaning it’s easier for astronomers to notice fine details. “This system was definitely one of the first we wanted to observe with JWST,” says co-author Marie Ygouf, research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

Before JWST, other observations revealed that Fomalhaut is surrounded by a ring of dust analogous to our own solar system’s Kuiper Belt, which contains all the little bits of ice and rock beyond Neptune. The new data from NASA’s superlative space telescope spot not only this outer ring, but also an inner ring more analogous to the asteroid belt. There’s a third feature, too—a giant clump of dust, lovingly referred to as the Great Dust Cloud. 

[Related: These 6 galaxies are so huge, they’ve been nicknamed ‘universe breakers’]

Between Fomalhaut’s outer Kuiper-Belt-like ring and its inner asteroid-belt-like ring is a gap. “The new gap that we see hints at the presence of an ice-giant mass planet, which would be an analog of what we see in the solar system,” like Neptune or Uranus, says lead author András Gáspár, astronomer at the University of Arizona. This unseen planet could be “carving out the gaps” via gravity, explains fellow Arizona astronomer and co-author Schuyler Wolff.

Fomalhaut’s asteroid belt has a curious tilt, appearing at a different angle from the outer ring, as though something knocked it off kilter. A knock, in fact, might explain the misalignment, the researchers say—a major collision could have tilted the asteroid belt, creating the massive dust cloud, too. 

All signs in Fomalhaut “point to a solar system that is alive and active, full of rocky bodies smashing into each other,” says co-author Jonathan Aguilar, staff scientist at Space Telescope Science Institute, home of JWST’s mission control.

JWST was uniquely suited to take these photos of Fomalhaut’s dust. The dust glows brightest in the mid-infrared, at long wavelengths unreachable by most other observatories. A particularly powerful telescope is necessary, too, to resolve enough details—and JWST is the only scope with both these features. The space telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) also has a coronagraph, a small dot to block out a bright star and reveal the surrounding dust.

“Mid-infrared wavelengths are so important for debris disk observations because that’s where you observe dust emission, and the distribution of dust tells you a lot about what’s going on,” says Aguilar. The new view of Fomalhaut “showcases the scientific power of JWST and MIRI even just a year into operations,” he adds.

[Related: NASA sampled a ‘fluffy’ asteroid that could hold clues to our existence]

It’s certainly interesting to see what our solar system may have looked like in its infancy—but Fomalhaut isn’t an exact clone. Fomalhaut’s Kuiper Belt and asteroid belt doppelgangers are more spread out and contain more material than those features in our solar system. Although Fomalhaut has more movement and smashing than our solar system does now, our planets had a similar phase in the distant past, known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. Astronomers hope debris disks seen by JWST will help them figure out the details of how solar systems are born, and how they grow up to look like our own set of planets.

“We are at this frontier of unexplored territory, and I’m especially excited to see what JWST finds towards planet-forming disks,” says University of Michigan astronomer Jenny Calahan, who was not involved in the new findings. “Looking at these JWST images I was reminded of the moment that I got glasses for the first time,” adds Calahan. “It just changes your whole perspective when the world (or a debris disk) comes into focus at a level that you aren’t used to.”

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Black holes remain among the most enigmatic objects in the universe, but the past few years have seen astronomers develop techniques to directly image these powerful vacuums. And they keep getting better at it.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, the international team that took the first picture of a black hole in 2017, followed up that work with observations highlighting the black hole’s magnetic field. And just this month, another team of astronomers created an AI-sharpened version of the same image.

Now a new study published today in the journal Nature describes how images of that black hole, named after its galaxy, Messier 87 (M87), has a much larger circle of debris around it than the 2017 observations would suggest. 

Though long hypothesized to exist in theory, for many decades astronomers could only find indirect evidence of black holes in the sky. For instance, they would look for signs of the immense gravity of a black hole influencing other objects, such as when stars follow especially tight or fast orbits that imply the presence of another massive, but invisible partner.

But that all changed in 2017, when the EHT’s global network of radio telescopes captured the first visible evidence of a black hole, the supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy 57 million light-years away from Earth. When the image was released in 2019, the orange ring of fire around a central black void drew comparisons to “The Eye of Sauron” from Lord of the Rings.

EHT would go on to directly image Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, releasing another image of a fiery orange doughnut around a black center in May 2022.

Such supermassive black holes, which are often billions of times more massive than our sun—M87 is estimated to be 6.5 billion times bigger and Sagittarius A*  4 million times bigger—are thought to exist at the centers of most galaxies. The intense gravity of all that mass pulls on any gas, dust, and other excess material that comes too close, accelerating it to incredible speeds as it falls toward the lip of the black hole, known as the event horizon.

[Related: What would happen if you fell into a black hole?]

Like water circling a drain, the falling material spirals and is condensed into a flat ring known as an accretion disk. But unlike water around a drain, the incredible speed and pressures in the accretion disk heat the inflating material to the point where it emits powerful X-ray radiation. The disk propels jets of radiation and gas out and away from the black hole at nearly the speed of light.  

The EHT team already figured that M87 produced forcible jets. But the second set of results show that the ring-like structure of collapsing material around the black hole is 50 percent larger than they originally estimated.

“This is the first image where we are able to pin down where the ring is, relative to the powerful jet escaping out of the central black hole,” Kazunori Akiyama, an MIT Haystack Observatory research scientist and EHT collaboration member, said in a statement. “Now we can start to address questions such as how particles are accelerated and heated, and many other mysteries around the black hole, more deeply.”

The new observations were made in 2018 using the Global Millimeter VLBI Array, a network of a dozen radio telescopes running east to west across Europe and the US. To get the resolution necessary for more accurate measurements, however, the researchers also included observatories in the North and South: the Greenland Telescope along with the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array, which consists of 66 radio telescopes in the Chilean high desert.

“Having these two telescopes [as part of] the global array resulted in a boost in angular resolution by a factor of four in the north-south direction,” Lynn Matthews, an EHT collaboration member at the MIT Haystack Observatory, said in a media statement. “This greatly improves the level of detail we can see. And in this case, a consequence was a dramatic leap in our understanding of the physics operating near the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy.”

[Related: Construction starts on the world’s biggest radio telescope]

The more recent study focused on radio waves around 3 millimeters long, as opposed to 1.3 millimeters like the original 2017 one. That may have brought the larger, more distant ring structure into focus in a way the 2017 observations could not.

“That longer wavelength is usually associated with lower energies of the emitting electrons,” says Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who was not involved with the new study. “It’s possible that you get brighter emission at longer wavelengths farther out from the black hole.”

Going forward, astronomers plan to observe the black hole at other wavelengths to highlight different parts and layers of its structure, and better understand how such cosmic behemoths form at the hearts of galaxies and contribute to galactic evolution.

Just how supermassive black holes generate jets is “not a well-understood process,” Loeb says. “This is the first time we have observations of what may be the base of the jet. It can be used by theoretical physicists to model how the M87 jet is being launched.” 

He adds that he would like to see future observations capture the sequence of events in the accretion disk. That is, to essentially make a movie out of what’s happening at M87.

“There might be a hotspot that we can track that is moving either around or moving towards the jet,” Loeb says, which in turn, could explain how a beast like a black hole gets fed.

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Even the tallest trees, biggest blue whales, and even giant gleaming stars were once babies. Protostars are the hot core of energy that will one day become stars and galaxies. The formative years of our universe’s history, when billions of stars and galaxies formed and assembled after the Big Bang, have so far been beyond our understanding.

[Related: These 6 galaxies are so huge, they’ve been nicknamed ‘universe breakers’]

Now, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed the distance of a protocluster of seven galaxies that formed only 650 million years after the Big Bang, or what astronomers call redshift 7.9. The findings were published April 24 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and are the “earliest galaxies yet to be spectroscopically confirmed as part of a developing cluster.”

Based on the data collected, a team of astronomers calculated the nascent cluster’s future development. It will likely grow in size and mass to resemble the Coma Cluster, one of the densest group of galaxies of the modern universe. 

“This is a very special, unique site of accelerated galaxy evolution, and Webb gave us the unprecedented ability to measure the velocities of these seven galaxies and confidently confirm that they are bound together in a protocluster,” co-author and IPAC-California Institute of Technology astronomer Takahiro Morishita said in a statement.

JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) captured the key measurements to confirm both the galaxies’ collective distance and the high velocities at which they are moving within a halo of dark matter. They’re moving through space at more than two million miles per hour, or over 600 miles per second. 

Having this spectral data in hand allowed the astronomers to model and map the future development of the gathering group all the way up to the modern universe. If it does follow the prediction and eventually resemble the Coma Cluster, it could eventually be among the densest known galaxy collections.

“We can see these distant galaxies like small drops of water in different rivers, and we can see that eventually they will all become part of one big, mighty river,” co-author and National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy astronomer Benedetta Vulcani said in a statement.

According to NASA, galaxy clusters are the greatest concentrations of mass in the known universe. They can dramatically warp the fabric of spacetime itself. This warping is called gravitational lensing and can have a magnifying effect for the objects located beyond the cluster. This allows astronomers to see through the cluster as if it were a giant cosmic magnifying glass. The team in this study was able to utilize this enlarging effect and look through Pandora’s Cluster to view the protocluster.

[Related: JWST’s latest new galaxy discoveries mirror the Milky Way.]

Exploring how big clusters like Pandora and Coma first came together has historically been difficult because the expansion of the universe stretches light beyond visible wavelengths into the infrared. JWST’s sophisticated infrared instruments were developed to fill in these gaps at the beginning of the universe’s story. 

The team anticipates that future collaboration between JWST and a high-resolution, wide-field survey mission from NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will allow for even  more results on early galaxy clusters. Roman will be able to identify more protocluster galaxy candidates, while JWST can follow up to confirm these findings with its spectroscopic instruments. Currently, the Roman mission is targeted to launch by May 2027.

“It is amazing the science we can now dream of doing, now that we have Webb,” co-author and University of California, Los Angeles astronomer Tommaso Treu said in a statement. “With this small protocluster of seven galaxies, at this great distance, we had a one hundred percent spectroscopic confirmation rate, demonstrating the future potential for mapping dark matter and filling in the timeline of the universe’s early development.”

Correction (August 25, 2023): The story previously stated that the Coma Cluster is a single galaxy, when it is in fact a cluster of almost 1,000 galaxies.

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Since 1995 scientists have found more than 5,000 exoplanets—other worlds beyond our solar system. But while space researchers have gotten very good at discovering big planets, smaller ones have evaded detection.

However, a novel astronomy detection technique known as microlensing is starting to fill in the gaps. Experts who are a part of the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet) recently used this method to locate three new exoplanets about the same sizes as Jupiter and Saturn. They announced these findings in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on April 11. 

How does microlensing work?

Most exoplanets have been found through the transit method. This is when scientists use observatories like the Kepler Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope to look at dips in the amount of light coming from a star. 

Meanwhile, gravitational microlensing (usually just called microlensing) involves searching for increases in brightness in deep space. These brilliant flashes are from a planet and its star bending the light of a more distant star, magnifying it according to Einstein’s rules for relativity. You may have heard of gravitational lensing for galaxies, which pretty much relies on the same physics, but on a much bigger scale.

The new discoveries were particularly unique because they were found in partial data, where astronomers only observed half the event.

“Microlensing events are sort of like supernovae in that we only get one chance to observe them,” says Samson Johnson, an astronomer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab who was not affiliated with the study. 

Because astronomers only have one chance and don’t always know when events will happen, they sometimes miss parts of the show. “This is sort of like making a cake with only half of the recipe,” adds Johnson.

[Related: Sorry, Star Trek fans, the real planet Vulcan doesn’t exist]

The three new planets have long serial-number-like strings of letters and numbers for names: KMT-2021-BLG-2010Lb, KMT-2022-BLG-0371Lb, and KMT-2022-BLG-1013Lb. Each of these worlds revolves around a different star. They weigh as much as Jupiter, Saturn, and a little less than Saturn, respectively. 

Even though the researchers only observed part of the microlensing events for each of these planets, they were able to rule out other scenarios that could confidently explain the signals. This work “does show that even with incomplete data, we can learn interesting things about these planets,” says Scott Gaudi, an Ohio State University astronomer who was not involved in the published paper.

The exoplanet search continues

Microlensing is “highly complementary” to other exoplanet-hunting techniques, says Jennifer Yee, a co-author of the new study and researcher at The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. It can scope out planets that current technologies can’t, including worlds as small as Jupiter’s moon Ganymede or even a few times the mass of Earth’s moon, according to Gaudi.

The strength of microlensing is that “it’s a demographics machine, so you can detect lots of planets,” says Gaudi. This ability to detect planets of all sizes is crucial for astronomers as they complete their sweeping exoplanet census to determine the most common type of planet and the uniqueness of our own solar system. 

Astronomers are honing their microlensing skills with new exoplanet discoveries like those from KTMNet, ensuring that they know how to handle this kind of data before new space telescopes come online in the next few years. For example, microlensing will be a large part of the Roman Space Telescope’s planned mission when it launches mid-decade. 

“We’ll increase the number of planets we know by several thousand with Roman, maybe even more,” says Gaudi. “We went from Kepler being the star of the show to TESS [NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite] being the star of the show … For its time period, Roman [and microlensing] will be the star of the show.”

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Astronomy sheds light on the far-off, intangible phenomena that shape our universe and everything outside it. Artificial intelligence sifts through tiny, mundane details to help us process important patterns. Put the two together, and you can tackle almost any scientific conundrum—like determining  the relative shape of a black hole. 

The Event Horizon Telescope (a network of eight radio observatories placed strategically around the globe) originally captured the first image of a black hole in 2017 in the Messier 87 galaxy. After processing and compressing more than five terabytes of data, the team released a hazy shot in 2019, prompting people to joke that it was actually a fiery donut or a screenshot from Lord of the Rings. At the time, researchers conceded that the image could be improved with more fine-tuned observations or algorithms. 

[Related: How AI can make galactic telescope images ‘sharper’]

In a study published on April 13 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, physicists from four US institutions used AI to sharpen the iconic image. This group fed the observatories’ raw interferometry data into an algorithm to produce a sharper, more accurate depiction of the black hole. The AI they used, called PRIMO, is an automated analysis tool that reconstructs visual data at higher resolutions to study gravity, the human genome, and more. In this case, the authors trained the neural network with simulations of accreting black holes—a mass-sucking process that produces thermal energy and radiation. They also relied on a mathematical technique called Fourier transform to turn energy frequencies, signals, and other artifacts into information the eye can see.

Their edited image shows a thinner “event horizon,” the glowing circle formed when light and accreted gas crosses into the gravitational sink. This could have “important implications for measuring the mass of the central black hole in M87 based on the EHT images,” the paper states.

One thing’s for sure: The subject at the center of the shot is extremely dark, potent, and powerful. It’s even more clearly defined in the AI-enhanced version, backing up the claim that the supermassive black hole is up to 6.5 billion times heftier than our sun. Compare that to Sagittarius A*—the black hole that was recently captured in the Milky Way—which is estimated at 4 million times the sun’s mass.

Sagittarius A* could be another PRIMO target, Lia Medeiros, lead study author and astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, told the Associated Press. But the group is not in a rush to move on from the more distant black hole located 55 million light-years away in Messier 87. “It feels like we’re really seeing it for the first time,” she added in the AP interview. The image was a feat of astronomy, and now, people can gaze on it with more clarity.

Watch an interview where the researchers discuss their AI methods more in-depth below:

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Few places in the solar system get hotter than the surface of the sun. But contrary to expectations, the tenuous tendrils of plasma in the outermost layer of its atmosphere—known as the corona—are way more searing than its surface.

“It is very confusing why the solar corona is farther away from the sun’s core, but is so much hotter,” says University of California, Berkeley space sciences researcher Jia Huang. 

The solar surface lingers around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while the thin corona can get as hot as 2 million degrees. This conundrum is known as the coronal heating problem, and astronomers have been working on solving it since the mid-1800s.

“Simply speaking, solving this problem could help us understand our sun better,” says Huang. A better understanding of solar physics is also “crucial for predicting space weather to protect humans,” he adds. Plus, the sun is the only star we can send probes to—the others are simply too far away. “Thus, knowing our sun could help understand other stars in the universe.”

A brief history of the coronal heating problem

During the 1869 total solar eclipse—an alignment of the sun, moon, and Earth that blocks out the bulk of the sun’s light—scientists were able to observe the faint corona. Their observations revealed a feature in the corona that they took as evidence of presence of a new element: coronium. Improved theories of quantum mechanics over 60 years later revealed the “new element” to be plain old iron, but heated to a temperature that was higher than the sun’s surface.

[Related: We still don’t really know what’s inside the sun—but that could change very soon]

This new explanation for the puzzling 1869 measurement was the first evidence of the corona’s extreme temperature, and kicked off decades of study to understand just how the plasma got so hot. Another way of phrasing this question is, where is the energy in the corona coming from, and how is it getting there? 

“We know for sure that this problem hasn’t yet been resolved, though we have many theories, and the whole [astronomy] community is still enthusiastically working on it,” says Huang. There are currently two main hypotheses for how energy from the sun heats the corona: the motion of waves and an explosive phenomenon called nanoflares.

Theory 1: Alfvén waves

The surface of the sun roils and bubbles like a pot of boiling water. As the plasma convects—with hotter material rising and cooler material sinking down—it generates the sun’s immense magnetic field. This magnetic field can move and wiggle in a specific kind of wave, known as Alfvén waves, which then push around protons and electrons above the sun’s surface. Alfvén waves are a known phenomenon—plasma physicists have even seen them in experiments on Earth. Astronomers think the charged particles stirred up by the phenomenon might carry energy into the corona, heating it up to shocking temperatures.

Theory 2: Nanoflares

The other possible explanation is a bit more dramatic, and is kind of like the sun snapping a giant rubber-band. As the sun’s plasma tumbles and circulates in its upper layer, it twists the star’s magnetic field lines into knotted, messy shapes. Eventually, the lines can’t take that stress anymore; once they’ve been twisted too far, they snap in an explosive event called magnetic reconnection. This sends charged particles flying around and heats them up, a happening referred to as a nanoflare, carrying energy to the corona. Astronomers have observed a few examples of nanoflares with modern space telescopes and satellites.

The coronal heating mystery continues

As is usually the case with nature, it seems that the sun isn’t simply launching Alfvén waves or creating nanoflares—it’s more than likely doing both. Astronomers just don’t know how often either of these events happen.

[Related: Hold onto your satellites: The sun is about to get a lot stormier]

But they might get some straightforward answers soon. The Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018, is on a mission to touch the sun, dipping closer to our star than ever before. It’s currently flying through some outer parts of the corona, providing the first up-close look at the movements of particles that may be responsible for the extreme temperatures. The mission has already passed through the solar atmosphere once, and will keep swinging around for a few more years—providing key information to help scientists settle the coronal heating problem once and for all.

“I would be very confident that we could make big progress in the upcoming decade,” says Huang.

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It took years of design and engineering toil to successfully get the largest-ever telescope mirror into space. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope’s trademark, 6.5-meter-in-diameter, gold-coated array orbits the sun 1.5 million kilometers above Earth, routinely providing stunning, previously inaccessible views of the universe. As incredible as its results are, however, a new, promising “mirror membrane” breakthrough is already in the works that could one day show scientists space in a new way.

According to a recent announcement from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, researcher Sebastian Rabien has reportedly designed a lighter, thinner, more cost-efficient reflective material that is hypothetically capable of producing telescope mirrors 15-20 meters wide. Detailed in a paper published with the journal Applied Optics, Rabien first evaporated a currently unspecified liquid within a vacuum chamber, which slowly deposits on interior surfaces before combining to form a polymer that eventually forms the mirror’s base.

[Related: Ice giant Uranus shows off its many rings in new JWST image.]

Telescope mirrors require a parabola shape to concentrate light towards a single spot. To achieve this, Rabien and his team positioned a rotating container containing additional liquid inside the vacuum chamber. That newly introduced liquid forms a “perfect parabolic shape,” which the polymer then grows upon to form the mirror’s base. As Space.com notes, “a reflective metal layer is applied to the top via evaporation and the liquid is washed away.”

“Utilizing this basic physics phenomenon, we deposited a polymer onto this perfect optical surface, which formed a parabolic thin membrane that can be used as the primary mirror of a telescope once coated with a reflecting surface such as aluminum,” explained Rabien in the announcement. 

At this stage, although the material in the study could be easily folded or rolled up to pack away for delivery to space, that optimal parabolic shape would be “nearly impossible” to reform. To solve this issue, researchers developed a new thermal method utilizing localized, light-derived temperature changes to gain an adaptive shape control which could bring the membrane back into its necessary optical shape.

[Related: NASA reveals James Webb Space Telescope first finds.]

In addition to its telescopic applications, the new mirror membranes could be used for adaptive optic systems. These systems rely upon deformable mirrors to compensate for incoming light distortion. Given the new material’s extreme malleability, the mirrors could be shaped via electrostatic actuators in a way that is less expensive than existing methods.

Looking ahead, Rabien’s team hopes to conduct further experiments to improve the membrane’s malleability, as well as improve how much initial distortion it can handle. There are also plans for even larger final products—a goal that could be integral to getting the new advancement into space.

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In a sequel to its image of the planet Neptune’s rings in September 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has taken a new image of the ice giant Uranus. The new view of the seventh planet from the sun was taken on February 6 and released to the public on April 6. It shows off Uranus’ rings and some of the bright features in its atmosphere.

[Related: Expect NASA to probe Uranus within the next 10 years.]

The image was taken with NIRCam as a short 12-minute exposure and combines data from two filters, one shown in blue and one in orange. Uranus typically displays a blue hue naturally. 

Of the planet’s 13 known rings, 11 are visible in the image. According to NASA, some of these rings are so bright that they appear to merge into a larger ring when close together while observed with JWST. Nine are classed as the main rings of the planet, and two are the fainter dusty rings. These dusty rings have only ever been imaged by the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it flew past the planet in 1986 and with the Keck Observatory’s advanced adaptive optics in the early 2000s. Scientists expect that future images will also reveal the two even more faint outer rings that the Hubble Space Telescope discovered in 2007.

The new image also captured many of Uranus’ 27 known moons. Many of the moons are too small and faint to be seen in this image, but six can be seen in the wide-view. Uranus is categorized as an ice giant due to the chemical make-up of its interior. The majority of Uranus’ mass is believed to be a hot, dense, fluid of water, methane, and ammonia above a small and rocky core.

Among the planets in our solar system, Uranus has a unique rotation. It rotates on its side at a roughly 90-degree angle, which causes extreme seasons. The planet’s poles experience multiple years of constant sunlight, and then an equal number of years in total darkness. It takes the planet 84 years to orbit the sun and its northern pole is currently in its late spring. Uranus’ next northern summer isn’t until 2028. 

[Related: Uranus’s quirks and hidden features have astronomers jazzed about a direct mission.]

Uranus also has a unique polar cap on the right side of the planet. It’s visible as a brightening at the pole facing the sun, and seems to appear when the pole enters direct sunlight during the summer and vanishes in the autumn. JWST’s data is expected to help scientists understand what’s behind this mechanism and has already noticed a subtle brightening at the cap’s center. NASA believes that JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera NIRCam’s sensitivity to longer wavelengths may be why they can see this enhanced Uranus polar feature, since it has not been seen as clearly with other powerful telescopes.

Additionally, a bright cloud lies at the edge of the polar cap and another can be seen on the planet’s left limb. The JWST team believes that these clouds are likely connected to storm activity. 

More imaging and additional studies of the planet are currently in the works by multiple space agencies, after the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine identified Uranus science as a priority in its 2023-2033 Planetary Science and Astrobiology decadal survey. This 10 year-long study will likely include a study of Saturn’s moons and sending a probe to Uranus. 

“Sending a flagship to Uranus makes a lot of sense,” because Uranus and Neptune “are fairly unexplored worlds,” Mark Marley, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, told PopSci last year. Marley also called the future study it “clear-eyed,” and said that learning more about Uranus will help scientists understand both the formation of our solar system and even some exoplanets. 

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Astronomers recently detected an explosion so large they dubbed it the BOAT—the brightest of all time. This explosion—known now as GRB 221009A—was a gamma-ray burst (GRB), a flash of extremely high-energy light that resulted from the death of a colossal star.

This detonation is the brightest burst at X-ray and gamma-ray energies since human civilization began. It is 70 times brighter than any observed before. Papers describing this result and others related to the burst were published in a focus issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters in March.

“A burst this bright arrives at Earth only once every 10,000 years,” says Eric Burns, a Louisiana State assistant professor and astronomer involved in the detection. 

[Related: Black hole collisions could possibly send waves cresting through space-time]

So-called long GRBs—gamma-ray bursts that last longer than two seconds—materialize when a massive star runs out of fuel and collapses into a black hole. This catastrophic collapse causes powerful jets of material to stream out, collide with gas around the former star, and produce high-energy gamma rays. We can see this explosion from Earth if the jet is pointed directly at our planet. 

Astronomers are constantly monitoring the sky for GRBs and other bright, short-lived bursts of light—and that’s how they found the BOAT. The research team that works with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, is notified each time a certain camera, known as the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT), spots a new GRB.

“This one was bright enough to trigger BAT twice,” says Maia Williams, a Penn State astronomer and lead author of one of the GRB 221009A papers. 

The initial detection of the burst was based on data gathered from the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope onboard SWIFT and NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. After “it was seen by instruments on more than two dozen satellites,” explains Burns. These include the NICER x-ray telescope on the International Space Station, NASA’s NuSTAR x-ray telescope, NASA’s new Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) satellite, and even one of the Voyager spacecraft.

With this vast trove of information on the BOAT, astronomers realized it was a “more-complicated-than-usual GRB,” says Huei Sears, a Northwestern University astronomer and graduate student not involved in the discovery.

Why was the BOAT so bright? First, it’s nearby (in cosmic terms, about 1.9 billion light-years away), which adds to its extreme shine—just like a light bulb appears brighter to your eyes closer up than across a room. But its brightness isn’t just a quirk of its proximity. It’s also “intrinsically the most energetic burst ever seen,” says Burns. 

Astronomers suspect the jets blasted out of the black hole that created the BOAT were narrower  than usual. Imagine the jet setting on a garden hose—and by lucky coincidence this particular hose was aimed directly at Earth. However, why these jets behaved like this is not understood. 

“Scientifically, the BOAT has proven most of our existing models for these events to be incomplete,” says Burns.

[Related: Astronomers now know how supermassive black holes blast us with energy]

Gamma-ray bursts are at their brightest in their first moments but continue with an afterglow for much longer—possibly several years in the case of the BOAT. Williams and her team plan to continue observing the BOAT once a week with SWIFT as long as they can. They’ll also use NASA’s powerhouse James Webb and Hubble space telescopes to get a look at other wavelengths, capturing as much as they can from this rare happening.

“The BOAT is so important because it is one of those events that breaks what we know,” says Sarah Dalessi, a University of Alabama astrophysicist and graduate student involved in the detection. “This is truly a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

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Even the most advanced ground-based telescopes struggle with nearsighted vision issues. Often this isn’t through any fault of their own, but a dilemma of having to see through the Earth’s constantly varying atmospheric interferences. As undesirable as that is to the casual viewer, it can dramatically frustrate researchers’ abilities to construct accurate images of the universe—both literally and figuratively. By applying an existing, open-source computer vision AI algorithm to telescope tech, however, researchers have found they are able to hone our cosmic observations.

As detailed in a paper published this month with the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of scientists from Northwestern University and Beijing’s Tsinghua University recently trained an AI on data simulated to match imaging parameters for the soon-to-be opened Vera C. Rubin Observatory in north-central Chile. As Northwestern’s announcement explains, while similar technology already exists, the new algorithm produces blur-free, high resolution glimpses of the universe both faster and more realistically.

“Photography’s goal is often to get a pretty, nice-looking image. But astronomical images are used for science,” said Emma Alexander, an assistant professor of computer science at Northwestern and the study’s senior author. Alexander explained that cleaning up image data correctly helps astronomers obtain far more accurate data. Because the AI algorithm does so computationally, physicists can glean better measurements.

[Related: The most awesome aerospace innovations of 2022.]

The results aren’t just prettier galactic portraits, but more reliable sources of study. For example, analyzing galaxies’ shapes can help determine gravitational effects on some of the universe’s largest bodies. Blurring that image—be it through low-resolution tech or atmospheric interference—makes scientists’ less reliable and accurate. According to the team’s work, the optimized tool generated images with roughly 38 percent less error than compared to classic blur-removal methods, and around 7 percent less error compared to existing modern methods.

What’s more, the team’s AI tool, coding, and tutorial guidelines are already available online for free. Going forward, any interested astronomers can download and utilize the algorithm to improve their own observatories’ telescopes, and thus obtain better and more accurate data.

“Now we pass off this tool, putting it into the hands of astronomy experts,” continued Alexander. “We think this could be a valuable resource for sky surveys to obtain the most realistic data possible.” Until then, astronomy fans can expect far more detailed results from the Rubin Observatory when it officially opens in 2024 to begin its deep survey of the stars.

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When NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope takes an image of a star field, it usually looks more like an abstract painting than a real piece of the universe. In the case of globular cluster M14, those drops of white, blue, and orange paint are more than 150,000 stars packed at the periphery of a spiral galaxy 29,000 light-years away from Earth.

Of course, NASA has shared many stunning views of the universe since Hubble was launched in 1990, but this newly processed image has another claim to fame—it’s known as Messier 14, one of the dozens of celestial objects cataloged by French astronomer and comet hunter Charles Messier beginning in 1758. The objects are bright and relatively easy to see with small ground telescopes, and so are popular with the amateur astronomy community.

But five years ago, the NASA Hubble team decided to begin posting the legendary space telescope’s observations of the vintage catalog online “to give people a chance to view the Messier objects in a way that they might not otherwise be able to do, especially since in many cases we can see colors of light that don’t get through the atmosphere,” says Hubble Operations Project Scientist Kenneth Carpenter. “People can’t see the ultraviolet, for instance, when they look with their ground telescopes.”

Messier was born in 1730 and developed a fascination with comets, ultimately discovering the “Great Comet” of 1769, which exhibited an extremely long tail as it passed near Earth. His catalog grew out of his notes on sightings from the Northern Hemisphere that could be confused as streaking balls of ice and dust to keep other comet seekers from wasting their time. The series includes globular star clusters like M14, nebulae such as the Eagle Nebula (M16) and Crab Nebula (M1), and even the Andromeda galaxy (M31). The numbers indicate the order in which Messier discovered the objects, though he only found 103 of the current 110—additions were made by other astronomers in the mid-20th century.

[Related: Your guide to the types of stars, from their dusty births to violent deaths]

The Hubble Messier Catalog is much newer, according to James Jeletic, NASA’s deputy project manager for Hubble. In 2017, his team was brainstorming ways to get the amateur astronomy community involved and feeling more connected with Hubble science. ”So we said, ‘Well, let’s go back to that Messier catalog,” he recalls. “That way, amateur astronomers can look at an object in their telescope, and then compare it to what Hubble sees.”

The scavenger hunt is not yet complete—the Hubble Messier Catalog currently exhibits images of 84 of the 110 Messier objects and plots them on an interactive map—but that’s partly because of the way in which the Hubble team has gone about building out the collection. They don’t purposefully take new images of Messier objects to add to the catalog; rather they wait for a scientific proposal that overlaps with the targets. That, or they comb through the Hubble archive looking for suitable scenes that haven’t been published yet and process them (as was the case with M14). “We think we found all the ones, for the most part, that are worthy of creating an image out of,” Jelectic explains. “We’re going to search one more time, you know, just to make sure.”

The Hubble team shared the image of M14 on March 19 as part of what’s called a Messier Marathon, an attempt by amateur astronomers to observe all 110 objects in a short time frame; the skygazing conditions in March and early April are considered particularly conducive to Messier Marathons because all of the objects can be seen in a single night around the spring equinox. “If you can view all 110, no matter how long it takes, you become a member of the [official Messier club] and get a certificate and pin,” Jelectic says.

For those in the Southern Hemisphere, the NASA Hubble website also includes images from the Caldwell Catalog, a collection of 109 objects visible compiled in the 1980s by English amateur astronomer Patrick Moore as a counterweight to the Messier Catalog.

[Related: Researchers found what they believe is a 2,000-year-old map of the stars]

Reflecting on the fact that astronomers, both professional and amateur, and the general public are still fascinated by objects first cataloged more than 200 years ago, Carpenter says it illustrates how science progresses over time.

“Every time you build a new telescope, whether it be on the ground or in space, that’s either larger in size so it’s more sensitive, or sensitive to a different color of light than we’ve had previously, you make wonderful new discoveries,” he says. Even after years in the field it still astonishes him what telescopes can seek. “It is just absolutely incredible, both in terms of the science and just in terms of the sheer beauty. I think a telescope is really as much a tool of art, of the creation of art, as it is of the creation and interpretation of science.”

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If you’ve ever been to the beach on a windy day, you’ve likely been treated to the not so fun feeling grains of sand hitting your face. That unpleasant experience would a walk in the park compared to what scientists have now discovered is happening in the atmosphere of the exoplanet VHS 1256 b.

A team of researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) found that the planet’s clouds are made up of silicate particles that range in size from tiny specks to small grains.  The silicates in the clouds are swirling in nearly constant cloud cover. Silicates are common in our solar system and make up about 95 percent of Earth’s crust and upper mantle.

[Related: These 6 galaxies are so huge, they’ve been nicknamed ‘universe breakers.’]

During VHS 1256 b’s 22-hour day, the atmosphere is continuously rising, mixing, and moving. This motion brings hotter material up and pushes colder material down, the way hot air rises  and cool air sinks on Earth. The brightness that results from this air shifting is so dramatic that the team on the study say it is the most variable planetary-mass object known to date. 

The findings were published March 22 in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The team also found very clear detections of carbon monoxide, methane, and water using JWST’s data and even evidence of carbon dioxide. According to NASA, it is the largest number of molecules ever identified all at once on a planet outside our solar system.

VHS 1256 b is about 40 light-years away from Earth and orbits two stars over a 10,000-year period. “VHS 1256 b is about four times farther from its stars than Pluto is from our Sun, which makes it a great target for Webb,” said study co-author and University of Arizona astronomer Brittany Miles, in a statement. “That means the planet’s light is not mixed with light from its stars.” 

The temperature in the higher parts of its atmosphere where the silicate clouds churn daily reach about 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. JWST detected both larger and smaller silicate dust grains within these clouds that are shown on a spectrum. 

“The finer silicate grains in its atmosphere may be more like tiny particles in smoke,” said astronomer and co-author Beth Biller of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, in a statement. “The larger grains might be more like very hot, very small sand particles.”

[Related: JWST has changed the speed of discovery, for better or for worse.]

Compared to more massive brown dwarfs, VHS 1256 b has low gravity, so its silicate clouds can appear and remain higher up in its atmosphere where JWST can detect them. It is also quite young as far as planets are concerned, at only 150 million years old. As with most young humans, it’s going through some turbulent times as it ages. 

The team says that these findings are similar to the first “coins” pulled out of a treasure chest of data that they are only beginning to rummage through. “We’ve identified silicates, but better understanding which grain sizes and shapes match specific types of clouds is going to take a lot of additional work,” said Miles. “This is not the final word on this planet – it is the beginning of a large-scale modeling effort to fit Webb’s complex data.”

While these features have been spotted on other planets in the Milky Way by other telescopes, only one at a time was typically identified, according to the team. They used JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) to collect the data and says that there will be much more to learn about VHS 1256 b as scientists sift through the data.

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A new JWST infrared image, captured last summer but shared publicly this week, exposes some of the explosive details scientists have been looking for. The telescope used a spectrograph and two of its advanced cameras to record the halo of dust emanating from WR 124. The star is currently in the “Wolf-Rayet phase,” in which it loses much of its mass to surrounding space. The bright white spot at the center shows the burning stellar core; the pink and purple ripples represent a nebula of hydrogen and other ejecta.

Stars of a certain magnitude will go through the Wolf-Rayet transformation as their lifespan winds down. WR 124 is one of the mightiest stars in the Milky Way, with 3,000 percent more mass than our sun. But its end is nye—it will collapse into a supernova in a few hundred thousand years

[Related: This could be a brand new type of supernova]

In the meantime, astronomers will use images and other data from JWST to measure WR 124’s contribution to the universe’s “dust budget.” Dust is essential to the universe’s workings, as NASA explains. The stuff protects young stars and forms a foundation for essential molecules—and planets. But much more of it exists than we can account for, the space agency notes: “The universe is operating with a dust budget surplus.”

The spectacular cloud around WR 124 might explain why that is. “Before Webb, dust-loving astronomers simply did not have enough detailed information to explore questions of dust production in environments like WR 124, and whether the dust grains were large and bountiful enough to survive the supernova and become a significant contribution to the overall dust budget. Now those questions can be investigated with real data,” NASA shared.

As JWST enters its second year of exploration, the observatory will take a sweeping look at galaxies far and near to reconstruct a timeline of the early universe. But individual stars can add to that cosmological understanding, too, even if they aren’t all on a glorious death march like WR 124.

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Using the first dataset released by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of scientists have discovered something surprising– evidence of six massive galaxies that existed during the early days of our universe. 

“These objects are way more massive​ than anyone expected,” said Joel Leja, an astronomer and astrophysicist at Penn State University, in a statement. “We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.”

[Related: Astronomers are already using James Webb Space Telescope data to hunt down cryptic galaxies.]

Leja is co-author of a study published February 22 in the journal Nature that could change some of our preconceived notions of how galaxies form. These newly discovered galaxies themselves date back to about 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang. JWST has infrared-sensing instruments on board that can detect light that was emitted by the most ancient stars and galaxies, allowing astronomers to see roughly 13.5 billion years back in time. 

“This is our first glimpse back this far, so it’s important that we keep an open mind about what we are seeing,” Leja said. “While the data indicates they are likely galaxies, I think there is a real possibility that a few of these objects turn out to be obscured supermassive black holes. Regardless, the amount of mass we discovered means that the known mass in stars at this period of our universe is up to 100 times greater than we had previously thought. Even if we cut the sample in half, this is still an astounding change.”

Since these six galaxies were far more massive than anyone on the team expected them to be, they could upend previous notions about the galaxy formation at the very beginning of the universe.

“The revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science,” said Leja. “We’ve been informally calling these objects ‘universe breakers’ — and they have been living up to their name so far.”

The authors argue that the “universe breakers” are so large, that almost all modern cosmological models fail to explain how these star systems could have formed.

[Related: Our universe mastered the art of making galaxies while it was still young.]

“We looked into the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find,” Leja said. “It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.”

One way that the team can confirm their new findings is with a spectrum image that could  provide data on the true distances between us and the mysterious galaxies, as well as  the gasses and other elements present. It would also paint a more clear picture of what these galaxies looked like billions of years ago.

“A spectrum will immediately tell us whether or not these things are real,” Leja said. “It will show us how big they are, how far away they are. What’s funny is we have all these things we hope to learn from James Webb and this was nowhere near the top of the list. We’ve found something we never thought to ask the universe — and it happened way faster than I thought, but here we are.”

NASA released JWST’s first full-color images and spectroscopic data on July 12, 2022. One of JWST’s primary goals this year is to better map and create a timeline of the earliest days of the universe with its high resolution and infrared spotting capabilities.  

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Breathtaking visuals of the swirling arms of spiral galaxies are some of the awe-inspiring images our galaxy and others have to offer. 

In only its first Earth-year in space, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), has already captured some stunning images of these spinning wonders.

[Related: Our universe mastered the art of making galaxies while it was still young.]

In the constellation Hercules–named for the Roman spelling of the Greek demigod Heracles known for his strength–are trillions of stars that stretch back about 13 billion light-years. In the lower center of the constellation is a spiral galaxy known as LEDA 2046648. It’s a billion light-years away, but one of its defining characteristics is that it looks like our very own Milky Way galaxy. 

A new image from JWST is so clear that the spiral arms of the galaxy are visible—impressive for a sight so far away. It shows multiple galaxies and stars in six-pointed diffraction spikes that have become one of JWST’s signature observations. 

The image was taken with JWST’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) which can detect infrared rays and see light on the infrared spectrum. This is an important part of one of Webb’s main missions of exploring the age of when stars and galaxies first began to light up the universe.

JWST also discovered a cannibal galaxy named “Sparkler,” for the dwarf galaxies and 12 globular clusters shining around it. In the results published towards the end of last year in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, it appears to be a “very early” mirror image of the Milky Way. Studying Sparkler could help astronomers understand how our home galaxy took shape. 

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope just identified its first exoplanet.]

According to the study team, the galaxy is a cannibal because it is gobbling up nearby celestial objects to grow ever larger. It’s believed that the Milky Way galaxy also grew this way. Astronomers spotted the star in JWST’s First Deep Field  released in July 2022. This image is the deepest and most detailed view of the universe ever captured and was Webb’s first full-color picture.

The Sparkler galaxy is shown as a warped orange line surrounded by spots of light. 

“We appear to be witnessing, first hand, the assembly of this galaxy as it builds up its mass—in the form of a dwarf galaxy and several globular clusters,” said co-author Duncan Forbes, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, in a statement. “We are excited by this unique opportunity to study both the formation of globular clusters, and an infant Milky Way, at a time when the universe was only one-third of its present age.”

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Happy “spoke” season, Saturnians! NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured new images of the spoke season during the planet’s equinox, when mysterious smudgy spokes appear around Saturn’s famed rings. Scientists still don’t have a full understanding of what causes these spokes and their seasonal variations. 

Saturn is tilted on its axis and has four seasons just like Earth. Since Saturn has a larger orbit around the sun, each season on Saturn lasts about seven Earth years. During this cycle, an equinox occurs when Saturn’s rings are tilted edge-on to the sun, and as Saturn approaches its summer and winter solstices, these spokes disappear. 

[Related: The origin of Saturn’s slanted rings may link back to a lost, ancient moon.]

The autumnal equinox for Saturn’s northern hemisphere is on May 6, 2025 and it gets closer, the spokes are expected to become more prominent and observable.

Astronomers believe that the spokes are caused by Saturn’s variable magnetic field. When a planet’s magnetic field interacts with solar wind, it creates an electrically charged environment. 

Scientists believe that the smallest, dust-sized icy ring particles can also become charged, and temporarily levitate those particles above the larger icy particles and boulders in the rings.

NASA’s Voyager mission first observed the ring spokes during the early 1980s. Depending on how much is illuminated and the viewing angle, the strange features can appear dark or light.

To learn more about Saturn and the other gas giants of our solar system (Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune), Hubble’s Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) is a project, is taking long time baseline observations of the outer planets to better understand their evolution and atmospheric dynamics. The measurements will be taken throughout the remainder of Hubble’s operation,  which could be into the 2030s.

“Thanks to Hubble’s OPAL program, which is building an archive of data on the outer solar system planets, we will have longer dedicated time to study Saturn’s spokes this season than ever before,” said NASA senior planetary scientist Amy Simon, head of the Hubble OPAL program, in a statement.

Saturn’s last equinox occurred in 2009 and NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was orbiting it for close-up reconnaissance. Hubble is now continuing the work of monitoring Saturn and other outer planets for long-term now that Cassini and Voyager have wrapped up their missions.

[Related: Is something burping methane on Saturn’s ocean moon?]

“Despite years of excellent observations by the Cassini mission, the precise beginning and duration of the spoke season is still unpredictable, rather like predicting the first storm during hurricane season,” said Simon.

While other planets have ring systems, Saturn’s are the most prominent which makes them a good laboratory for studying spokes. “It’s a fascinating magic trick of nature we only see on Saturn – for now at least,” Simon said.

Next, Hubble’s OPAL program will add visual and spectroscopic data to Cassini’s archived observations. Putting these pieces together could paint a more complete picture of the spoke phenomenon and what it can tell us about the physics of planetary rings. 

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Enlisting advanced artificial intelligence to help humans search for signs of extraterrestrial life may sound like the premise to a sci-fi novel. Nevertheless, it’s a strategy that investigators are increasingly employing to help expedite and improve their ET detection methodologies. As a new paper published in Nature Astronomy reveals, one of the most promising advancements in the field may have arrived courtesy of a college undergrad.

Over the past few years, Peter Ma, a third-year math and physics student at the University of Toronto, has worked alongside mentors at SETI and Breakthrough Listen—an initiative tasked with finding “technosignatures” of extraterrestrial intelligence—to develop a new neural network technique capable of parsing through massive troves of galactic radio signals in the pursuit of alien life. Narrowband radio frequencies have been hypothesized as a potential indicator for ETs, given they require a “purposely built transmitter,” according to SETI’s FAQ.

[Related: Are we alone in the universe? Probably not.]

While prior search algorithms only identified anomalies as exactly defined by humans, Ma’s deep machine learning system allows for alternative modes of thinking that human-dictated algorithms often can’t replicate.

In an email to PopSci, Ma explains, “people have inserted components of machine learning or deep learning into search techniques to assist [emphasis theirs] with the search. Our technique is the search, meaning the entire process is effectively replaced by a neural network, it’s no longer just a component, but the entire thing.”

As Motherboard and elsewhere have recently noted, the results are already promising, to say the least—Ma’s system has found eight new signals of interest. What’s more, Ma’s deep learning program found the potential ET evidence while combing through 150TB of data from 820 nearby stars that were previously analyzed using classical techniques, but at the time determined to be devoid of anything worth further investigation.

According to Ma’s summary published on Monday, the college student previously found the standard supervised search models to be too restrictive, given that they only found candidates matching simulated signals they were trained on while unable to generalize arbitrary anomalies. Likewise, existing unsupervised methods were too “uncontrollable,” flagging anything with the slightest variation and “thus returning mostly junk.” By intermediately swapping weighted considerations during the deep learning program’s training, Ma found that he and his team could “balance the best of both worlds.”

[Related: ‘Historical’ AI chatbots aren’t just inaccurate—they are dangerous.]

The result is ostensibly an additional proofreader for potential signs of alien life able to highlight possible anomalies human eyes or even other AI programs might miss. That said, Ma explains that his program is far from hands-off, and required copious amounts of engineering to direct it to learn the properties researchers wanted. “We still need human verification at the end of the day. We can’t solely rely on, or trust, a black box tool like a neural network to conduct science,” he writes. “It’s a tool for scientists, not a replacement for scientists.”

Ma also cautions that the eight newly discovered signals of interest are statistically unlikely to yield any definitive proof of alien life. That said, his new AI advancements could soon prove an invaluable tool for more accurate searches of the stars. SETI, Breakthrough Listen, and Ma are already planning to soon help with 24/7 technosignature observations using South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope array, as well as “analysis that will allow us to search for similar signals across many petabytes of additional data.”

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The last time Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) passed by Earth, our human cousins the Neanderthals still roamed the Earth.      

Discovered in March 2022 by US-based astronomers, the comet, which sports an emerald green coma, is believed to have last passed through the inner solar system some 50,000 years ago. It made its closest pass by the sun on January 12 and will fly within a mere 27 million miles of Earth on February 1 on its way out of the solar system. This is why University of Maryland Astronomy graduate student Carrie Holt and US Naval Academy professor of astronomy Matthew Knight were in Flagstaff, Arizona, to observe the comet from Lowell Observatory last week.

“Because this comet travels fairly close to the Earth, we are presented with a great opportunity to study a more detailed view of the composition and structure of the coma, the cloud of gas and dust that surrounds the comet nucleus,” Holt says.

Comets consist of icy volatiles, such as water and carbon dioxide ice, around a nucleus of rocky material pulled from the protoplanetary disc that formed the planets billions of years ago. They can be difficult for astronomers to find until they get close enough to the sun for the volatiles to begin to sublimate, the process by which the off-gassing materials generate the comet’s coma and form its tail.

“They get really bright when they start evaporating water ice from their surface,” says Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science. He notes most comets don’t even get warm enough to begin off-gassing until they’re in Saturn’s orbit.

[Related: Scientists finally solved the mystery of why comets glow green]

The contents of a comet’s ice can also determine its appearance. The green hue of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is common among its kind, according to Holt, and is due to the presence of diatomic carbon, which “emits green light when it interacts with ultraviolet radiation from the sun,” she says.

While there was a time centuries ago when professionals and amateur comet hunters shared similar stargazing equipment, most comets today are discovered by professional digital sky surveys. Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California, for instance, an observatory that scans the entire northern sky every two days looking for changes—such as the appearance of a suddenly brightening comet.

“The few comet discoveries outside of these surveys are usually found by amateur astronomers searching in regions of the sky where surveys don’t typically reach, like near the sun,” Holt explains. In 2020, amateur astronomer Michael Mattiazzo discovered C/2020 F8 (SWAN) by combing through data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO satellite, a joint project by NASA and the European Space Agency.

There are two main populations of comets in the solar system, according to Sheppard. There are the Jupiter family comets, which have short orbits of around 20 years or so and rarely travel much further out than the orbit of the gas giant. And then there are long period comets, a category that includes C/2022 E3 (ZTF).

“Their orbits take them beyond the orbit of Neptune,” Sheppard says. “They have these very elongated orbits” that can take thousands of years to traverse. Compared to short period comets, long period comets also travel much faster relative to Earth during their time in the inner solar system, reaching speeds of about 40 miles per second. Shorter period comets average closer to 10 miles per second.

When a phenomenon like C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is discovered, the coordinates are submitted to the Minor Planet Center, an international organization dedicated to tracking comets, asteroids, and other small bodies in the solar system. The center uses software to take the location of the new comet and project an orbit path and length, or period, for it, according to Knight. This can also allow scientists to project when a comet will past closest to the sun and to Earth.

“It takes a good bit of data to reliably determine just how long the period is,” he says. “The length of data needed varies by object, but usually weeks or months are needed before we have a confident handle on the period.”

Having observed Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) since last March, astronomers are fairly confident it is a long period comet with an orbit period of about 50,000 years. This means it likely originated in the Oort Cloud, a far-off shell of icy bodies enveloping our solar system at a distance 2,000 times greater than that of the sun from the Earth.

“The Oort Cloud has never been observed directly, but it is thought to be made up of many comets on circular orbits,” Holt says. “Gravitational interactions of passing stars or galactic tides can perturb these comets inward into an elliptical orbit.”

[Related: Our universe mastered the art of making galaxies while it was still young]

And it’s this origin at the periphery of our solar system that makes comets an interesting focus of research, Holt explains. “We study comets because they are the leftover building blocks of planet formation, spending most of their lifetime relatively unprocessed in the cold, outer solar system. When a comet enters the inner solar system and begins to outgas, we are able to gain insight into the conditions that existed during planet formation. We want to understand how our solar system came to be.”

Should you be lucky enough to catch sight of comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)—look for a greenish glow in the northern sky after sunset with binoculars or a small telescope—keep in mind you’re witness the slow unsealing of time capsule from before the Earth was formed.

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The lifetime of the universe is, unfortunately, so long that we can’t just wait and watch what happens to understand how it works. It’s a movie marathon that started billions of years before our species began, and will likely continue after us, too. But what if there was a recording, and we could wind back the tape?

Astronomers are doing just that with the famed James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), using the behemoth flying observatory to rewind through our universe’s history, searching for early galaxies. As a result, astronomers have found hundreds of galaxies from 11 to 13 billion years ago that also show a remarkable diversity of shapes: disks, bulges, clumps, lumps, and more. These star groupings emerged earlier in the universe’s timeline than previously thought, according to new research recently presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting and soon to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

“It is amazing to be able to see the structures of these distant galaxies with such clarity for the first time,” said Jeyhan Kartaltepe, Rochester Institute of Technology astronomer and lead author on the new study. “They are anything but boring.”

To estimate the ages, Kartaltepe and her team used a well-established method in astronomy. Galaxies farther away from us in space also go back further in the universe’s history, thanks to the finite speed of light. Plus, given that the universe is expanding, galaxies farther away from us appear more red than they would if they were nearer, as their light gets stretched out while traveling the vast, lengthening cosmic distances to our telescopes. This gives astronomers an easy way to mark when something existed in the universe, known as redshift. 

But, this also means targets with a higher redshift literally appear red, or even shine mostly in the infrared. So, a galaxy that looked bright blue billions of years ago may appear bright in infrared light to our cameras. This is the distinct advantage of JWST—because it sees the universe in the infrared, it can spot these distant, red galaxies. The telescope is also quite simply bigger than past space tools, and in the world of telescopes, bigger really is better.

[Related: How the James Webb Space Telescope is hunting for ‘first light’]

With previous data from the Hubble Space Telescope, which sees in the visible and near-infrared, astronomers already knew there were interesting and diverse galaxies in our universe from 11 billion years ago. To find out when the sweeping spirals and rotund bulges (like those in our own Milky Way) first formed, though, researchers needed to rewind the tape a bit further. 

“We do not know what happened in the early universe to create disks and bulges, or when it happened, or where it happened, or how it happened—and we had no way of finding this out until JWST,” says University of Melbourne astronomer Benji Metha, a researcher not affiliated with the new findings. “We can use these [galactic] observations like a fossil record, to dig back through time and see what features existed in these galaxies while the universe was still under construction.”

The team gathered images of 850 galaxies with JWST, and classified them into the typical galaxy shapes: disks (like our own spiral galaxy), clumps, irregulars, or some combination of the three. The data was all analyzed by hand, with astronomers sifting through each and every file. “One thing I love about this paper is how human it is,” says Metha. He explains how a century ago, American astronomer Edwin Hubble used the Mount Wilson Observatory in California to sort different types of nearby galaxies, creating the classification system most astronomers use today. “At its core, this paper uses the exact same method that Hubble used: Look at some pictures, and write down what you see,” Metha adds.

The international group of researchers found lots of disks, which may be precursors to galaxies like the Milky Way. They also spotted lots of irregulars, which are signs of two galaxies whose gravitational fields got a little too close and nudged each others’ stars around, or even merged completely.

“We see all sorts of structures across cosmic time less than a billion years after the Big Bang,” says Olivia Cooper, an astronomer at UT Austin. These new images, she said, “demonstrate what we are able to do with JWST and hint at a universe that hosted evolved galaxies earlier than we thought.”

The fact that there was such a variety of galaxies while the universe was still young is puzzling, and sure to keep astronomers busy as they build better models to learn how these cosmic entities formed and grew. The study also shows that to see the first galaxies, experts will need to keep rewinding that tape, and pushing the boundaries of how far back JWST can peer into the universe’s past.

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After launching on Christmas Day 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has continued to dazzle us with its data and discoveries. Now, the multi-mirrored space observatory has identified its first new exoplanet named LHS 475 b. At only 41 light years away from Earth in the constellation Octans, the exoplanet is about 99 percent of our world’s diameter.

After reviewing the targets of interest from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, the team from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland honed in on hints of the exoplanet’s existence with JWST. With only two transit observations (when an exoplanet passes in front of its star), JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) captured the distant celestial body clearly. “There is no question that it’s there. Webb’s pristine data validate it,” said Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, an astronomer and astrobiologist at APL, in a statement.

[Related: James Webb Space Telescope reconstructed a ‘star party,’ and you’re invited.]

“The fact that it is also a small, rocky planet is impressive for the observatory,” Kevin Stevenson, an astronomer also from APL, added in the statement,

JWST can characterize the atmosphere of exoplanets that are close to Earth’s size. The team tried to assess LHS 475 b’s atmosphere by analyzing its transmission spectrum. According to NASA, “When starlight passes through the atmosphere of a planet some of the light is absorbed by the atmosphere and some is transmitted through it. The dark lines and dim bands of light in a transmission spectrum correspond to atoms and molecules in the planet’s atmosphere. The amount of light that is transmitted also depends on how dense the atmosphere is and how warm it is.”

The data shows that the exoplanet is an Earth-sized terrestrial (not water covered) world, but it is not known if it has an atmosphere.

“The observatory’s data are beautiful,” noted Erin May, an astrophysicist at APL, in a statement. “The telescope is so sensitive that it can easily detect a range of molecules, but we can’t yet make any definitive conclusions about LHS 475 b’s atmosphere.”

That said, the team can definitely say what is not present. “There are some terrestrial-type atmospheres that we can rule out,” explained Lustig-Yaeger. “It can’t have a thick methane-dominated atmosphere, similar to that of Saturn’s moon Titan.”

While it is possible that the exoplanet doesn’t have an atmosphere, some environmental conditions haven’t been ruled out. One of those conditions is a pure carbon dioxide atmosphere. “Counterintuitively, a 100-percent carbon dioxide atmosphere is so much more compact that it becomes very challenging to detect,” said Lustig-Yaeger. To distinguish a pure carbon dioxide atmosphere from no atmosphere at all will take even more precise measurements that the team is scheduled to receive this summer.

[Related on PopSci+: There is no Planet B.]

JWST also revealed that LHS 475 b is much warmer than Earth. If clouds are detected, it could be more like Venus, which does have a carbon dioxide atmosphere. It also completes an orbit in just two days, which the JWST’s precise light curve from the telescope’s NIRSpec was able to reveal.

Findings like JWST’s also open up possibilities of pinpointing Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting smaller red dwarf stars. “This confirmation highlights the precision of the mission’s instruments,” said Stevenson.

In addition to LHS 475 b, NASA has confirmed 5,000-plus exoplanets with its many deep-space searching tools. The roster is incredibly diverse, with some looking like Mars’s pebbly terrain and others like Jupiter-esque gas giants. Some of them orbit two stars at once, while others orbit long-dead stars. It is very likely that there are hundreds of billions of exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy alone. JWST will be able to tell scientists even more about these other worlds.

“We have barely begun scratching the surface of what their atmospheres might be like. And it is only the first of many discoveries that it will make,” stated Lustig-Yaeger. “With this telescope, rocky exoplanets are the new frontier.”

Correction (January 19, 2023): The story initially said that when an exoplanet “transits,” it passes in front of its moon, which was incorrect. It passes in front of its star.

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The past few years have been a space launch boom: Late 2021 saw the long-awaited arrival of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and in 2022 NASA finally launched its massive new Space Launch System Moon rocket. This year will continue that trend, as several scientific and commercial craft zoom off our world to orbit and beyond.

This year’s historic flights include missions to Jupiter and the asteroid belt, robotic moon landings, and the maiden flight of a new spacecraft to take astronauts to and from the aging International Space Station (ISS). Here are some of the major launches to look forward to in 2023.

Asteroids and icy moons

Both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have big plans for studying celestial bodies beyond the orbit of Mars that kick off in 2023.

ESA’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer, or JUICE mission, will study the icy Galilean moons of Jupiter, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. Of the three moons, Europa has so far garnered the lion’s share of scientific interest due to the global liquid water ocean beneath the moon’s icy crust, an environment that could host alien life. But evidence now suggests Callisto and Ganymede may also host subsurface liquid water oceans. JUICE, which is scheduled to launch atop an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana sometime in April and will arrive at Jupiter in 2031, will fly by each of the three moons to compare the three icy worlds.

[Related: Jupiter’s moons are about to get JUICE’d for signs of life]

The JUICE spacecraft will enter orbit around Ganymede in 2034, the first time a spacecraft has circled a moon other than Earth’s, where it will spend roughly a year studying the satellite in greater detail. Ganymede, in addition to its potential subsurface ocean and potential habitability, is the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetic field. JUICE will study how this field interacts with Jupiter’s even  larger one.

NASA’s Psyche mission, meanwhile, will blast off no earlier than October 10 on a mission to rendezvous with its namesake asteroid, when it arrives in the belt between Mars and Jupiter in August 2029. The Psyche mission was originally scheduled to launch in August 2022, but was delayed due to problems developing mission-critical software at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The asteroid 16 Psyche is a largely metallic space rock that scientists believe could be the exposed core of a protoplanet that formed in the early solar system. If that theory bears out, the Psyche spacecraft could end up traveling millions of miles to give scientists a better understanding of the Earth’s iron core far beneath their feet.

India returns to the moon

The Indian Space Research Organization, ISRO, is going back to the moon with its Chandrayaan-3 mission, which is scheduled to launch over the summer. The space agency’s Chandrayaan-2 mission carried an orbiter and lander to the moon in 2019, but a software glitch caused the lander to crash on the lunar surface. The Chandrayaan-3 mission is ditching the orbiter in favor of a redesigned lander and rover intended for the lunar South Pole. Carrying a seismometer and spectrographs, among other instruments, the lander and rover will study the chemical composition and geology of the polar region. 

[Related: 10 incredible lunar missions that paved the way for Artemis]

The hunt for dark matter

Astrophysicists believe dark matter and dark energy shape the structures of entire universes—and drive the accelerated expansion of ours. But experts don’t understand much about these enigmatic phenomena. ESA’s Euclid space telescope, scheduled to launch sometime in 2023, will measure the effects of these dark forces on the cosmos over time to try and discern their properties.

After launch, Euclid will make its way to the same operational location as JWST, entering an orbit around Lagrangian Point 2, about 1 million miles behind Earth. From there, Euclid will use its nearly 4-foot diameter mirror, visible light imaging system, and near-infrared spectrometer to survey a third of the sky out to a distance of about 15 billion light years. That will give a view  some 10 billion years into the past. By studying how galaxies and galaxy clusters change over eons and across much of the sky, Euclid scientists hope to grasp how dark matter and dark energy shape galactic formation and the evolution of the entire universe.

Boeing catches up to SpaceX

Boeing will finally launch a crewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft sometime in April 2023. Boeing developed the Starliner, a capsule that holds up to seven people, as a competitor to the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Like Dragon, Starliner will ferry astronauts and cargo to and from the ISS as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

[Related: ISS astronauts are building objects that couldn’t exist on Earth]

But while Crew Dragon began flying astronauts to the ISS in November 2020, the Starliner ran into many delay-causing problems, beginning with a software glitch that kept the spacecraft from rendezvousing with the ISS during an uncrewed test flight in December 2020. Boeing kept at it, however, and completed a second attempt at an uncrewed rendezvous with the ISS in May 2022, paving the way for the coming crewed test flight.

If all goes well, NASA will integrate Starliner flights alongside Crew Dragon launches within the Commercial Crew program, providing the space agency some redundancy in case of problems with either type of spacecraft.

The (private) enterprise

As NASA becomes more and more reliant on Boeing, SpaceX, and other contractors for flights to the ISS, private space operators have big plans of their own for 2023.

Axiom Space plans to send a crew of private citizens for a two-week stay on the ISS in the  summer, following the company’s first mission in April 2022 when four private astronauts spent more than two weeks aboard the space station. Axiom Space plans to build a new habitat—first connected to the ISS, then separated to create a free-flying space station when NASA retires the ISS in 2031.

[Related: SpaceX’s all-civilian moon trip has a crew]

Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who funded the first ever all-private orbital space flight in September 2021 with the Inspiration 4 mission, will also be back at it in 2023. The Polaris Dawn mission is scheduled to launch no sooner than March and will once again see Isaacman fly aboard a chartered SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft along with three crewmates. Unlike Inspiration 4, at least two of the Polaris Dawn crew plan to conduct the first-ever private astronaut spacewalks outside a spacecraft.

The Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin, meanwhile, will attempt to launch the first test flight of its orbital rocket, known as New Glenn, sometime in 2023. While the company has flown celebrities such as Bezos and William Shatner to the edge of space aboard its suborbital New Shepard rocket, the company has yet to make an orbital flight. This year, it’s aiming higher.

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The James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s newest and biggest off-world observatory, has been collecting jaw-dropping images of the cosmos since June. Astronomers quickly shared their results online, even before the telescope’s calibrations were finished. Some of these findings were record-breaking, including observations of the most distant galaxies yet found. Significant debate and discussion ensued among researchers—was science moving too quickly by publishing observations before peer review, forsaking rigor for the glory of being first to a new discovery?

As the dust has settled, many astronomers think the early results remain informative. But, in the rush to work with a groundbreaking new observatory and sift through its mountains of data, they report stressful working conditions. That’s a scenario they hope to improve upon in 2023 and beyond, finding a balance between quickly offering exciting results to the public and taking the time needed for rigorous, sustainable science.

“I was actually quite excited to see science happening very fast,” says Klaus Pontoppidan, JWST project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “This is the way science works … if there are issues with calibration, that gets tested by other teams, and any errors get corrected later.”

[Related: A fierce competition will decide James Webb Space Telescope’s next views of the cosmos]

Every day JWST returns around 60 gigabytes of data to Earth, about the amount of information a basic iPhone can hold. This may not seem like much, but the steady stream of data amounts to a whopping 12,000 gigabytes so far—enough to fill a roomful of laptops—with much more to come. Each bit of this valuable data will be subject to the intense scrutiny of astronomers, who are trying to glean as much information as they can about the cosmos with JWST’s new view.

Some of that analysis started almost as soon as the telescope was operational, with programs known as Early Release Science (ERS), which made JWST data publicly available this June and July. 

Hannah Wakeford, an astronomer at the University of Bristol, worked on some of these early release science programs. Although she is excited about the scientific breakthroughs, she also experienced an extremely intense work environment—she hasn’t taken a break since mid-July. She criticizes this initial period of rushed results, saying that usually “fast science results in poorer or incomplete work. This is not necessarily the scientists themselves at fault for this, but the enormous external pressure to get publications.”

On the other hand, Ryan Trainor, an astrophysicist at Franklin & Marshall College, considers this frenzy as just “part of the modern scientific process, particularly given the pressure to be first to any big discovery.” Wakeford and Trainor’s statements are not mutually exclusive—the race to publish is both an accepted part of science and a possible hazard. For those trying to make astronomy their career, publishing an idea first and getting the credit for it is a necessary evil.

As we approach the one year anniversary of JWST’s launch on Christmas Day, the debate about the speed of astronomy has resurfaced again, now in the context of observations proposed by teams of scientists. NASA reportedly planned to make all data available from the telescope immediately, removing so-called proprietary periods that allow astronomers time to work with data they planned and designed. There isn’t currently a clear deadline for this change, but it may fall in line with the White House’s call for open access science by 2026.

Those in favor of removing proprietary periods claim that public access to the data will be more equitable, allowing anyone a chance to explore the wonders of the new telescope. Many astronomers disagree, though, explaining that their field will become impossibly competitive without proprietary periods to protect scientists’ ideas. The rush to publish would undermine work-life balance, and disadvantage those who can’t work as fast: parents who have to contend with childcare, astronomers at smaller schools with fewer resources, early career students who are still learning, and others.

[Related: James Webb Space Telescope reconstructed a ‘star party,’ and you’re invited]

“JWST will produce ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting science over the next 20 years of its observing time,” says Wakeford. “Why not cut the scientists a break and give them time to make sure we can do the work with rigor, while not destroying our mental and physical health at the same time?” 

Lafayette College astronomer Stephanie Douglas agrees, explaining that “this is an equity issue. We need to protect the more vulnerable members of our community.”

The situation is not so simple for the NASA scientists in charge of the telescope, though. They have a responsibility to both scientists and the general public, whose taxpayer money funds the entire program. “I think it’s a balance,” says Pontoppidan. “You’re balancing public programs and proprietary time, and both things you need to do for equity.” The future of proprietary periods is yet undecided, but no matter the outcome it will surely affect the process of science in JWST’s second year. Astronomers are currently preparing for the second round of proposals to use JWST, due just after the holidays in January. “I’m hoping that we’ll see some really ambitious proposals,” says Pontoppidan. The first year of JWST observations explored what the observatory could do—and now astronomers can start pushing the limits of those capabilities.

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) proves yet again that its gorgeous images are the gift that keeps on giving in 2022.

A dazzling new image is one of the first medium-deep wide-field images of the cosmos and accompanies a paper published Wednesday in the Astronomical Journal. It features a region of the sky called the North Ecliptic Pole and comes from the Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science (PEARLS) program. PEARLS’ main goal is to study, “galaxy assembly, AGN growth, and First Light,” using the data from JWST.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope is about to beam us monster amounts of cosmic data.]

The term medium-deep refers to the faintest objects that can be seen within this image, and they are roughly 29th magnitude (1 billion times more faint than the unaided eye can see). Wide-field refers to the total area that will be covered by the PEARLS program, about one-twelfth the area of the full moon.

The new image uses data collected from the JWST and the dependable Hubble Space Telescope. It’s made up of eight different colors of near-infrared light captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), and is also boosted with three colors of ultraviolet and visible light from the Hubble.

The colors show off in stellar detail the depth of a universe that’s chock full of galaxies, many of which were previously unseen by Hubble or even the largest and most sophisticated land-based telescopes. The image includes thousands of galaxies and some of the light in the image traveled roughly 13.5 billion years. These far ranging stars are shown alongside an assortment of stars within our own Milky Way galaxy, giving it an all-inclusive vibe.

“The stunning image quality of Webb is truly out of this world,” said co-author Anton Koekemoer, research astronomer at STScI, who assembled the PEARLS images into very large mosaics, in a statement. “To catch a glimpse of very rare galaxies at the dawn of cosmic time, we need deep imaging over a large area, which this PEARLS field provides.”

[Related: The most awesome aerospace innovations of 2022.]

Some of the pinpricks of light within the image show the range of stars that are present in our home Milky Way galaxy and is a useful tool in understanding the universe’s past.

“The diffuse light that I measured in front of and behind stars and galaxies has cosmological significance, encoding the history of the universe,” said co-author Rosalia O’Brien, a graduate research assistant at Arizona State University (ASU), in a statement. “I feel very lucky to start my career right now. Webb’s data is like nothing we have ever seen, and I’m really excited about the opportunities and challenges it offers.”

The NIRCam observations will also be combined with data from another instrument on JWST, the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), allowing the team to search for faint objects with spectral emission lines, which can then be used to estimate their distances more accurately.

The new image shows just a portion of the full PEARLS field, which will eventually be about four times larger. However, this huge panel of stars exceeded scientists’ expectations from the simulations they ran they ran before JWST began making scientific observations (and sending us gorgeous images) in July.

“There are many objects that I never thought we would actually be able to see, including individual globular clusters around distant elliptical galaxies, knots of star formation within spiral galaxies, and thousands of faint galaxies in the background,” said co-author Jake Summers, a research assistant at ASU, in a statement.

In the future, the PEARLS team hopes to catch a glimpse of more space objects in this region, such as the varying flares of light around black holes or distant exploding stars.

“This unique field is designed to be observable with Webb 365 days per year, so its time-domain legacy, area covered, and depth reached can only get better with time,” said lead study author Rogier Windhorst, from ASU and PEARLS principal investigator, in a statement.

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When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began sending back its incredible images in July, some of the first data showed that there were at least two, and possibly three more unseen stars in the oblong, curvy shapes of the Southern Ring Nebula.

The Southern Ring Nebula is a planetary nebula, which actually doesn’t have anything to do with planets. Instead, it is the result of the implosion of a star called a red giant. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), a star swells into a red giant when a star that is a bit bigger than our sun runs out of hydrogen fuel at its core and red giants can even be hundreds of times wider than the original star. The red giant eventually sheds its outer layers, which then forms the nebula, and contracts into the cooling remnants called a white dwarf.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope’s first glimpses into deep space reveal 4 mind-blowing finds.]

Now, researchers have reconstructed an image of this particular nebula roughly 2,000 light years away from Earth , that shows there were up to five stars at this ‘star party,’ but only two partying stars appear there now.

The team of almost 70 researchers led by Orsola De Marco of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia details the findings in a study published yesterday in the journal Nature Astronomy. They began by analyzing Webb’s 10 highly detailed exposures of the Southern Ring Nebula to reconstruct the “party scene.” According to NASA, it’s common for small groups of stars that span a range of masses to form together and continue to orbit one another as they get older. The team used this principle to travel back in time thousands of years to figure out what might explain the shapes of the colorful clouds of gas and dust in this nebula.

They found that possibly more than one star in the nebula interacted with the dimmer of the two central partying stars (shown in red), before that star created this planetary nebula. “The first star that ‘danced’ with the party’s host created a light show, sending out jets of material in opposite directions. Before retiring, it gave the dim star a cloak of dust. Now much smaller, the same dancer might have merged with the dying star – or is now hidden in its glare,” writes the team at NASA.

Adding to the mix, a third partygoer may have gotten close to the central star several times. That star then stirred up the jets ejected by the first companion, which helped form the wavy shapes at the edges of the gas and dust in the nebula. The fourth star didn’t want to be left out, and contributed to the celebration with its wider orbit. It then circled the scene, stirring up the gas and dust, creating the big system of rings on the outside the nebula. The fifth star is the best known and life of the party. It’s the bright white-blue star that continues to orbit the gathering “predictably and calmly.”

[Related: The 100 greatest innovations of 2022.]

In addition to taking a peek at the star party, the team also accurately measured the mass that the central star had before it shed layers of gas and dust. They estimate that the star was about about three times the mass of the sun before it created this specific planetary nebula. After ejecting the dust and gas, it was about 60 percent of the sun’s mass.

According to NASA, this is some of the first published research regarding some of the first images taken by the JWST to be published, so more details and findings are likely to be released. It also shows the first time that images taken with JWST’s NIRCam and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), were paired with existing data from the ESA’s Gaia observatory. This data enabled the team to precisely pinpoint the mass of the central star before it created the nebula.

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It’s been almost a year since the James Webb Space Telescope was launched into space, and NASA’s most powerful far-flung traveler has already given us many new glimpses of our ever-captivating universe.

Able to see objects 100 times fainter than the Hubble Space Telescope, JWST is a hot commodity; excitement over the craft has only skyrocketed since scientists recently began utilizing the data it sends back. Since leaving Earth on December 25, 2021, JWST has reported novel details about faraway exoplanets and insights about the earliest days of the universe. As the telescope’s first year of research comes to an end, scientists are lining up for a chance to work with JWST, offering up their bids to determine where the observatory’s next science goals will lie next. But securing even a slice of observing time is easier said than done. 

The process to determine JWST’s upcoming science targets is a bit more technical than you might imagine, says Mercedes López-Morales, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Research projects are scheduled for mission crafts in research cycles, a period that lasts about 12 months. Yet selection isn’t determined by random name drawing or by first-come first-serve reservation, like booking a dinner table or library computer. Instead, astronomers often have to submit detailed research proposals in order to be awarded observation time on a NASA mission. 

In JWST’s case, the decision is made by the JWST Users Committee, a group of twelve  scientists, whose role was established by the Space Telescope Science Institute and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The committee’s job is to ensure that observatory operations proceed in a manner meant to “maximize” the telescope’s scientific performance. López-Morales, who serves as the chair of the committee, says while astronomers from all over the world are eligible to submit a case for observations they’d like the telescope to make, the process is so highly competitive that only about 25 percent (one in four proposals) had been successfully selected for the last research cycle. 

“Some years you get lucky and you get time, and some years, you just don’t get lucky and you have to wait,” López-Morales says. 

[Related: Get alerts every time the James Webb Space Telescope drops a heavenly new look]

It’s also no easy feat to convince NASA to turn the telescope’s sensitive instruments toward a brand new location in the vast expanse. Scientists have to be prepared to send in target coordinates, emphasize when and for how long they’d like JWST to observe that object, as well as recommend what instruments will be used and how they’d like the data to be collected.

After the painstaking process of creating such a detailed roadmap, the proposals undergo anonymous review, before eventually being chosen and sent off to telescope engineers to check to see if those programs are feasible or not, says López-Morales, who has gone through the steps herself. 

López-Morales was part of a team that recently used JWST data to reveal new details about the atmosphere of the exoplanet WASP-39 b, a Saturn-sized planet about 700 light-years away from Earth. Her team and their collaborators were initially awarded about 270 hours (just under 12 days) of telescope time to complete all of their observations for the study, she says. JWST’s current science cycle started on July 10, 2022 and will end June 30, 2023. The proposal deadline for JWST’s next cycle is January 27, 2023, which will ultimately run from July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024.

Though the application process is fierce, shedding light on how scientists are granted access to heavy-duty technology also brings up questions about how findings are distributed to the public. In August of this year, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy installed new guidance that makes research funded by taxpayers immediately accessible to the public. All government agencies—including NASA—will be expected to implement the policy no later than December 31, 2025. 

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope is about to beam us monster amounts of cosmic data]

To date, many space missions have proprietary research periods that typically range from six months to a year. At this time, only observers who have gone through the formal proposal process and are approved for that instrument’s science data have exclusive access to it. Other missions with many targets or objects to observe, like the survey mission TESS, have no proprietary period at all. But some researchers note that the possibility of completely eliminating exclusive access periods from future missions could cause deeper issues inside the scientific community.  

“I think in astronomy there’s this idea that the results should come out immediately, so that anyone could use it,” says Stephanie T. Douglas, an assistant professor of physics at Lafayette College who has not been involved with JWST. But the general public isn’t inclined to do the deeper, time-intensive “science analysis that [researchers] want to do with these images.” The proprietary period, Douglas notes, protects the person who was originally selected to get those results and helps give them credit. If released to the public immediately, the scientists who initially proposed the analysis and collected the data will have to rush to use it before other research groups get a chance, she says. 

Mia de los Reyes, an observational astronomer and a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University, says she’s seen many colleagues deal with the frustrations these issues cause. For instance, the pressure to be first to publish often exacerbates inequity in the astronomy community, she says. 

“It’s not that astronomers don’t want the public to have access to data,” de los Reyes says. “I think astronomers, on the contrary, feel very strongly that open-access research is good.” 

That said, the lack of a proprietary period incentivizes a poor work-life balance and puts early-career scientists from backgrounds and communities not often seen in science at a disadvantage. The pressure to publish could also lead to slapdash first results as scientists rush to turn their complex analyses into easily digestible, actionable results. 

Overall, de los Reyes hopes that early-career scientists will start thinking of creative ways to combat these underlying issues, as who is alloted time on ground-breaking space missions like JWST ultimately influences what research is done.   
Regardless of who gets dibs on JWST’s leaderboard next, López-Morales says that the telescope isn’t just a privilege for scientists, but is truly meant for everyone. “You often hear that this is a toy for scientists, and in reality it’s not a toy, it’s a tool,” she says. “It’s a tool for humankind to understand our place in the universe and where we came from, and where we are going.”

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In space, no one can hear a probe smash into an asteroid—but that’s just what happened in September, when NASA’s successful DART experiment proved that it’s possible to reroute a space rock by crashing into it on purpose. And that wasn’t even the most important event to materialize in space this year—more on the James Webb Space Telescope in a moment. Back on Earth, innovation also reached new heights in the aviation industry, as a unique electric airplane took off, as did a Black Hawk helicopter that can fly itself. 

Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Check it out here.

Innovation of the Year

The James Webb Space Telescope by NASA: A game-changing new instrument to see the cosmos 

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Once a generation, an astronomical tool arrives that surpasses everything that came before it. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is just such a creation. After more than two decades and $9.7 billion in the making, JWST launched on December 25, 2021. Since February of this year, when it first started imaging—employing a mirror and aperture nearly three times larger in radius than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope—JWST’s vibrant images have captured the attention of the world.

The JWST can see deep into fields of forming stars. It can peer 13 billion years back in time at ancient galaxies, still in their nursery. It can peek at exoplanets, seeing them directly where astronomers would have once had to reconstruct meager traces of their existence. It can teach us about how those stars and galaxies came together from primordial matter, something Hubble could only glimpse.

While Hubble circles in low Earth orbit, JWST instead sits hundreds of thousands of miles farther away, in Earth’s shadow. It will never see sunlight. There, protected even further by a multi-layer sunshield thinner than a human fingernail, the telescope chills at -370 degrees F, where JWST’s infrared sight works best. Its home is a fascinating location called L2, one of several points where the sun and Earth’s gravities balance each other out. 

All this might just be JWST’s prologue. Since the telescope used less fuel than initially anticipated when reaching its perch, the instrument might have enough to last well past its anticipated 10-year-long window. We can’t wait to see what else it dazzles us with.

Parallel Reality by Delta: A screen customized for you

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You’ve probably found yourself running through an airport at some point, squinting up at a screen filled with rows of flight information. A futuristic new offering from Delta and a startup called Misapplied Sciences aims to change that. At Detroit Metro Airport, an installation can show travelers customized information for their flight. A scan of your boarding pass in McNamara Terminal is one way to tell the system who you are. Then, when you look at the overhead screen, you see that it displays only personalized data about your journey, like which gate you need to find. The tech behind the system works because the pixels in the display itself can shine in one of 18,000 directions, meaning many different people can see distinct information while looking at the same screen at the same time. 

Electronic bag tags by Alaska Airlines: The last tag you’ll need (for one airline)

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Believe it or not, some travelers do still check bags, and a new offering from this Seattle-based airline aims to make that process easier. Flyers who can get an electronic bag tag from Alaska Airlines (at first, 2,500 members of their frequent flier plan will get them, and in 2023 they’ll be available to buy) can use their mobile phone to create the appropriate luggage tag on this device’s e-ink display while at home, up to 24 hours before a flight. The 5-inch-long tag itself gets the power it needs to generate the information on the screen from your phone, thanks to an NFC connection. After the traveler has done this step at home, they just need to drop the tagged bag off in the right place at the airport, avoiding the line to get a tag. 

Alice by Eviation: A totally electric commuter airplane 

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The aviation industry is a major producer of carbon emissions. One way to try to solve that problem is to run aircraft on electric power, utilizing them just for short hops. That’s what Eviation aims to do with a plane called Alice: 8,000 pounds of batteries in the belly of this commuter aircraft give its two motors the power it needs to fly. In fact, it made its first flight in September, a scant but successful eight minutes in the air. Someday, as battery tech improves, the company hopes that it can carry nine passengers for distances of 200 miles or so. 

OPV Black Hawk by Sikorsky: A military helicopter that flies itself 

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Two pilots sit up front at the controls of the Army’s Black Hawk helicopters, but what if that number could be zero for missions that are especially hazardous? That’s exactly what a modified UH-60 helicopter can do, a product of a DARPA program called ALIAS, which stands for Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System. The self-flying whirlybird made its first flights with zero occupants on board in February, and in October, it took flight again, even carrying a 2,600-pound load beneath it. The technology comes from helicopter-maker Sikorsky, and allows the modified UH-60 to be flown by two pilots, one pilot, or zero. The idea is that this type of autonomy can help in several ways: to assist the one or two humans at the controls, or as a way for an uninhabited helicopter to execute tasks like flying somewhere dangerous to deliver supplies without putting any people on board at risk. 

Detect and Avoid by Zipline: Drones that can listen for in-flight obstacles

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As drones and other small aircraft continue to fill the skies, all parties involved have an interest in avoiding collisions. But figuring out the best way for a drone to detect potential obstacles isn’t an easy problem to solve, especially since there are no pilots on board to keep their eyes out and weight is at a premium. Drone delivery company Zipline has turned to using sound, not sight, to solve this conundrum. Eight microphones on the drone’s wing listen for traffic like an approaching small plane, and can preemptively change the UAV’s route to get out of the way before it arrives. An onboard GPU and AI help with the task, too. While the company is still waiting for regulatory approval to totally switch the system on, the technique represents a solid approach to an important issue.

DART by NASA and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory: Smashing into an asteroid, for good 

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Earthlings who look at the sky in fear that a space rock might tumble down and devastate our world can now breathe a sigh of relief. On September 26, a 1,100-pound spacecraft streaked into a roughly 525-foot-diameter asteroid, Dimorphos, intentionally crashing into it at over 14,000 mph. NASA confirmed on October 11 that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)’s impact altered Dimorphos’s orbit around its companion asteroid, Didymos, even more than anticipated. Thanks to DART, humans have redirected an asteroid for the first time. The dramatic experiment gives astronomers hope that perhaps we could do it again to avert an apocalypse.

CAPSTONE by Advanced Space: A small vessel on a big journey

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Some lunar craft fill up whole rooms. On the other hand, there’s CAPSTONE, a satellite that can fit on a desk. Despite control issues, CAPSTONE—which launched on June 28—triumphantly entered lunar orbit on November 13. This small traveler is a CubeSat, an affordable design of mini-satellite that’s helped make space accessible to universities, small companies, and countries without major space programs. Hundreds of CubeSats now populate the Earth’s orbit, and although some have hitched rides to Mars, none have made the trip to the moon under their own power—until CAPSTONE. More low-cost lunar flights, its creators hope, may follow.

The LSST Camera by SLAC/Vera C. Rubin Observatory: A 3,200-megapixel camera

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Very soon, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the high desert of Northern Chile will provide astronomers with what will be nearly a live-feed view of the southern hemisphere’s sky. To do that, it will rely on the world’s largest camera—with a lens 5 feet across and matching shutters, it will be capable of taking images that are an astounding 3,200 megapixels. The camera’s crafters are currently placing the finishing touches on it, but their impressive engineering feats aren’t done yet: In May 2023, the camera will fly down to Chile in a Boeing 747, before traveling by truck to its final destination.

The Event Horizon Telescope by the EHT Collaboration: Seeing the black hole in the Milky Way’s center

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Just a few decades ago, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s heart, was a hazy concept. Now, thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), we have a blurry image of it—or, since a black hole doesn’t let out light, of its surrounding accretion disc. The EHT is actually a global network of radio telescopes stretching from Germany to Hawaii, and from Chile to the South Pole. EHT released the image in May, following years of painstaking reconstruction by over 300 scientists, who learned much about the black hole’s inner workings in the process. This is EHT’s second black hole image, following its 2019 portrait of a behemoth in the galaxy M87.

Starliner by Boeing: A new way of getting to the ISS 

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After years of budget issues, technical delays, and testing failures, Boeing’s much-awaited Starliner crew capsule finally took to the skies and made it to its destination. An uncrewed test launch in May successfully departed Florida, docked at the International Space Station (ISS), and landed back on Earth. Now, Boeing and NASA are preparing for Starliner’s first crewed test, set to launch sometime in 2023. When that happens, Starliner will take its place alongside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, and NASA will have more than one option to get astronauts into orbit. There are a few differences between the two: Where Crew Dragon splashes down in the sea, Starliner touches down on land, making it easier to recover. And, where Crew Dragon was designed to launch on SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 rockets, Starliner is more flexible. 

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Stars love personal growth, but even they have limits. A new composite image from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) illustrates how the youngest members of a cluster in the Milky Way can exert “self control” in a process known as “stellar feedback.”

The action takes place in RCW 36, a cloud of mostly hydrogen ions located 2,900 light-years away from Earth. A group of stars is emerging from super-hot gas there—and leaving a strange pair of voids in its wake. The formation is also pulled together by dense, cool gas, giving it an hourglass-like appearance.

With data collected from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, APEX telescope, and the now-retired SOFIA and Herschel space instruments, a team of international researchers dove into RSW 36’s deserted regions. They learned that the ring of freezing gas (estimated at -430 to -410 degrees Fahrenheit) is being pushed out by the pressure of sizzling atoms in the middle (estimated at 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit). Radiation from the natal stellar bodies also helped clear out raw materials from both sides of the cloud. “This process should drastically slow down the birth of new stars, which would better align with astronomers’ predictions for how quickly stars form in clusters,” NASA explained in a blog post this week.

The pressure and plasma coming out of the hotspots are called “stellar winds,” and act similar to a galactic power washer. The scientists observing RSW 36 think the cold gas could be moving upward of 30,000 miles per hour, which means it’d be cleaning out 170 Earths worth of mass per year. At that rate, the cloud could be free of any fertile bits in the next 1 to 2 million years.

[Related: The Milky Way’s oldest star is a white-hot pyre of dead planets]

The team’s findings, which were published in The Astrophysical Journal in August 2022, indicate that the ruthless “stellar feedback” strategy could be seen elsewhere in the Milky Way and cosmos. Lucky for us, NASA and ESA has the tools to catch the stars red-handed.

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Following an investigation by NASA into James Webb’s career, NASA will not be renaming the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) which launched on December 25, 2021. From 1941-1968, Webb, a government official and Marine Corps pilot, held high-ranking government positions at the Department of State and was NASA’s second administrator. During this time, a panic about the sexual orientation of government employees led to mass firings and discriminatory policies during what is called the Lavender Scare.

LGBTQI+ scientists and astronomers have protested the name, saying it glorifies a hateful period in American history.

[Related: After years of delays, the James Webb telescope is finally in space.]

The telescope was named in 2002, when it was still in its planning stages, by former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe. The name is meant to recognize Webb’s contributions to government service, including running NASA as it developed the Apollo program from 1961 to 1968. However, the fact that Webb held high positions of power during a time of such rampant discrimination should be enough for his name to not be on the telescope, says a group of astronomers working to get it renamed.

“It is hypocritical of NASA to insist on giving Webb credit for the exciting things that happened under his leadership — activities that were actually conducted by other people — but refuse to accept his culpability for the problems,” four astronomers wrote in a petition to rename the telescope in 2021. “NASA’s top leadership is engaging in historical cherry picking, which is deeply unscientific in our view.”

Additionally, NASA has struggled with the politics surrounding the decision based on internal e-mails and pressure from NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee (APAC). Lucianne Walkowicz, one of the authors of the petition, resigned from this committee after the agency first declined to change the telescope’s name.

Brian C. Odom, NASA’s chief historian published a report on November 18 into Webb’s career, particularly his time at the Department of State from 1949 to 1950 and then his time at NASA from 1961 to 1968. The State Department fired hundreds of employees for alleged homosexuality throughout the course of the 1940s and 1950s.

“For decades, discrimination against LGBTQI+ federal employees was not merely tolerated, it was shamefully promoted by federal policies. The Lavender Scare that took place following World War II is a painful part of America’s story and the struggle for LGBTQI+ rights,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson SAID in a statement following the release of the report. “NASA’s core values of equality and inclusivity are in part what makes this agency so great, and we remain committed to ensuring those values are lived out throughout the workplace.”

[Related: As PopSci turns 150, we reflect on the highs and lows of our long history.]

According to NASA, the historical investigation examined two particular meetings during June 1950 in which Webb appears relation to the Lavender Scare. In the first meeting, President Harry Truman and Webb discussed whether or not to cooperate with investigators from Congress who were seeking records and information on State Department employees. After the meeting, Webb met with North Carolina Senator Clyde Hoey and several of President Truman advisers and gave Hoey “some material on the subject” of homosexuality one of Webb’s colleagues had prepared. The NASA report says, “To date, no available evidence directly links Webb to any actions emerging from this discussion. Other employees at the state department had responsibility for following up. Because of this, it is a sound conjecture that Webb played little role in the matter.”

The report also looked into whether Webb was aware of the firing of NASA GS-14 budget analyst Clifford J. Norton in 1963. Norton was fired based on a civil service policy against homosexuality, after being arrested by Washington, DC police in October 1963 for having made a “homosexual advance.” He sued the Civil Service Commission, and and won the 1969 federal case Norton v. Macy, which is one several cases that helped overturn the civil service’s policy in 1975. NASA did not find any evidence that Webb knew about the firing.

The name and other issues dealing with past discrimination will likely continue to be debated as the scientific community continues to examine the more shameful parts of its past.

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While most space cadets were understandably busy re-watching Orion’s successful launch yesterday, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was putting on a stellar show of its own.

According to NASA, a new image taken by the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) is giving astronomers a better look at some of the previously unseen features of the protostar hidden in a dark cloud named L1527. The blazing occlusions are located within the Taurus star-forming region (about 430 light years away from Earth) and are only visible in infrared light. NIRCam can see in infrared light, so it can process images that previous space telescopes couldn’t and is giving insight into the humble beginnings of young stars.

[Related: JWST give a new look at the Pillars of Creation’s majestic explosion of young stars.]

At about 100,000 years old, the protostar within L1527 is pretty young by star standards, and is considered a class 0 protostar due to its age and its brightness. This is the earliest stage of star formation, and protostars like this one are still cocooned in a dark cloud of dust and gas. The protostar doesn’t have one of the most essential characteristics of stars: the ability to generate its own energy through nuclear fusion of hydrogen. It has a mostly spherical shape, but is also unstable, which makes it take the form of a small, hot, and puffy clump of gas.

In the new image, the protostar is hidden from view within the narrow “neck” of this hourglass shape. The dark line across the middle of the neck is an edge-on protoplanetary disk. Light from L1527 leaks above and below the disk which illuminates the cavities within the surrounding gas and dust clouds.

NIRCam shows these clouds in blue and orange and outline the cavities that are formed when material shoots away from the protostar and collides with surrounding matter. The blue areas show where the dust is thinnest and the orange pockets are the thicker layers of dust that keep the blue light from shining through.

The image from JWST also shows filaments of molecular hydrogen that have been shocked as the protostar ejects material away from it. These shocks and turbulence can inhibit the formation of new stars, which would otherwise form throughout the cloud. Due to this, L1527 is a bit greedy, and is taking all of the material for itself.

[Related: New James Webb Space Telescope image shows a secluded galaxy in stellar detail.]

The dramatic space scene JWST captured in this image reveals L1527 continuing to gobble up mass. The protostar’s core will gradually compress and it will inch closer to creating the stable nuclear fusion needed to bring it to the next stage of star life.

Dense dust and gas make up a molecular cloud that is being drawn into the center of the protostar. When the gas and dust falls inward, it spirals around the center, creating a dense disk of material called an accretion disk. This disk feeds material to the protostar and is the dark band in front of the bright center, and is roughly the size of our solar system (over 13 billion miles).

As L1527 gains more mass and keeps compressing, the temperature of its core will rise and it will eventually teach the threshold for nuclear fusion to being (about 100 million degrees Kelvin).

This new view takes astronomers back through time and shows what the sun and our solar system may have looked like in their earliest days over four billion years ago.

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In the vastness of space, galaxies can get a little isolated. That’s the case for a dwarf galaxy called Wolf–Lundmark–Melotte (WLM), which is one-tenth the size of our home Milky Way galaxy and pretty close by space standards at 3 million light years away. According to NASA, WLM can be seen in the constellation Cetus.

Lonesome or not, WLM is ready for its close-up. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) took an incredibly detailed image of WLM using its near-infrared spotting tech to reveal a deep glimpse into the stars of the galaxy. The images were released to the public on November 9 and the data from this image could help astronomers study the early days of the universe since WLM’s seclusion has helped it maintain a chemical make-up that is similar to those of the galaxies in the early universe.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope’s first image shows the universe in a new light.]

“We think WLM hasn’t interacted with other systems, which makes it really nice for testing our theories of galaxy formation and evolution,” Kristen McQuinn of Rutgers University, one of the lead scientists on Webb Early Release Science (ERS) program 1334, said in a NASA blog post. “Many of the other nearby galaxies are intertwined and entangled with the Milky Way, which makes them harder to study.”

The Early Release Science programs were designed to highlight JWST’s capabilities and help astronomers prepare for future observations.

The WLM galaxy has also been imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope and the now-decommissioned Spitzer Space Telescope, but JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captured the galaxy in stunning detail.

“We can see a myriad of individual stars of different colors, sizes, temperatures, ages, and stages of evolution; interesting clouds of nebular gas within the galaxy; foreground stars with Webb’s diffraction spikes; and background galaxies with neat features like tidal tails,” McQuinn added. “And, of course, the view is far deeper and better than our eyes could possibly see. Even if you were looking out from a planet in the middle of this galaxy, and even if you could see infrared light, you would need bionic eyes to be able to see what Webb sees.”

[Related: X-ray vision adds a whole new layer to James Webb Space Telescope images.]

With this new data, that still has to undergo peer review, astronomers are looking to reconstruct the star formation history of the WLM galaxy. Since low-mass stars can live for billions of years, some of the stars that are present in WLM likely formed during the early universe.

“By determining the properties of these low-mass stars (like their ages), we can gain insight into what was happening in the very distant past,” said McQuinn. “It’s very complementary to what we learn about the early formation of galaxies by looking at high-redshift systems, where we see the galaxies as they existed when they first formed.

JWST was launched into space on December 25, 2021 and is a joint effort by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and Canadian Space Agency (CSA). It is the universe’s most powerful space observatory and can detect the faint light of incredibly distant galaxies that are invisible to the human eye.

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Back in 2018, astronomers examining the ruins of two collided neutron stars in Hubble Space Telescope images noticed something peculiar: a stream of bright high-energy ions, jetting away from the merger in Earth’s direction at seven times the speed of light.

That didn’t seem right, so the team recalculated with observations from a different radio telescope. In those observations, the stream was flying past at only four times the speed of light.

That still didn’t seem right. Nothing in the universe can go faster than the speed of light. As it happens, it was an illusion, a study published in the journal Nature explained earlier this month.

[Related: Have we been measuring gravity wrong this whole time?]

The phenomenon that makes particles in space appear to travel faster than light is called superluminal motion. The phrase fits the illusion: It means “more than light,” but actually describes a trick where an object moving toward you appears much faster than its actual speed. There are high-energy streams out in space there that can pretend to move faster than light—today, astronomers are seeing a growing number of them.

“They look like they’re moving across the sky, crazy fast, but it’s just that they’re moving toward you and across the sky at the same time,” says Jay Anderson, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland who has worked extensively with Hubble and helped author the Nature paper.

To get their jet’s true speed, Anderson and his collaborates compared Hubble and radio telescope observations. Ultimately, they estimated that the jet was zooming directly at Earth at around 99.95 percent the speed of light. That’s very close to the speed of light, but not quite faster than it.

Indeed, to our knowledge so far, nothing on or off our planet can travel faster than the speed of light. This has been proven time and time again through the laws of special relativity, put on paper by Albert Einstein a century ago. Light, which moves at about 670 million miles per hour, is the ultimate cosmic speed limit. Not only that, special relativity holds that the speed of light is a constant no matter who or what is observing it.

But special relativity doesn’t limit things from traveling super close to the speed of light (cosmic rays and the particles from solar flares are some examples). That’s where superluminal motion kicks in. As something moves toward you, the distance that its light and image needs to reach you decreases. In everyday life, that’s not really a factor: Even seemingly speedy things, like a plane moving through the sky above you, don’t move anywhere near the speed of light. 

[Related: Check out the latest version of Boom’s supersonic plane]

But when something is moving at high speeds at hundreds of millions of miles per hour in the proper direction, the distance between the object and the perceiver (whether it be a person or a camera lens) drops very quickly. This gives the illusion that something is approaching more rapidly than it actually is. Neither our eyes nor our telescopes can tell the difference, which means astronomers have to calculate an object’s actual speed from data collected in images.

The researchers behind the new Nature paper weren’t the first to grapple with superluminal motion. In fact, they’re more than a century late. In 1901, astronomers scanning the night sky caught a glimpse of a nova in the direction of the constellation Perseus. It was the remnants of a white dwarf that ate the outer shells of a nearby gas giant, briefly lighting up bright enough to see with the naked eye. Astronomers caught a bubble inflating from the nova at breakneck speed. But because there was no theory of general relativity at the time, the event quickly faded from memory.

The phenomenon gained buzz again by the 1970s and 1980s. By then, astronomers were finding all sorts of odd high-energy objects in distant corners of the universe: quasars and active galaxies, all of which could shoot out jets of material. Most of the time, these objects were powered by black holes that spewed out high-energy jets almost moving at the speed of the light. Depending on the mass and strength of the black hole they come from, they could stretch for thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of light-years to reach Earth.

Around the same time, scientists studying radio waves began seeing enough faux-speeders to raise alarms. They even found a jet from one distant galaxy that appeared to be racing at nearly 10 times the speed of light. The observations garnered a fair amount of alarm among astronomers, though by then the mechanisms were well-understood.

In the decades since, observations of superluminal motion have added up. Astronomers are seeing an ever-increasing number of jets through telescopes, particularly ones that are floating through space like Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope. When light doesn’t have to pass through Earth’s atmosphere, their captures can be much higher in resolution. This helps teams find more jets that are farther away (such as from ancient, distant galaxies), and it helps them view closer jets in more detail. “Things stand out much better in Hubble images than they do in ground-based images,” says Anderson. 

[Related: This image wiggles when you scroll—or does it?]

Take, for instance, the distant galaxy M87, whose gargantuan central black hole launched a jet that apparently clocked in at between 4 and 6 times the speed of light. By the 1990s, Hubble could actually peer into the stream of energy and reveal that parts it were traveling at different speeds. “You could actually see features in the jet moving, and you could measure the locations of those features,” Anderson explains.

There are good reasons for astronomers to be interested in such breakneck jets, especially now. In the case of the smashing neutron stars from the Nature study, the crash caused a gamma-ray burst, a type of high-energy explosion that remains poorly understood. The event also stirred up a storm of gravitational waves, causing rippled in space-time that researchers can now pick up and observe. But until they uncover some strange new physics in the matter flying through space, the speed of light remains the hard limit.

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For the first time, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured an image of one of space’s most iconic images—the Pillars of Creation. This part of the Eagle Nebula roughly 6,500 light years away from Earth is where new stars are forming within dense clouds of dust and gas. To some, the pillars look like majestic rock formations—but they are more like a massive, permeable cloud of dusty fog.

The Pillars of Creation were first made famous by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope back in 1995. Aside from being exceptionally beautiful, the new JWST image will help researchers identify more precise counts of newly formed stars within the nebula, as well as how much gas and dust is in the region. The goal over time is to build a more clear understanding the dusty clouds and the stars that burst from them.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope is almost ready to start blowing our minds.]

The young up-and-coming stars in this image are shown as bright red orbs, usually with diffraction spikes. These stars lie outside one of the dusty pillars, according to NASA. “When knots with sufficient mass form within the pillars of gas and dust, they begin to collapse under their own gravity, slowly heat up, and eventually form new stars,” writes NASA.

The image was taken using Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which can see space objects on a different light spectrum called the near-infrared range to create more detailed images like this one.

The wavy lava-looking lines are are ejections from the stars that are still forming within the dust and gas. From time to time, young stars shoot out supersonic jets which collide with clouds like these thick pillars. “This sometimes also results in bow shocks, which can form wavy patterns like a boat does as it moves through water. The crimson glow comes from the energetic hydrogen molecules that result from jets and shocks,” NASA writes in a recent release. This can be seen in the second and third pillars from the top. The young stars in this image are estimated to be only a few hundred thousand years old, which is young compared to stars like the red giant Betelgeuse, aged about 10 million years-old, and Methusula, the oldest star in the universe at a ripe 16 billion years old.

[Related: The James Webb telescope could help solve the mystery of dark matter.]

There aren’t any galaxies present in this view of the Pillars. A mix of of translucent gas and dust called the interstellar medium in the densest part of our Milky Way galaxy’s disk blocks our view of the deeper universe, according to NASA.

Launched into space on Christmas Day 2021, the JWST is an international partnership between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). It has been sending back some beautiful images since July, including a tarantula shaped nebula, exoplanets, and the planet Neptune’s rings.

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When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sent back images in July, a photo of a distant star known as WR140 sparked some interesting conversation. Some on the internet speculated that the concentric, somewhat rectangular ripples spilling out from the star could be evidence of an alien megastructure.

Two new papers published in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy are throwing some some cold water on that theory. In the new papers, Australian astronomers explain that the 17 concentric rings that look a bit like a spider web are a series of dust shells. These shells are created by the circular interaction between a pair of hot stars locked together in a tight orbit. 

[Related: X-ray vision adds a whole new layer to James Webb Space Telescope images.]

“Like clockwork, WR140 puffs out a sculpted smoke ring every eight years, which is then inflated in the stellar wind like a balloon,” Peter Tuthill from the Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney, a co-author in both papers, said in a press release. “Eight years later, as the binary returns in its orbit, another ring appears, the same as the one before, streaming out into space inside the bubble of the previous one, like a set of giant nested Russian dolls.” 

The WR140 binary is made up of one huge Wolf-Rayet star and an even bigger blue supergiant star. The two are gravitationally bound in an eight-year orbit around each other. All stars generate stellar winds, but the gusts from a Wolf-Rayt star are more like a hurricane. Some of the elements in the wind condense out as soot, which remains hot enough to glow bright when captured using infrared cameras like those on the JWST. The telescopes can follow their flow.

Because the two stars are in elliptical orbit (more oval shaped) rather than a circular orbit, dust production turns on and off as WR140’s binary companion gets closer to it. Using data collected from other telescopes since 2006, Tuthill and his former student Yinuo Han created a 3D model of the dust plume’s geometry. That model is featured in the Nature paper and explains the bizarre image obtained by the JWST back in July.

[Related: After the big bang, light and electricity shaped the early universe.]

Han and Tuthill’s work also shows the first direct evidence of intense starlight driving into matter and accelerating it, after tracking the huge plumes of dust generated by the violent interactions between these two colossal stars over the course of 16 years. 

“It’s hard to see starlight causing acceleration because the force fades with distance, and other forces quickly take over,” Han said in a press release. “To witness acceleration at the level that it becomes  measurable, the material needs to be reasonably close to the star or the source of the radiation  pressure needs to be extra strong. WR140 is a binary star whose ferocious radiation field  supercharges these effects, placing them within reach of our high-precision data.” 

With JWST now in operation, researchers will be able to learn much more about WR140 and similar systems. “The Webb telescope offers new extremes of stability and sensitivity,” Ryan Lau, assistant astronomer at the U.S. National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory and lead author of the Nature Astronomy study, said in a press release. “We’ll now be able to make observations like this much more easily than from the ground, opening a new window into the world of Wolf-Rayet physics.”

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In New York City’s ONX Studio, bits and pieces of the universe, as seen through the eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), are on display. It’s a new exhibit that opened last week from Mozilla Hubs, artist Ashley Zelinskie, and NASA called “Unfolding the Universe: A NASA Webb VR Experience.” It was created to commemorate the launch of the space telescope last December.  

Dispersed throughout the exhibition space are rooms with projected movies, desktop computers for users to try the online experience, silk prints, fake fog and laser lights (emulating the birth of stars), and conceptual sculptures inspired by interstellar travel.

At the center of the exhibit’s main room is a spot reserved for the virtual reality aspects of the experience—a digital gallery modeled after the images of galaxies and other celestial bodies from JWST. 

Last Wednesday night, former astronaut Mike Massimino was decked out in a VR headset, headphones, and hand controllers, and ambled around an area whose virtual and physical boundaries have been marked out in the gallery with an outline of white masking tape. (Viewers at home can also join in this part of the exhibition from browsers on their phones, laptop, or desktop here.)

“I’m an astronaut but I’m not a young person who does a lot of virtual reality gaming. I don’t know if I controlled it as well as it could be controlled,” Massimino tells PopSci. Massimino, who once went on spacewalking missions to repair and update the various elements on the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002 and 2009, has a special type of appreciation for the engineering it takes to collect the information needed to make science discoveries in space. ”I worked on Hubble. I can appreciate the images. What [Zelinskie] has been able to do is apply an artistic interpretation of that wonder and discovery to it,” he says.

The virtual experience runs kind of like an online game. Viewers can navigate around a series of corridors in outer space and visit animated artworks or interactive avatars of scientists that Zelinskie interviewed in the process. 

“She kept a lot of the details. What she made here is true to the science behind it and the way that the telescope works,” Massimino adds. “What I like in general about all of this stuff is that it’s taking very technical scientific discovery and it shows the beauty of images, and the beauty of the science behind it, but in a very artistic way so you can engage it at a different level.” 

The James Webb Space Telescope in VR

Zelinskie’s collaboration with NASA and the JWST team started around seven years ago. Since COVID, they had been brainstorming creative ways to engage the public, and landed on the idea of creating a VR experience. They enlisted London-based virtual architects Metaxu Studios and Mozilla Hubs to develop the concept they had in mind. 

[Related: Dive into the wonderful and wistful world of video game design]

“We were able to host a viewing party of the James Webb telescope launch on Christmas with a bunch of scientists and the public and we watched NASA Live TV in our Hubs space. We had each of the scientists in VR as avatars, and we streamed it to YouTube,” Zelinskie, a conceptual and mixed media artist, tells PopSci. 

When the JWST images were released by NASA in July, she wanted to incorporate some of the updated visual elements into an exhibit. 

She added a window of aurora borealis based on the spectroscopy graphs and data from JWST’s first images of exoplanets. There’s also a recurring motif of hexagons that appears in multiple installations, both in person and online. “The reason that they’re hexagons is because they had to fold up into the space capsule. That’s why the show is called ‘Unfolding the Universe,’ because the telescope had to unfold,” Zelinskie explains. “The cool thing about the hexagonal shape of mirrors is it makes this six-pointed star. You’re going to know it’s a Webb image because the stars in that image are going to have the same shape. It’s kind of like an artist signing its work.” 

Zelinskie also conducted interviews with several scientists and engineers, asking them about their career journeys, and their experiences working with JWST. 

“I wanted to house different portraits of the scientists; we did all the sound mapping so when you walk up to them, you can hear the sound of the interview, but then when you walk away, you’re not hearing it,” Zelinskie says. There’s a soundscape running across the virtual gallery that changes depending on where you are in the space. “That’s what [Mozilla] Hubs is really good at—sound tracking.”

Building out the virtual space

John Shaughnessy, Mozilla Hubs’ senior ecosystem and engineering manager, attests that enabling this kind of spatial audio in a device-agnostic browser setting is definitely challenging work. 

There are lots of features to consider, like distance-based fall-off of sound, so conversations close to users are loud, and those further away are quieter. There are also considerations around how sound propagates in the real world. Sounds are different in a room with curtains on the walls versus in a room that has solid metal surfaces. “In fact, we’ve had blind users in Mozilla Hubs who have built add-ons for themselves, customizing the code so they can send audio pings out into the world and listen to how sound bounces off of virtual surfaces to navigate the 3D space without the use of eyesight,” Shaughnessy says. Plus, they have to consider the different qualities of microphones from different users, and noise from things like keyboard typing sounds. 

But it’s part of a larger effort to build the tech backbone that will one day power all types of immersive virtual and metaverse interactions. And these are problems that all metaverse and virtual reality platforms face.

“I think groups of people are going to want to meet in virtual spaces with one another, and we’re going to take that for granted. What we’re trying to do is build the bare bones, basic necessities so that it happens in an open and decentralized way,” Shaughnessy says. “For that we need two things. We need people to have a shared spatial awareness. The second one is a shared sense of presence.”

To this end, Shaughnessy says that they have been borrowing 3D graphics tricks used in game rendering to give the illusion of realism. For example, they use baked lighting to calculate shadows and reflections for fixed objects in the scene ahead of time, so that math doesn’t need to be done in real-time. They also use “level of detail” to keep objects close to the user high-definition while conserving overall memory. 

In this project specifically, Shaughnessy and Mozilla Hubs built the technology that renders the 3D scene of the meeting space and virtual gallery that Zelinskie and the JWST team came up with. “We gave them a tool where they can customize the look, the avatars that are in there, and how they can present this experience. We don’t control who comes and goes. We don’t monitor what you’re doing in that space,” says Shaughnessy.

The sound of the universe cannot travel through the actual vacuum that is outer space. “Inside your space suit, when you’re space walking, it’s really quiet. You can bang with a hammer, and they’ll hear it inside the spaceship because the sound can travel within the structure, but you can’t hear anything,” Massimino notes. “You can hear yourself breathing inside. You can hear people talking to you in your headset. But what you always hear in the background is the whirring of a fan, which tells you your space suit is working, that air is being circulated, that you have power.”

While the soundscape broadcasted inside his VR headset uses a bit of artistic license, he can just pick up the faint, yet familiar whirring of equipment in the background during his virtual space walk. “It’s a comforting sound.”

Unfolding the Universe: First light will be on display at ONX studio in Manhattan, New York through October 23, 2022. Join the VR space from a browser here.

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When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sent back its first images this summer, many of us were gobsmacked at the clarity and beauty of the pictures. But even space telescopes work best with a little support, and JWST has been designed to work with many other telescopes and facilities. Four of JWST’s first images are now getting a little jolt from x-ray vision thanks to NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. These re-mixes of the original images from JWST are composites, meaning they are layered to include data from multiple telescopes. The stellar snapshots show how much more powerful telescopes are when they work together and reveal some feature’s that weren’t visible to JWST alone, according to NASA.

Stephan’s Quintet

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope’s first glimpses into deep space reveal 4 mind-blowing finds.]

Four galaxies within Stephan’s Quintet (about 620,000 lightyears across) are doing an intricate dance with gravity. The fifth galaxy is merely an observer, watching from a distance. The images of the quintet taken by JWST (which have red, orange, yellow, green, and blue colors) shows never-seen-before features and details of the, “results of these interactions, including sweeping tails of gas and bursts of star formation,” according to NASA. The Chandra data (in light blue) of this same system shows a shock wave heating up gas to tens of millions of degrees, while one of the galaxies passes through at about 2 million miles per hour. Infrared data from NASA’s now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope (shown in red, green, and blue) as also included.

Cartwheel Galaxy

The acrobatic Cartwheel galaxy is shaped this way due to a a collision with another smaller galaxy roughly 100 million years ago. Star formation on its outer ring and other places in the galaxy was triggered when the smaller galaxy punched the Cartwheel. Chandra X-rays, shown in blue and purple, are due to, “superheated gas, individual exploded stars, and neutron stars and black holes pulling material from companion stars,” said NASA in a statement. JWST offers an infrared view in red, orange, yellow, green, and blue shows the Cartwheel galaxy and two smaller companion galaxies that were not involved in the 100 million year old collision.

SMACS 0723.3–7327

Located about 4.2 billion light-years away from Earth, JWST’s data shows that the galaxy cluster SMACS J0723 actually contains hundreds of individual galaxies. These galaxy clusters more than their galaxies—they’re some of the biggest structures in the universe. These clusters are, “filled with vast reservoirs of superheated gas that is seen only in X-ray light,” according to NASA. The Chandra data (shown in blue) shows really hot gas. This gas is roughly tens of millions of degrees and has a total mass of about 100 trillion times that of our sun, several times higher than the mass of all of the galaxies in the cluster. A larger fraction of the mass in this cluster is made up by individual dark matter.

[Related: This kilonova could have created the first-ever extragalactic ‘sonic boom.’]

NGC 3324, The Cosmic Cliffs of the Carina Nebula

Cliffs are not just for climbing back on Earth. Chandra’s data of the “Cosmic Cliffs” (shown in pink) in the Carina Nebula reveals over a dozen individual X-ray sources. These stars on the nebula’s outer region are between 1 and 2 million years old, quite young in stellar terms. Typically, young stars are much brighter in X-rays than older stars, so X-ray studies are an, “ideal way to distinguish stars in the Carina Nebula from the many stars of different ages from our Milky Way galaxy along our line of sight to the nebula,” said NASA. The JWST data uses red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, and blue in this image as well.

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Scorching heat, pillars of darkened ash, gushing lava fountains. Volcanic eruptions on Earth are paradoxes of life and death, though they are nothing compared to entire planets embalmed in such a nightmare. 

Lava worlds and other volcanically active bodies are some of the most enthralling cosmic destinations astronomers have ever discovered, and still some of the most scientifically elusive. The James Webb Space Telescope’s first batch of findings could reveal their secrets in greater detail, when paired with research already in the works. In an upcoming issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of scientists at Cornell University took existing atmospheric and surface composition data to understand the mantles—or the interior—of 16 different exoplanets by modeling and synthesizing them here on Earth. They were able to create and cool artificial lava from other distant locales in our universe inside the lab, no volcanic eruption required.

Given that exoplanets are difficult to reach by even our farthest traveling space probes, there have rarely been experimental studies done on these faraway worlds, says Esteban Gazel, lead author of the study and engineering professor at Cornell University who studies geochemistry and volcanology. His team’s new research is the first to provide a “library of composition” for potential exotic exoplanet surfaces—a rolodex of building blocks that exoplanet hunters can reference in their search for faraway planets and fiery space environments. In their lab, Gazel and his colleagues meticulously combined star metallicity data, thermodynamic modeling algorithms, and physical experiments to whip up their synthetic lava batches using different measurements of starting chemicals like magnesium oxide, iron oxide, and silicon dioxide. The final result were several porous igneous rocks, crystallized magma with glass and minerals you can touch without burning your limbs off.  

[Related: Volcanoes, not alien life, might explain Venus’s weird atmosphere]

Eventually, astronomers could use the team’s data from the lava experiments to interpret the inner-makings of different exoplanets. In the future this interplanetary brochure could even be used to shed light on Earth’s red-hot beginnings. “There are so many exoplanets out there in different evolutionary stages,” says Gazel. “If we can figure out their composition, it will give us a lot of information about how our planet evolved.”

Before the dawn of its glittering blue oceans and towering green forests, Earth too was a lava planet—molten and uninhabitable. At one point in its 4.5 billion-year lifetime, the planet might have resembled the hellish landscape of other super-sized Earths, like 55 Cancri e residing some 41 light years away. Today, we know that volcanoes are vital to spawning and sustaining life, as these volatile processes help with atmospheric cooling, land formation, and turning dead dirt into fertile flesh once more. 

While using other planets to investigate our hot origins is hardly a new approach, it would be natural to expect alien planets to possess foreign elements—chemical compounds or materials that we would be unable to replicate on Earth. Yet Lisa Kaltenegger, co-author of the study and the director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell and associate professor in astronomy, says that isn’t the case. She explains that while they may look different to the naked eye, many planets and stars in our celestial neighborhood actually hold the same celestial ingredients, just arranged in different ways. 

“When we look at other stars, we see the disks around them that make the planets,” she says. “And so far in those disks, we haven’t found anything we can’t explain.” That means that their team was able to create all 16 synthetic surfaces with chemical materials easily found here on Earth. Kaltenegger says their work is only just beginning to create a larger picture of the cosmos, and will only continue to improve. They plan to pull in exoplanet data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which will become more precise over time.

[Related: Astronomers are already using James Webb Space Telescope data to hunt down cryptic galaxies]

Despite some calibration issues since the telescope’s initial data release, Karl Gordon, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, says that such small setbacks are expected of any mission. The only difference this time, he says, is how quickly scientists are jumping on the data. “The best way to describe calibration is it’s an exponential,” he says. “Right at the beginning, it’s not so good, and then it quickly gets better and better.” 

Kaltenegger agrees that the calibration issues are mere “stepping stones,” that will begin to clear up as JWST’s mission continues.  

“I think the more time we have with the data, the better we’re going to be in actually finding out nuances that we don’t even see yet,” she says. 

Correction (October 5, 2022): Information in the story originally implied that the new study used data from the JWST. We updated the language to clarify that the team plans to use JWST data in future experiments. An earlier version of this story misspelled Esteban Gazel’s name. We regret the error.

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The Hubble Space Telescope has sent back dazzling images and critical data back to Earth for 32 years, but nothing lasts forever, even space telescopes. In an effort to give the telescope a longer lifespan, NASA and SpaceX signed an unfunded Space Act Agreement. They will be studying the feasibility of a SpaceX and Polaris Program idea to use SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to boost the Hubble into a higher orbit at no cost to the government.

The study is designed to help NASA understand the commercial possibilities of missions like this, but there currently aren’t any plans for NASA to conduct or fund a servicing mission to the telescope or commercially compete in this space, according to NASA.

In partnership with the Polaris Program (a planned human space flight company), SpaceX proposed this study as a way to better understand the technical challenges associated with servicing missions in space. The Polaris Program is funded by billionaire Jason Isaacman, who bought three flights to space on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft earlier this year. SpaceX was founded in 2002 by billionaire Elon Musk with the goal of reducing the costs of space exploration and one day colonize Mars. In 2020, Dragon became the first private spacecraft to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.

[Related: Space tourism is on the rise. Can NASA keep up with it?]

This study is non-exclusive, so other space exploration companies may propose similar studies with different rockets or spacecraft as their model. It’s expected to take six months, and will look at technical data from both the Hubble and the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to determine whether it is possible to safely rendezvous, dock, and move the telescope into a more stable orbit.

“This study is an exciting example of the innovative approaches NASA is exploring through private-public partnerships,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, in a press release. “As our fleet grows, we want to explore a wide range of opportunities to support the most robust, superlative science missions possible.”

[Related: This glittery Hubble image shows how far we’ve come in studying distant stars.]

The Hubble and Dragon will be the test models in this study, but portions of the mission concept may be applicable to other spacecraft. It could be particularly applicable to those in near-Earth orbit like the Hubble, according to NASA. Hubble operates about 335 miles (539 kilometers) above the Earth in an orbit that is slowly decaying over time. Orbital decay like this leads to the gradual decrease of the distance between two orbiting bodies. Hubble has now brushed against the outer edges of Earth’s atmosphere and is now about 18 miles (30 kilometers) closer to Earth than it was in 2009. Re-boosting Hubble into a higher, and more stable orbit could add multiple years of operations to its life.

“SpaceX and the Polaris Program want to expand the boundaries of current technology and explore how commercial partnerships can creatively solve challenging, complex problems,” said Jessica Jensen, vice president of Customer Operations & Integration at SpaceX, in a press release. “Missions such as servicing Hubble would help us expand space capabilities to ultimately help all of us achieve our goals of becoming a space-faring, multiplanetary civilization.”

NASA plans to safely de-orbit or dispose of Hubble at the end of its lifetime.

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Some skeletons are more sparkly than scary. A new image of a far-off galaxy shows us that what lurks underneath a spiral galaxy can be just as spectacular as what our eyes can see. The new images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) show IC 5332, a spiral galaxy over 29 million light years away from the Earth in the constellation Sculptor. It has a diameter of roughly 66,000 light years, making it slightly larger than our Milky Way galaxy.

The MIRI aboard the new telescope observes the furthest reaches of the universe and can see infrared light, so it’s able to peer through the galaxy’s clouds of dust and into the “skeleton” of stars and gas underneath its signature arms. MIRI basically was able to take an x-ray of a galaxy, revealing IC 5332’s bones and a world that looks different, yet somewhat the same.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope’s first image shows the universe in a new light.]

The dust between the arms of the galaxy virtually disappear in this new image, and it also shows some blood-red stars that were missed or blocked in previous pictures taken by the three-decade old, but still kicking, Hubble Space Telescope. Comparing and contrasting these the two images will help astronomers learn more about how stars, dust, and gas interact within swirly spiral galaxies and the specific properties of IC 5332.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), obtaining observations in the mid-infrared range like the scale that the JWST can see, is incredibly challenging from Earth, partially because Earth’s atmosphere absorbs most of the light. The heat from the atmosphere also complicates things. The Hubble can’t observe the mid-infrared region because as its mirrors weren’t cold enough, meaning the “infrared radiation from the mirrors themselves would have dominated any attempted observations,” writes the ESA.

[Related: Neptune’s faint rings glimmer in new James Webb Space Telescope image.]

MIRI operates colder than the rest of the observatory aboard the JWST at a chilly -447 degrees Fahrenheit. That means that MIRI operates in an environment only around a few degrees warmer than absolute zero (-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit), or the lowest possible temperature based on the laws of thermodynamics. This super cold environment is needed for MIRI’s highly specialized detectors to function correctly.

IC 5332 shows up as a pristine image of a spiral galaxy in the wavelengths of light that are visible to the human eye, but this new image shows just how much goes into those dreamy swirls. This galaxy is also notable because it is almost perfectly face-on with respect to Earth, which allows us to better see the symmetrical sweep of its spiral arms from our corner of the universe.

CORRECTION October 3, 2022: A previous version of this article said 29,000 light years when IC 5332 is 29 million light years away. We regret the error.

CORRECTION October 12, 2022: Conversions between Celsius and Fahrenheit have since been updated.

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Known as one of the most complex nebulae in the universe, NGC 6543 , also known as the Cat’s Eye Nebula, is slightly more than 3,000 light-years away from Earth. Astronomers are a bit closer to understanding the 1,000 year old star factory, thanks to a the first three-dimensional model of the Cat’s Eye Nebula.

The study was is published in the October 2022 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and details the building of this stellar new model that reveals a pair of symmetric rings circling the nebula’s outer shell.

The Cat’s Eye Nebula can be seen in the constellation Draco located in the far northern sky. In addition to this new model, The Cat’s Eye Nebula was imaged by the famed Hubble Space Telescope in 1994. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), “it’s a visual ‘fossil record’ of the dynamics and late evolution of a dying star.” A planetary nebula like this one forms when a dying star releases an outer layer of gas, which creates a the colorful, shell-like structure that sets planetary nebulae apart. The telescope allowed astronomers to see the nebula’s complicated structure of knots, spherical shells, and arc-like filaments.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope opens spooky season with stunning images of Tarantula nebula.]

This unusual structure confounded astrophysicists for years because it could not be explained by previously accepted theories for planetary nebula formation.

According to the study, the symmetry of the rings suggests that they were formed by a precessing jet. The precession is similar to the wobbling motion of a spinning top. As the jet, a stream of gas and dust, wobbled (or precessed), it outlined a circle that created the rings around the Cat’s Eye. The new data indicates the the rings are only partial, which means that the precessing jet never completed a full 360-degree rotation, so the emergence of these jets was short lived. The authors say that these findings are strong evidence that this kind of set up is at the core of the Cat’s Eye, since only binary stars can power a precessing jet in a planetary nebula like this one.

Cat’s Eye’s jets and knots were likely formed as the angle and direction of the jet changed over time. The 3D model also allowed the researchers to calculate the tilt and opening angle of the precessing jet based on the rings orientation.

[Related: Dark energy camera gives a tasty view of a lobster-shaped nebula.]

“When I first saw the Cat’s Eye Nebula, I was astounded by its beautiful, perfectly symmetric structure. I was even more surprised that its 3D structure was not fully understood,” said lead author Ryan Clairmont, in a press release. “It was very rewarding to be able to do astrophysical research of my own that actually has an impact in the field. Precessing jets in planetary nebulae are relatively rare, so it’s important to understand how they contribute to the shaping of more complex systems like the Cat’s Eye. Ultimately, understanding how they form provides insight into the eventual fate of our Sun, which will itself one day become a planetary nebula.”

According to the Royal Astronomical Society, Clairmont is an astronomy enthusiast and prospective undergraduate at Stanford who sought to establish the detailed 3D structure of the Cat’s Eye to discover more about what mechanism is giving it such an intricate shape. He sought out the help of Wolfgang Steffen of The National Autonomous University of Mexico and Nico Koning from the University of Calgary, who developed an astrophysical modeling software particularly suitable for planetary nebulae called SHAPE.

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When you think of planets with rings, Saturn normally takes the cake for its iconic icy spirals. But, Saturn isn’t the only planet in our solar system that the universe put a ring on. As a matter of fact, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) just capture the clearest view of Neptune’s rings in over 30 years.

“It has been three decades since we last saw these faint, dusty rings, and this is the first time we’ve seen them in the infrared,” said Heidi Hammel, a Neptune system expert and interdisciplinary scientist for Webb, in a press release.

In 1989, NASA’s Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to observe Neptune during its late 80’s flyby. Now, JWST has taken this crisp image of the planet’s rings—some of which have not been detected since that mission over three decades ago. The photo clearly shows Neptunes finer bands of dust, in addition to the bright and narrow rings.

[Related: The outer solar system awaits—but getting there may not be as easy as we’d like.]

Neptune is an ice giant due to the chemical make-up of the planet’s interior. When compared with the solar system’s gas giants (Jupiter and the more famously ringed Saturn), Neptune is much richer in elements that are heavier than hydrogen and helium.

JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) can see space objects on a different light spectrum called the near-infrared range. This means that Neptune doesn’t appear blue in the pictures the NIRCam takes. “The planet’s methane gas so strongly absorbs red and infrared light that the planet is quite dark at these near-infrared wavelengths, except where high-altitude clouds are present,” according to NASA. These methane-ice clouds show up as bright streaks and spots, which reflect sunlight before begin absorbed by the methane gas. The Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory have also recorded these rapidly changing cloud features.

Astronomers suspect that the thin line of brightness circling the planet’s equator could be a sign that there is atmospheric circulation that fuels Neptune’s winds and storms. It glows at infrared wavelengths more than the surrounding cooler gases because the atmosphere drops down and warms at Neptune’s equator.

It takes Neptune 164 Earth-years to orbit the sun, so its northern pole is just out of view for astronomers. However, the JWST images show a possible brightness up there. JWST can see a previously-known vortex at Neptune’s southern pole, but a continuous band of high-latitude clouds surrounding it was revealed for the first time in these images.

[Related: Neptune is already an ice giant, but it might be having a cold snap.]

JWST also captured pictures of seven of Neptune’s 14 known moons (Galatea, Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Proteus, Larissa, and Triton). Neptune’s large and “unusual” moon Triton is dominating this portrait of the planet, creating a point with diffraction spikes that make it look like a star. Triton is covered in a frozen sheen of condensed nitrogen and it reflects 70 percent of the sunlight that hits it. It is much brighter than Neptune in this image because the planet’s atmosphere is darkened by methane absorption when seen at at these near-infrared wavelengths. Since Triton orbits Neptune in an unusual retrograde orbit (aka backwards), astronomers believe that this moon may have originally been a Kuiper belt object that Neptune used its gravity to capture. Studies of both Triton and Neptune by JWST are planned in the coming year.

Since the first documented discovery of Neptune in 1846, Neptune has long fascinated scientists. Compared to Earth, it 30 times farther from the sun. It orbits in the remote, dark region of the outer solar system, where the sun is so small and faint that high noon on Neptune is similar to a dim twilight on Earth.

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When the first stars and galaxies formed, they didn’t just illuminate the cosmos. These bright structures also fundamentally changed the chemistry of the universe. 

During that time, the hydrogen gas that makes up most of the material in the space between galaxies today became electrically charged. That epoch of reionization, as it’s called, was “one of the last major changes in the universe,” says Brant Robertson, who leads the Computational Astrophysics Research Group at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It was the dawn of the universe as we know it.

But scientists haven’t been able to observe in detail what occurred during the epoch of reionization—until now. NASA’s newly active James Webb Space Telescope offers eyes that can pierce the veil on this formative time. Astrophysicists like Robertson are already poring over JWST data looking for answers to fundamental questions about that electric cosmic dawn, and what it can tell us about the dynamics that shape the universe today.

What happened after the big bang?

The epoch of reionization wasn’t the first time that the universe was filled with electricity. Right after the big bang, the cosmos were dark and hot; there were no stars, galaxies, and planets. Instead, electrons and protons roamed free, as it was too steamy for them to pair up. 

But as the universe cooled down, the protons began to capture the electrons to form the first atoms—hydrogen, specifically—in a period called “recombination,” explains Anne Hutter, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cosmic Dawn Center, a research collaboration between the University of Copenhagen and the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark. That process neutralized the charged material.

Any material held in the universe was spread out relatively evenly at that time, and there was very little structure. But there were small fluctuations in density, and over millions of years, the changes drew early atoms together to eventually form stars. The gravity of early stars drew more gases, particles, and other components to coalesce into more stars and then galaxies. 

[Related: How old is the universe? Our answer keeps getting better.]

Once the beginnings of galaxies lit up, the cosmic dark age, as astrophysicists call it, was over. These stellar bodies were especially bright, Robertson says: They were more massive than our sun and burned hot, shining in the ultraviolet spectrum. 

“Ultraviolet light, if it’s energetic enough, can actually ionize hydrogen,” Robertson says. All it takes is a single, especially energetic particle of light, called a photon, to strip away the electron on a hydrogen atom and leave it with a positive electrical charge. 

As the galaxies started coming together, they would first ionize the regions around them, leaving bubbles of charged hydrogen gas across the universe. As the light-emitting clusters grew, more stars formed to make them even brighter and full of photons. Additional new galaxies began to develop, too. As they became luminous, the ionized bubbles began to overlap. That allowed a photon from one galaxy to “travel a much larger distance because it didn’t run into a hydrogen atom as it crossed through this network,” Robertson explains.

At that point, the rest of the intergalactic medium in the universe—even in regions far from galaxies—quickly becomes ionized. That’s when the epoch of reionization ended and the universe as we know it began.

“This was the last time whole properties of the universe were changed,” Robertson says. “It also was the first time that galaxies actually had an impact beyond their local region.”

The James Webb Space Telescope’s hunt for ionized clues

With all of the hydrogen between galaxies charged the universe entered a new phase of formation. This ionization had a ripple effect on galaxy formation: Any star-studded structures that formed after the cosmic dawn were likely affected. 

“If you ionize a gas, you also heat it up,” explains Hutter. Remember, high temperatures it difficult for material to coalesce and form new stars and planets—and can even destroy gases that are already present. As a result, small galaxies forming in an ionized region might have trouble gaining enough gas to make more stars. “That really has an impact on how many stars the galaxies are forming,” Hutter says. “It affects their entire history.”

Although scientists have a sense of the broad strokes of the story of reionization, some big questions remain. For instance, while they know roughly that the epoch ended about a billion years after the big bang, they’re not quite sure when reionization—and therefore the first galaxy formation—began. 

That’s where JWST comes in. The new space telescope is designed to be able to search out the oldest bits of the universe that are invisible to human eyes, and gather data on the first glimmers of starlight that ionized the intergalactic medium. Astronomers largely detect celestial objects by the radiation they emit. The ones farther away from us tend to appear in the infrared, as the distance distorts their wavelengths to be longer. With the universe expanding, the light can take billions of years to reach JWST’s detectors. 

[Related: Astronomers are already using James Webb Space Telescope data to hunt down cryptic galaxies]

That, in a nutshell, is how scientists are using JWST to peer at the first galaxies in the process of ionizing the universe. While older tools like the Hubble Space Telescope could spot the occasional early galaxy, the new space observatory can gather finer details to place the groups of stars in time.

“Now, we can very precisely work out how many galaxies were around, you know, 900 million years after the big bang, 800, 700, 600, all the way back to 300 million years after the big bang,” Robertson says. Using that information, astrophysicists can calculate how many ionizing photons were around at each age, and how the particles might have affected their surroundings.

Painting a picture of the cosmic dawn isn’t just about understanding the large-scale structure in the universe: It also explains when the elements that made us, like carbon and oxygen, became available as they formed inside the first stars. “[The question] really is,” Hutter says, “where do we come from?” 

Correction (September 21, 2022): The fluctuations in the early universe’s density took place over millions of years, not billions as previously written. This was an editing error.

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Decades after Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, went their separate ways to explore the universe, the probe has lasted far longer than NASA ever expected—both have sent back discoveries of active volcanoes and new moons among the Jovian and Saturnian systems. Yet even for a spacecraft, getting older comes with its own set of problems. 

This year, without any known interference in its previously spotless record, the probe experienced a glitch in its attitude articulation and control system (AACS), the system which keeps its antennae pointed towards Earth. Confused about its position in space, the muddled probe began sending back inaccurate telemetry data through an onboard computer that had ceased functioning years earlier, corrupting the correct data. 

Although NASA engineers were recently able to fix the issue by commanding the system to revert back to its previous computer, Voyager’s slip begs the question: Is it time to retire one of the agency’s oldest, farthest-traveling space probes? Although the agency notes that the error isn’t a threat to the long-term health of the mission, some scientists have already been looking into creating Voyager’s heir-apparent. 

“We’ve gotten incredibly lucky with the Voyagers and so the fact that the things are still working as well as they are, is really a combination of technological miracle and some luck,“ says Ralph McNutt, the chief scientist for space science at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “So if things go wrong, it’s not surprising.”

McNutt, who was lucky enough to be present at Cape Canaveral, Florida during Voyager 1’s launch in 1977, is the principal investigator of a team at the Applied Physics Laboratory that has recently submitted a detailed proposal to NASA for a mission concept that could far exceed Voyager’s limits. Dubbed the “Interstellar Probe,’‘ their craft would be able to travel even farther than the Voyager missions, while still seeking answers about the heliosphere, or the bubble-like region of space that shields our solar system from galactic radiation. 

[Related: How the most distant object ever made by humans is spending its dying days]

With the right technology, McNutt’s probe concept could be ready to launch between 2036 to 2042, depending on when it’s able to get a gravity assist from Jupiter, where the craft’s orbit would use the planet’s gravitational pull to slingshot itself into space’s outer reaches. If Interstellar Probe does come to fruition, the mission could end up breaking its predecessor’s record as the most distant human-made object in the universe. And unlike the 45-year-old Voyager, which has succeeded its original mission lifetime by a factor of 10, says McNutt, Interstellar Probe would be reliable enough to last for at least 50 years. 

But a potential launch would still be some years away. Although NASA did fund the initial study, the concept is still in its early stages, and won’t be turned into an official mission until it’s been reviewed and chosen by a decadal survey committee, whose decisions could take another two years to be finalized. 

But why exactly do we need probes when astronomers now have access to powerful telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope and the long-awaited dark matter hunter, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope? The simple answer is that the missions often have different priorities and contrasting capabilities. Probes like Voyager and the Parker Solar Probe, are heliophysics missions that study the sun’s influence in space, whereas JWST and Roman are astrophysics missions that study objects like exoplanets and faraway galaxies. Despite their differences, probes and bigger survey telescopes like JWST are also two sides of the same coin. Their discoveries are both needed to create an accurate, more comprehensive picture of our cosmic surroundings. 

[Related: What we learn from noisy signals from deep space]

While Voyager isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, some experts are appreciative of the fact that many in the scientific community are planning for the day Voyager might go dark. 

“Around 2030 is probably the last time that any of the instruments on Voyager will work,“ says Merav Opher, a professor of astronomy at Boston University, who has long been involved with the Voyager team. She says it’s encouraging that so many of her colleagues are working on next-generation projects that could eventually utilize Voyager’s knowledge to the fullest. 

“This long-term mission needs diversity,” she says. “Attention to diversity in teams is not just good diversity, but it’s good to make discoveries.” 

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At 8,000 light years away from Earth, nebula NGC 6357 (aka the Lobster Nebula) is pretty safe from being drenched with drawn butter and service with a a side of corn on the cob and coleslaw at a New England restaurant.

The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) atop the Víctor M. Blanco Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile captured the stellar image as part of The Dark Energy Survey, a project searching the universe for evidence of dark energy.

Astronomers believe that dark energy is the force accelerating the expansion of the universe. They look for evidence of it in images like this one by studying how distant objects move in space. According to NASA, astronomers know how much dark energy is present in the universe because we know how affects universe’s expansion. Beyond that, it’s a mystery. “It turns out that roughly 68 percent of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27 percent. The rest—everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter—adds up to less than 5 percent of the universe,” writes NASA.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope opens spooky season with stunning images of Tarantula nebula.]

The Lobster Nebula fittingly is in the constellation Scorpius. The image released yesterday shows a region about 400 light-years across, with bright young stars scattered across clouds of dust and gas. An open star cluster, or a loose group of very big and young stars is at its center.

Protostars are still wrapped in tight shrouds of gas and dust are some of the brith dots that surround the cluster that will eventually become fully-formed stars. There are also interstellar winds, galactic radiation, and powerful magnetic fields battering the nebula, crushing the gas and dust inside of it into braids and twisting streams.

[Related: Astronomers may have found a galaxy that formed without dark matter.]

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) NOIRLab operates the camera and is a center for “ground-based optical-infrared astronomy, enabling breakthrough discoveries in astrophysics by developing and operating state-of-the-art ground-based observatories and providing data products and services for a diverse and inclusive community.” According to the NOIRLab, DECam is one of the highest-performance wide-field charged-coupled device cameras in the world. It can capture very faint sources of light, deliver 400 to 500 images per night, and recently reached a milestone of 1 million individual exposures.

The images was unveiled during the DECam at 10 years—Looking Back, Looking Forward conference, celebrating a decade of DECam operations. Some of DECam’s other highlights include images of stellar steams that confirm the “melting pot” history of the galaxy and the giant Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein on the outskirts of our Solar System.

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What could be better than one gleaming, spiral galaxy? Two. A new image of a “galactic overlap” from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project appears to show two dueling galaxies more than one billion light years away from Earth. For a closer look, there is a zoomable version of the image.

While it looks like the galaxies SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461 might collide with one another, they are just aligned by chance and ESA likened them to two ships passing in the night. Hubble has captured similar galaxies that appear to be hanging out together in the past, such as NGC 1512 and NGC 1510 in 2017 and NGC 6285 and NGC 6286 in 2019.

[Related: Hubble image captures stars forming in a far-off phantom galaxy.]

This is one of many Hubble galaxy observations where the Galaxy Zoo project has played a big role. Since 2007, the citizen science project and its successors, including Galaxy Zoo 2 and Galaxy Zoo: CANDELS, have crowdsourced galaxy classifications from almost 90,000 volunteer astronomers. The citizen scientists classify galaxies imaged by robotic telescopes and are often the first to ever set eyes on an astronomical object, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). To date, Galaxy Zoo has classified 5,134,932 galaxies. Galaxy Zoo volunteers have also discovered a “menagerie of weird and wonderful galaxies,” such as unusual 3-armed spiral galaxies and colliding ring galaxies.

From our perspective on Earth, it’s not uncommon for galaxies to overlap like this. The new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured a 150-million-pixel shot a group of five galaxies that appear to swirl together called Stephan’s Quintet in July. In this group of five, only a few of galaxies in the group are interacting. According to NASA, images like this, “provide new insights into how galactic interactions may have driven galaxy evolution in the early universe.”

[Related: Behold six galactic collisions, masterfully captured by Hubble.]

Galaxies are classified into three major categories: elliptical, spiral and irregular. Ellipticals make up about one-third of all galaxies and can vary from nearly circular to more elongated. The largest and rarest are called giant ellipticals, and are about 300,000 light-years across.

Spiral galaxies are very colorful. They typically appear as flat, blue-white disks of stars, gas and dust with yellow looking bulges in the middle. There are two types of spiral galaxies, normal and barred. Barred spirals have a bar of stars running through the central bulge and the arms usually start at the end of the bar instead off from a bulge. Normal spirals have arms that extend from a center, that look like a hurricane’s eye.

Irregular galaxies are (as the name suggests) the most unusual galaxy. They’re neither disk-like nor elliptical and contain very little dust. These are often seen by astronomers as they gaze deeper into the universe. Looking that deep is like looking back in time, and irregular galaxies are abundant in the early universe, before spirals and ellipticals even developed.

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It’s certainly been an exciting few months for telescopes. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has just released stellar new images of the sun’s face, courtesy of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawaii. The images show the chromosphere, the middle layer of the sun’s atmosphere, which can reach over 13,000 degrees Farenheit. The pictures vaguely resemble the bright yellow flowers in Vincent van Gogh’s painting, “Sunflowers.”

Hairs of fiery plasma flow into the corona, the suns outermost atmospheric level, from a pattern of pores. The sun’s chromosphere sits below the corona, which is usually invisible and historically has only been seen during a total solar eclipse. But new technology like this telescope has changed that.

The blistering blobs are called granules and are about 994 miles wide. Each of these portraits shows an area about 51,260 miles wide, only a small percentage of the sun’s total diameter.

[Related: NASA’s solar probe reveals stunning results after swooping in close to the sun.]

The images were taken on June 3 and released to the public this week. Named for the late Hawaiian Senator Daniel K. Inouye, the DKIST is currently the largest solar telescope in the world. The 13 feet-wide telescope rests on the peak of the mountain and volcano Haleakalā (or “House of the Sun”) on the island of Maui. It’s focused on understanding the explosive behavior of the sun and observing its magnetic fields. It will also help scientists predict and prepare for solar storms called coronal mass ejections (CME). CME bursts send hot plasma from the sun’s corona to Earth and interfere with electricity and internet connections. It is part of the NSF’s National Solar Observatory.

“With the world’s largest solar telescope now in science operations, we are grateful for all who make this remarkable facility possible,” said Matt Mountain, AURA President, in a press release. “In particular we thank the people of Hawai‘i for the privilege of operating from this remarkable site, to the National Science Foundation and the US Congress for their consistent support, and to our Inouye Solar Telescope Team, many of whom have tirelessly devoted over a decade to this transformational project. A new era of Solar Physics is beginning!”

[Related: What happens when the sun burns out?]

This telescope is not free from controversy since its location is in a sacred spot of Native Hawaiians. Mountain tops likes this one are regarded as wao akua, (realm of the gods), places where both deities and demigods existed on Earth. They are still sacred places of reverence, where many Native Hawaiians visit to honor ancestors and practice other spiritual traditions.

In a 2017 interview with Science, Kaleikoa Kaeo, a Hawaiian-language educator at the University of Hawaii Maui College in Kahului and a leader in opposition to the telescope said, “As a people, we don’t have control of some of our most sacred spaces. They say it’s Hawaiian culture versus science. I say, ‘No, it’s Hawaiian culture versus white supremacy.'”

Following protests in 2015 and 2017, the telescope’s officials began to meet with working groups of Native Hawaiians, who have since gained more authority over the site. The peak also remains open to native Hawaiians and a sun-centered middle-school curricula that highlights Hawaii’s long history of studying astronomy has been developed.

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As the leaves in the Northern Hemisphere begin to change colors and Halloween decorations begin to emerge from dusty attics, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) appears to be embracing “spooky season.” The powerful NASA/ESA/CSA space telescope released chilling new images of 30 Doradus aka the Tarantula Nebula yesterday. The nebula’s arachnid inspired nickname comes from its similar appearance to a burrowing tarantula’s silk-lined home, according to NASA.

The Tarantula Nebula is about 161,000 light-years away from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy and is home to some of the hottest and and biggest stars known to astronomers. It is also the biggest and brightest star-forming region in the Local Group, or the galaxies located closest to our own Milky Way. In addition to the baby stars, the images captured by JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) reveal distant background galaxies and a closer look at the detailed structure and composition of the nebula’s gas and dust.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope’s first glimpses into deep space reveal 4 mind-blowing finds.]

The nebula’s cavity was hollowed out like a jack-o-lantern by blistering radiation from a cluster of young stars that sparkle pale blue in the new image. Only the densest surrounding areas of the nebula can resist erosion by the powerful stellar winds blown by young stars, forming the pillars that appear to point back toward the cluster. The pillars contain forming protostars, very young stars that are still gathering mass from a molecular cloud. The protostars will eventually emerge like a caterpillar from a cocoon and further shaping the nebula. JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) caught a very young star doing just that, adding new knowledge to this stellar process.

“Astronomers previously thought this star might be a bit older and already in the process of clearing out a bubble around itself,” wrote NASA. “However, NIRSpec showed that the star was only just beginning to emerge from its pillar and still maintained an insulating cloud of dust around itself. Without Webb’s high-resolution spectra at infrared wavelengths, this episode of star formation in action could not have been revealed.”

[Related: NASA releases Hubble images of cotton candy-colored clouds in Orion Nebula.]

Astronomers are also reaping the benefits of JWST’s Mid-infrared Instrument (MIRI), which can detect longer infrared wavelengths and see through the stellar dust in a nebula. MIRI peered into a previously unseen cosmic environment, where that the hotter stars fade, the cooler gases and dust glow, and the points of light within the nebula’s clouds indicate embedded protostars that are still gaining mass.

The Tarantula Nebula has been a favorite of astronomers studying star formation since it has has a similar chemical makeup to that of the gigantic star-forming regions at the universe’s cosmic noon. This is when the cosmos were roughly two to three billion years old and star formation was at its peak. The Tarantula Nebula is the closest (easiest to see in detail) example of what was happening in the universe as it reached that brilliant high noon of furious star birth.

According to NASA, JWST will help give astronomers opportunity to compare and contrast observations of star formation in the Tarantula Nebula with the telescope’s deep observations of distant galaxies from the actual era of cosmic noon.

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For the first time ever, astronomers at NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) captured a direct image of an exoplanet using the James Webb Space Telescope. Extra solar planets, or exoplanets, are planets that exist outside of our solar system.

Researchers are currently analyzing the new data from these observations and are working on a paper for peer review. The findings are currently published in a preprint. But Webb’s first capture of an exoplanet already hints at future possibilities for studying distant worlds.

JWST captured the image of the inhabitable gas giant called HIP 65426 b located about 385 light-years away from Earth. It is roughly six to 12 times the mass of Jupiter (our solar system’s biggest planet) and astronomers believe that their observations could help narrow down that estimate. Compared to 4.5 billion-year-old Planet Earth, HIP 65426 b is only 15 to 20 million years-old, so still a young one as far as planets go.

[Related: In a first, James Webb Space Telescope reveals distant gassy atmosphere is filled with carbon dioxide.]

“This is a transformative moment, not only for Webb but also for astronomy generally,” said Sasha Hinkley, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, who led these observations with a large international collaboration, in a NASA blog.

The image released by NASA/ESA/CSA shows the exoplanet through four different light filters. Unlike the human eye, JWST can see the universe in infrared light, which gives astronomers more precise measurements of an exoplanet’s mass and temperature and can even detect clouds moving in a distant planet’s sky. The infrared light pointing the way to future observations that will reveal more information than ever before about exoplanets.

JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) have coronagraphs. These are sets of tiny masks that can block out starlight and enable the telescope to take direct images of certain exoplanets like HIP 65426 b. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch this decade, will demonstrate an even more advanced coronagraph.

“It was really impressive how well the Webb coronagraphs worked to suppress the light of the host star,” said Hinkley.

While this specific image is new to astronomers, HIP 65426 b is not. The exoplanet was first detected in 2017 using the SPHERE instrument located at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope in northern Chile. The ground-based telescope took images of the exoplanet using short infrared wavelengths of light. JWST is able to capture longer infrared wavelengths, revealing some new details that ground-based telescopes can’t necessarily see due to the intrinsic infrared glow of Earth’s atmosphere.

While more than 5,000 exoplanets have been discovered, taking direct images of them is incredibly challenging. Exoplanets revolve around a star just like Earth revolves around the sun, and those stars are typically much brighter than planets. According to NASA, HIP 65426 b is more than 10,000 times fainter than its host star in the near-infrared and a few thousand times fainter in the mid-infrared.

[Related: Newly discovered exoplanet may be a ‘Super Earth’ covered in water.]

In each filter image, HIP 65426 b appears as a slightly differently shaped blob of light due to how JWST’s optical system translates light through the different optics.

“Obtaining this image felt like digging for space treasure,” Aarynn Carter, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the analysis of the images said in the NASA release. “At first all I could see was light from the star, but with careful image processing I was able to remove that light and uncover the planet.”

While this is not the first direct image of an exoplanet taken from space, these images of HIP 65426 b points the way forward for JWST’s exciting exoplanet exploration.

“I think what’s most exciting is that we’ve only just begun,” said Carter. “There are many more images of exoplanets to come that will shape our overall understanding of their physics, chemistry, and formation. We may even discover previously unknown planets, too.”

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While most of us were busy watching for the latest Artemis I news, NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has sent back stunning new images of spiral galaxy M74. The rosy pink arms of the image show areas of new star formation. Lying around 3.2 million light-years away from earth in the constellation Pisces, M74 is also known as the “Phantom Galaxy,” and is a familiar sight for the over three-decades old space telescope.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the reddish blooms that spread throughout M74 are large clouds of hydrogen gas. The ultraviolet radiation from hot, young stars embedded within the hydrogen clouds make them glow. Astronomers call these regions H II regions and they mark the spot of recent star formation. H II regions are an important target for space telescopes like Hubble and ground-based telescopes because they help astronomers determine a galaxy’s distance and chemical composition. The data in this image was by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, which even has a filter specially tailored to pick out only this specific red wavelength of light.

The Hubble team created this image from data of observations exploring the evolution of local spiral galaxies such as M74. This will help astronomers gain insights into the history of star formation in these spirals. Astronomers also observed M74 to complement observations of the region from other telescopes. By combining observations of the same object from different telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum gives, astronomers gain far more insight than they would from a single telescope.

[Related: NASA releases Hubble images of cotton candy-colored clouds in Orion Nebula.]

Additionally, Hubble’s observations also paved the way for future instruments and M74 was one of the first targets of the powerful, newly launched James Webb Space Telescope.

NASA/ESA uses four classes to define galaxies: spiral, barred spiral, elliptical, and irregular.

Spiral galaxies typically have a rotating disc with spiral ‘arms’ that curve out from a dense central region. They have a more complex structure and are surrounded by sparsely populated halos. These halos are roughly spherical regions above and below the plane of the discs. Our galaxy, The Milky Way, is an example of a spiral galaxy.

Barred spiral galaxies have arms that do not lead all the way into the center, but are connected to the two ends of a straight bar of stars which contains the nucleus at its centre. Roughly two-thirds of all spiral galaxies are thought to be barred spiral galaxies. In 2021, the Hubble produced beautiful images of NGC 613, a barred spiral galaxy about 67-million light years away from Earth.

[Related: Astronomers may have found a galaxy that formed without dark matter.]

Elliptical galaxies do not have as defined shape as spiral galaxies, have a more spherical appearance smooth, and are typically observed in galaxy clusters. Cygnus A is one of the most famous elliptical galaxies and was a central part of the plot of Carl Sagan’s 1985 sci-fi novel “Contact.”

Irregular galaxies have odd shapes and appear to be more grainy. Unlike spiral galaxies, they do not have a central nucleus, and they are generally blue with a few exceptions that are red. IC10 is a recent example of an irregular galaxy and is the closest-known “starburst galaxy” to Earth. Starbursts are regions undergoing huge amounts of star formation do to having a lot of cool hydrogen gas to fuel it.

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This article was originally featured on Popular Photography.

If you thought the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was impressive, think again. With a fresh $205 million in funding secured to accelerate its construction, the Giant Magellan Telescope is poised to be the most powerful telescope… ever. It will be used to hunt for habitable planets, study the first galaxies of the universe, and attempt to explain mysteries like dark matter and energy.

Giant Magellan Telescope receives $205 million in funding

The $205 million check is one of the largest in the Giant Magellan Telescope’s history, led by the Carnegie Institution for Science, Harvard University, São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), The University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, and the University of Chicago. 

The funds will be used to construct the 12-story telescope, including the seven primary mirrors underway at the University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab and an advanced spectrograph instrument in Texas. The final product will be assembled at Ingersoll Machine Tools in Illinois.

“The funding is truly a collaborative effort from our Founders. It will result in the fabrication of the world’s largest mirrors, the giant telescope mount that holds and aligns them, and a science instrument that will allow us to study the chemical evolution of stars and planets like never before,” says Dr. Robert Shelton, President of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO).

An important priority in astronomy

 JWST is already a feat of human engineering. So why all the hype around the Giant Magellan Telescope? 

The National Academy of Sciences Astro2020 Decadal Survey deemed the project “absolutely essential if the United States is to maintain a position as a leader in ground-based astronomy.”

The telescope will have 10 times the light collecting area and four times the spatial resolution of the JWST, and will be 200 times more powerful than any other research telescope currently in use. For context, it will be able to show the torch on a dime from nearly 100 miles away with tack-sharp focus.

With that, the goal of the Giant Magellan Telescope will be to study the physics and chemistry of faint light sources discovered by the JWST. The hope is to identify potentially habitable planets; study the universe’s first galaxies; and search for clues that would unlock the mysteries of dark matter and energy, black holes, and the universe’s origins. 

Giant Magellan Telescope’s current progress

Though the project does not currently have a completion date, significant progress has been made. Presently, six of the seven primary mirror segments have been cast, with the third segment having completed its two-year polishing phase. 

The Giant Magellan Telescope will be assembled at a newly-constructed, 40,000-square-foot facility, and the first adaptive secondary mirror is currently in production in Europe. 

If the project is anything like other deep space telescope projects, it could be a while before we see any results. But until then, we’ll be eagerly waiting.

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With the James Webb Space Telescope sending back gorgeous photos of the furthest reaches of the galaxy, it can be quite easy to forget about the humble Hubble Space Telescope. But that changed last week.

The 32-year-old NASAS/ESA telescope captured a stunning image of the heart of globular cluster NGC6638 in the constellation Sagittarius. According to NASA/ESA, the star-studded image highlights the density of stars at the heart of these tightly bound groupings of clusters, which range from tens of thousands to millions of stars. Hubble’s state-of-the-art Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys created the glittery image that was released to the public on August 1.

A globular cluster is a densely packed collection of ancient stars that typically appear spherical in shape. Most of them are estimated to be about 10 billion years old and are home to some of the galaxy’s oldest stars. There are an estimated 150 known globular clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy and they primarily contain low-mass red stars and intermediate-mass yellow stars.

[Related: JWST’s latest snap captures the glimmering antics of the Cartwheel Galaxy]

Gathering images of globular clusters has been one of Hubble’s distinguishing achievements. The distortion caused by Earth’s atmosphere makes it nearly impossible for ground-based telescopes to clearly see the stars that make up the cores of globular clusters. Since Hubble orbits about 340 miles above Earth, yet is technically still within the atmosphere, it can better view the stars in a globular cluster without Earth blurring the images. The Hubble has been able to help scientists understand what kinds of stars make up a globular cluster, how they evolve over time, and what role gravity plays in dense star systems. 

The newly launched JWST is about 1 million miles away from Earth and completely out of the Earth’s atmosphere. This distance allows its high-tech cameras to operate on the infrared light spectrum versus the Hubble which uses the visible light spectrum. One of the main advantages of observing stars on the infrared spectrum is that it is less affected by gas or dust around newly formed stars. This next level of observation means that JWST’s images will complement Hubble’s views of globular clusters and help scientists study newly formed star clusters before they have a chance to fully evolve. 

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Galaxies don’t stay static: They twirl, shapeshift, and erupt into novas and kilanovas. That means every time we view a star system, whether it’s 13.5 billion light-years away like HD1 or our home galaxy of the Milky Way, we’re only capturing a little moment of its life.

The James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) new image of the Cartwheel Galaxy, located 500 million light-years away in the Sculptor Constellation, is the perfect example of a formation in motion. Previously documented by Hubble in 1996, its unique ring structure, which probably resulted from a high-speed collision between a large and small star cluster 200 million years back, is already showing signs of growth. Part of this is because JWST can detect stellar details otherwise obscured by cosmic dust. But the image also shows the galaxy in an epically long transition, with natal stars bursting out of its gummy edges.

[Related: What animal do you see in this nebula?] 

With data from the telescope’s Near-Infrared and Mid-Infrared cameras, the JWST team created a colorized composite that exposes fresh regions of upheaval in the formation. As NASA explains on its website, the blue wisps mark pockets of star production, while eye-catching red spokes map loose chemical components like hydrocarbons. The JWST image also identifies a contrast in textures between the core and the extremities of the Cartwheel Galaxy. Viewers can look at “the smooth distribution or shape of the older star populations and dense dust in the core compared to the clumpy shapes associated with the younger star populations outside of it,” according to the NASA post.

As the galaxy keeps expanding from the collision point, its “cartwheeling” limbs should become even more noticeable. The process will take a couple more years—anywhere from hundreds of millions to billions—but we might see some evidence of change the next time JWST turns its gold-plated mirrors toward Sculptor. After all, Hubble discovered quite a glow-up when it revisited the constellation 22 years later. While many of the revelations come down to upgrades in space technology and research, at the end of the day, it’s about the stories told by galaxies that never settle.

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In the past decade, hunting for Earth-like exoplanets has become one of astronomy’s top priorities. Combing through billions of galaxies and star systems for signs of life is akin to searching for a needle in a haystack, but a new NASA approach aims to make them infinitely easier to spot. 

The proposed study, dubbed the Hybrid Observatory for Earth-like Exoplanets (HOEE), will establish a two-pronged observatory—both on Earth and in orbit—to create one of the most powerful planet-seekers ever designed. HOEE plans to use the next-generation of powerful telescopes currently under construction, such as the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in Chile’s Atacama Desert, along with a space-based instrument called a ‘starshade,’ an object that can be used to block the light of an extremely bright object. 

At the moment, there are two ways researchers can view exoplanets directly. Scientists can take pictures using telescopes’ high-powered cameras which can be sent back through the air to Earth via radio waves to spot where a planet might be orbiting a star. For example, the Hubble Space Telescope has found hundreds of exoplanets using its digital camera. Another strategy astronomers use is a method called transit spectroscopy. When light from a nearby star travels through the atmosphere of an orbiting planet, it takes on properties of what it’s passed through. As that light reaches a telescope in space and on the ground, scientists can process  loads of data, such as atmospheric and structural information, about the environments that light has passed through. The James Webb Space Telescope used this method to make observations of the exoplanet Wasp-96. But while the JWST is capable of detecting exoplanets, its primary research objectives and design aren’t focused on searching for extraterrestrial life on far-off planets. That’s where a hybrid observatory, a two-part system that utilizes instruments both on the ground and in space, could come into play. 

[Related: NASA’s official exoplanet tally has passed 5,000 worlds]

The light of distant Earth-like planets is extremely faint, making it easy for an exoplanet’s presence to be washed out by stars as brilliant as our sun, explains John Mather, a senior astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and lead for the HOEE study. That’s not a good thing when astronomers are searching for places in the galaxy similar to our solar system. 

“The sun is 10 billion times as bright as the Earth,” says Mather. “That’s an awful lot of glare.” Searching for small objects, especially “a little Earth,” within that intense glare is extremely difficult, he says. But a starshade offers a way to block a host star’s radiance. 

Overall, a starshade is an object that would be positioned in space between a telescope on Earth and a star astronomers would like to observe, essentially blocking the light before it reached the telescope’s mirrors. A functional starshade would have to be more than 300 feet in diameter, and be positioned at least 100,000 miles away from Earth. Because it would be so far away, it would also need to be able to operate without human intervention. That said, the starshade would merely be a tool that would allow any telescope on Earth to peer generally unimpeded into the cosmos, but it’s still up in the air if one could be made to conduct any sort of science of its own. 

If deployed, this kind of hybrid observatory would allow scientists to explore corners of the Milky Way and other systems of interest much closer than existing technologies can today. Mather says a one minute exposure taken by a hybrid observatory would be long enough to prove that there’s an exoplanet in the area, and a one-hour exposure could give clues into whether there is oxygen or water in its atmosphere. 

[Related: Let’s make 2022 the year of the sunbrella]

But the technology needed to construct a starshade is still years away, Mather says. One of the biggest challenges behind the concept is just how big it would need to be to operate the way scientists would want it to. Past preliminary designs made by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been too big to fit into a rocket, but researchers are looking to concepts that could be compartmentalized and then opened up later, similar to JWST’s folded mirrors. “Nobody’s ever even tried something so big. It’s just enormous,” Mather says. “It’s a very big deal to put something so big into space.”

Although NASA has not pursued development, the agency has recently launched the Ultralight Starshade Structural Design Challenge, a competition that seeks to collect observatory design ideas from the public. The top five submissions will have a chance to win prizes, with first place winning $3,000. At the time of this writing there are 11 entries, but interested participants have until August 22 to submit designs. Mather, who will lead the team that will select the winner, said tapping into the public’s ideas could help push the concept of starshades off the ground. 

 “We are trying to solve some very nearly impossible problems of mechanical engineering,” he says. “On the other hand, I think it’s worth trying.”

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has already given us a look at what might be the most distant galaxy ever discovered, and it’s still got about 20 years of deep-space observations left to go. It’s impossible to know what groundbreaking, mind-blowing images of stellar nurseries, colliding galaxies, and dying stars its infrared cameras will beam back to Earth during that time. And given everything we’ve seen so far, you won’t want to miss them.

With the right know-how, you can have the newest JWST images sent directly to your phone and inbox, or whatever device you choose, because setting up these alerts is a heck of a lot easier than checking a bunch of websites whenever you remember.

[Related: The best hidden Instagram tricks]

Follow the JWST Flickr page

Like Instagram, but giving off “older sibling” vibes, Flickr is a useful place to find and download high-quality images of whatever the JWST sees. Once you’re on Flickr, go to NASA’s official James Webb Space Telescope page and hit the Follow button. From there, set yourself up to get email alerts whenever they post by clicking your profile avatar in the upper right and navigating to Settings. From there, choose Emails & Notifications and decide how often you want to receive emails about recent uploads from accounts you follow (immediately, once a day, or once a week).

If you follow a number of Flickr accounts and are worried about notifications swamping your inbox, you can simply check the box that says Only Friends & family, please. You will, of course, have to say the JWST is a friend, which isn’t necessarily the worst thing. To do this, go to the space telescope’s Flickr profile, click the three dots next to the “following” box, and mark it as a Friend or Family—or both.

[Related: 4 ways to keep newsletters from destroying your inbox]

Set up automated alerts

Google Alerts

Any Google user can set up Google Alerts that will push updates on specific topics straight to their email inbox. Head to the Google Alerts page, make sure you’re signed in to your account, and type in keywords related to the topic you’re looking for. Following the theme of this story, you might want to try “James Webb Space Telescope photos” or “JWST image.” Then configure how often you want to receive updates under the Show Options tab, and hit Create Alert. Google will start sending you regular digests of news stories and other newly published pages that contain the keywords you specified.

You can refine your alerts at any time, and if you want more tips, we have a guide dedicated to Google Alerts.

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Earlier this month, Hawaiian Governor David Ige signed legislation that transfers control of Mauna Kea—one of two large mountains that dominate the Hawaiian landscape and where some of the world’s most powerful observatories call home—away from the University of Hawai’i and back to Native Hawaiians. 

The new law declares astronomy as a state policy of Hawaii, which means that in addition to the scientific knowledge it brings, the state sees the field as an important contributor to jobs and the economy. It also establishes the Mauna Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority, an 11-member voting group that will now have majority authority over how the land is managed. According to the bill, the group’s responsibilities will also include building a new framework for the development of astronomy research on the islands, limiting commercial use and activities on Mauna Kea’s land, and requiring the “timely decommissioning” of certain telescopes. 

The governor is expected to select members of the new authority soon: The deadline for the public to submit their names into the application pool for a seat is July 28, but the law includes that the group must include one member who is a “lineal descendant” of a practitioner of Native Hawaiian traditions associated with the mountain, and another who is currently a recognized practitioner of those Native Hawaiian traditional practices. That stipulation is especially important as it’s the first time community experts and practitioners will be able to make those kinds of decisions for their community.  

While the University of Hawai’i has until 2028 to officially hand off its management duties to the group, locals like native activist Noe Noe Wong-Wilson are optimistic about the change. She and others note that it feels like policy makers are finally listening to Native Hawaiians’ voices regarding the stewardship and care of their own community. 

“This is the first time with the new authority that cultural practitioners and community members will actually have seats in the governing organization,” says Wong-Wilson, who is the executive director of the Lālākea Foundation, a nonprofit Native Hawaiian cultural organization. Wong-Wilson, who is a member of the working group that helped develop the bill proposal, says that the choice to bring in people and ideas from all over the community is what helped make the new law a reality. 

She adds that the law’s mutual stewardship model takes into account all human activities on the mountain, and is designed to help “protect Mauna Kea for future generations,” as Native Hawaiians believe the mountain is a sacred place—a part of their spirituality as well as their culture. But years of mismanagement has created a mistrust in the state’s stakeholders, which included the University and Hawaiian government officials, and deepened a rift between Indigenous culture and western science. 

[Related: There’s a viable alternative to building a giant telescope on sacred Hawaiian land]

Mauna Kea has been a hot spot for astronomical research since the first large telescopes broke ground on the summit in the early 1970s. The height of the mountain, the torrid atmosphere, and the natural lack of light pollution make the dormant volcano an exquisite location for observing the sky. But Native Hawaiians say that placing too many facilities on the land, including large observatories, draws in activity that puts an immense strain on the environment and its fragile ecosystem. “In Hawaii, there’s always tension about tourism, and overuse of some of our environmentally sensitive spaces for recreational use,” Wong-Wilson says.

Thirteen telescopes already operate atop Mauna Kea, with a fourteenth that, if and when completed, will sit about 18 stories tall. The long-planned Thirty Meter Telescope, is “in its own way, poised to have a comparable impact as the James Webb Space Telescope,” says Doug Simons, the director of the University of Hawai’i Institute for Astronomy. Although it was proposed nearly a decade ago, its construction has been repeatedly halted by protestors who have blocked access to the mountain.

While the TMT would be able to help scientists study distant supernovae and teach us more about how stars and planets form, Simons says that local researchers within the observatory community need to be prepared for several outcomes when it comes to astronomy’s fate on the mountain. “This is essentially a big experiment,” Simons says. “There’s a tremendous amount of hard work ahead, and a constrained amount of time to achieve what this new authority needs to achieve.” 

[Related: With the arrival of Africa’s next radio telescope, Namibia sees a new dawn in astronomy]

In the current land use agreements made by the University, all of the mountain’s telescopes are committed to cease operations and come down by 2033. The TMT could still continue construction until then, but as of now, the new bill includes a moratorium on any new leases or lease extensions. It’s unclear whether that could stymie the TMT’s future science goals or if the new authority will choose to issue new leases, but Robert Kirshner, executive director for the TMT International Observatory (TIO), says the team behind the observatory supports the new bill. 

“TIO welcomes this community-based stewardship model for Maunakea’s management,” wrote Kirshner in an email to Popular Science. “We value the respect, responsibility, caring, and inclusivity that this act is intended to foster.” He added that the observatory will work with the new authority to support astronomy and education programs that are in harmony with the culture and environment on the mountain. 

Trisha Kehaulani Watson, a Native Hawaiian and the vice president of Aina Momona, a non-profit dedicated to achieving environmental sustainability on the islands, says while it’s still too early to tell if the new law is truly a victory, she hopes people understand the value of involving Indigenous communities in the conversation before taking advantage of their resources. 

“I strongly believe that had the University better engaged and invited people with different viewpoints into the fold from the start in regards to management, we wouldn’t be here today,” says Watson. “How [the law] will sort out for the community, I think time will tell, but I certainly think it’s a step in the right direction.”

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Saturn boasts the most iconic rings in our solar system, but it is not the only planet to have them. Images released earlier this month from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) gave the world a glimpse of Jupiter’s rings, though they are much darker and fainter than Saturn’s. Until now, astronomers were puzzled as to why Jupiter doesn’t have larger rings, but a new preprint study released on July 13 suggests it may have to do with the gas giant’s moons.

Jupiter, in theory, should have big rings. It’s the largest planet in our solar system—Saturn comes in at a close second—and it stands to reason the gas giant could pull even more space debris to create bigger and more vivid rings. 

“If Jupiter did have them, they’d appear even brighter to us, because the planet is so much closer than Saturn,” Stephen Kane, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Riverside and lead author of the study, said in a university press release. When Jupiter is closest to Earth, astronomers estimate it’s about 365 million miles away, whereas Saturn only gets about 746 million miles near Earth.

Uranus and Neptune have rings, too, along with Jupiter and Saturn. But only Saturn’s are visible without an advanced telescope. Unlike its predecessor telescopes such as Hubble, JWST can look at the universe in infrared light, which makes it easier to see the other planets’ less-majestic rings.

Studying rings can give astronomers insight into the planet’s history, revealing what type of collisions or events happened there. Saturn’s massive rings span the length of 27 Earths. They are made up of billions of pieces of comets, asteroids, and moons pulled in and torn apart by the planet’s gravity. 

If scientists can calculate the age of the materials that form the rings, they can deduce whether the chunks of space debris came from nearby moons or objects from the distant Kuiper belt. Knowing the origins behind planetary rings could answer some questions on how our solar system and the universe began.

In the current study, the authors used a computer model to simulate Jupiter’s orbit and the orbits of four of its moons—Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa. The astrophysicists also included information on how long it takes for rings to take shape. “We found that the Galilean moons of Jupiter, one of which is the largest moon in our solar system, would very quickly destroy any large rings that might form,” Kane said, referring to the moons by their discoverer, Galileo Galilei. 

Since the moons are so big, their strong gravitational force ejects ice coming into Jupiter’s orbit instead of drawing it in. Based on the findings, the team suggests it’s unlikely that Jupiter had large rings in the past and later lost them, as they had originally theorized at the start of their study. 

The next step is to use the simulation to study Uranus’ rings. One question they’re hoping to answer is why Uranus orbits the sun tipped on its side. A possible explanation is that a massive collision shifted the planet’s position, and the rings may be leftover remnants from the impact. 

“For us astronomers, they are the blood spatter on the walls of a crime scene,” Kane said.  “When we look at the rings of giant planets, it’s evidence something catastrophic happened to put that material there.” 

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When Harvard’s Rohan Naidu saw the galaxy, the first thing he did was message his collaborator, Pascal Oesch, a cosmology professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. The second thing he did was call his girlfriend. 

“‘Would you like to be the second human being to see potentially the most distant galaxy ever known?’” Naidu recalls asking her. She looked, found it “a bit underwhelming,” he says, and went back to watching TV. “But she’s come around,” he says with a laugh. 

The galaxy candidate in question, GLASS-z13, doesn’t look like much to the untrained eye. Just a red splotch of light. But that unassuming visual is precisely why GLASS-z13 captured Naidu’s attention. It’s how he expects a galaxy that existed 13.5 billion years ago, one that is close to the limits of our ability to detect, to look from the vantage point of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). 

After the first batch of data from the JWST became public last week, Naidu, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, spent every waking hour filtering through the data to search for the most distant galaxies ever detected. He didn’t get a lot of sleep, but his efforts paid off. 

[Related: Hubble discovers a distant galaxy that might have closely followed the Big Bang]

On July 19, along with collaborators from around the globe, Naidu posted a paper in advance of expert review to the open access platform arXiv that describes two such candidate galaxies. He estimates one of these to be about 13.5 billion years old, making it the most distant galaxy ever detected. That would mean the system, GLASS-z13, was around perhaps as early as 300 million years after the Big Bang, which is thought to have occurred 13.8 billion years ago. As such, GLASS-z13 offers astronomers a never-seen-before view into the early days of the universe. And it is already challenging existing ideas about the earliest galaxies.

“I could not believe my eyes,” Naidu says of first seeing GLASS-z13 in the JWST data. He immediately noticed that it was bright and clear, which stood out as a bit of a surprise. “Even though the universe was so young, these things managed to have some kind of growth spurt and become so bright and so massive so quickly.” 

Naidu is careful to describe GLASS-z13 as a “candidate” galaxy, as the team’s analysis from the first batch of JWST data still needs to be validated by follow-up observations. However, on the same day that Naidu uploaded the study to arXiv, another team of researchers independently posted a report that describes the same galaxy candidates—and also places them as the most distant galaxies we’ve ever seen.

“If two independent groups see that, it gives confidence,” says Renske Smit, an astrophysicist at Liverpool John Moores University in England who was not involved in either paper. Still, she says, “I think we need unambiguous confirmation that these galaxies were formed so early in the universe.”

That confirmation, Smit says, will come from subsequent JWST observations that look more closely at the spectrum of light coming from GLASS-z13. 

Naidu and his colleagues initially determined the distance of the galaxy candidate by looking at that patch of sky in several different infrared wavelengths. As light travels through time and space, its wavelengths are stretched out to be longer. Their light, therefore, appears redder, in what is called a “redshift.” A galaxy that is far, far away will appear to us to be redder than a similar galaxy nearby. The scientists estimated how far the light from GLASS-z13 had traveled by estimating how much it had likely shifted. 

JWST, much like a pair of night goggles, is designed to pick up weak heat signatures found in the longer, infrared wavelengths of light. But that means the telescope also finds old, dead, or dying galaxies. Because these galaxies are cooler than young ones, they can also appear quite red, even when nearby, says Brooke Simmons, an associate professor of astrophysics at Lancaster University who was not involved in the new paper. But Simmons says she thinks the study authors have done “a reasonable job” trying to account for this; if the system was from the “middle-aged part of the universe,” she says, “we would be still be able to see it with the bands [of light] that are shorter wavelengths and we don’t.”

But the redness of GLASS-z13 wasn’t Naidu’s only clue indicating the galaxy candidate was extremely far away. He also noticed something missing: the bluest photons. 

In the very early universe, “oceans of neutral hydrogen” soaked up the deepest-blue photons, leaving behind only particles at redder wavelengths, Naidu explains. And the missing photons correspond to those that hydrogen absorbs, he says, suggesting that the light JWST saw from GLASS-z13 is indeed emanating from the earliest parts of the universe. 

Naidu and his colleagues are already working to get time on JWST to make the necessary follow-up observations to confirm their estimates. The next observations will look at specific parts of the spectrum of light coming from GLASS-z13. This will allow them to more precisely measure the galaxy candidate’s redshift. 

Characteristics of GLASS-z13 are already raising new questions for astrophysicists who study the early days of the cosmos. Primarily, its remarkable brightness and mass has caught the attention of scientists. They estimate that it is approximately 1 billion times the mass of our sun. 

“How do you get all the stars in there so quickly? We think it takes time to build up a galaxy that’s massive enough, that has enough stars for it to be so bright,” Smit says. “And so either stars might start forming earlier than we thought, or maybe these galaxies have somehow a way of forming stars really, really quickly. We don’t quite know yet.”

[Related: Rare ‘upside-down stars’ are shrouded in the remains of cannibalized suns]

Some scientific models also predicted that galaxies like this would be extremely rare, Naidu says. “But here, we found two of them, not too far away from each other.”

The other galaxy candidate described in Naidu’s paper, called GLASS-z11, is probably slightly less far away from Earth than GLASS-z13. It also adds a curious detail: It shows hints of moving into a spiral disk formation. 

“We didn’t expect disk galaxies to form so early,” Simmons says. “A few hundred million years is a very short time. A lot of us expected a lot of turbulence, a lot of chaos, a lot of stuff just assembling in an area that has a little bit more mass and so has a little bit stronger gravity and it just gobbles up everything around it, not necessarily in the kind of ordered structure that you would need to form a coherently rotating disk.” 

This discovery, about a week after the first data from JWST, is just the start. “These are not the very first stars or galaxies,” Smit says. “We could expect a lot more record-breaking galaxies in the years to come. I think we’re going to see stuff even much farther away, much older, that were stars that formed closer to the big bang.”

Correction (July 22, 2022): The story has been updated to reflect that Pascal Oesch is now at the University of Geneva, not Yale University.

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Our tiny corner of the cosmos has just gotten bigger, brighter, and bolder, and it’s all thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). NASA just dropped some of the most high-definition images of the universe ever taken. Although the telescope began science operations merely six months ago, its first batch—including five neighboring galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet and the Carina Nebula, a gaseous expanse where stars are born—are among the most stunning celestial pictures yet made.  

Inspiring wonder in space-lovers around the world is harder than it looks. A lot of work goes into making sure these cosmic close-ups photos are not only beautiful, but they reflect the astronomy community’s scientific priorities. So what exactly goes into crafting JWST’s next picture-perfect photographs?

The answers to these questions lie within the differences between JWST and its predecessor, the 32-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. The two have vastly different capabilities: Hubble, for one, mostly takes images inside visible and ultraviolet wavelengths. JWST captures its targets in the infrared color spectrum, light waves that are invisible to the naked eye. To create the spellbinding scenes that just debuted, scientists had to process and fill these images with color. This also explains why many pictures of the same cosmic object can look vastly different, depending on how astronomers choose to shade them.

Additionally, due to the size of its mirrors as well as its ability to see infrared light, JWST is able to peer further back into time than Hubble. According to the space agency, you can think of Hubble as able to only see “toddler galaxies,” while JWST can spy “baby galaxies.”

[Related: There is no Planet B]

During a NASA press conference held on Tuesday, Eric Smith, the program scientist for the JWST mission, said JWST’s first photos are especially phenomenal because they were technically nothing more than practice runs. It seems astronomers may have been too conservative in picking early telescope targets, because when planning these projects they weren’t prepared for how good the images would be, he noted. “We’re making discoveries and we really haven’t even started trying yet, so the promise of this telescope is amazing,” Smith said. 

But with the proof of the current images, Smith hopes that in JWST’s second scientific cycle, “people will be much more adventurous because they now know just how good the facility is.”

JWST can also gather more data more swiftly than Hubble. Klaus Pontoppidan, program scientist for the JWST mission, told reporters that NASA scientists spend weeks, on average, downloading and processing individual images before they’re transformed into the depictions that are released to the public. 

Hubble transmits about 120 gigabytes of science data to Earth every week. Over the next few days, JWST will release roughly 50 terabytes of data—more than 400 times Hubble’s weekly transmission—to the public. The new image of JWST’s deep field, which President Biden unveiled Monday, was created from a composite of images at different wavelengths and took about 12.5 hours to complete, according to NASA. Alternatively, Hubble’s deepest fields took weeks to put together. 

While NASA has not yet released a fresh target list or a timeline for new images, agency officials reported that the mission team would focus on investigating the exoplanets in the Trappist-1 system during JWST’s first full year of operation. The telescope will undergo “atmospheric reconnaissance” in a bid to learn more about the system’s atmospheres, habitability, and planetary formations. 

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope survived its first collision]

The telescope is expected to last for a few decades. As long as it has enough fuel, and withstands the harsh realities of life in space, it should be able to operate at full capacity for that duration. During its time gazing at the stars, it will act as a sort of time machine, allowing astronomers a small sparkling window into what the universe looked like more than 13 billion years ago. Moriba Jah, an associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, said the measurements the telescope beams back will not only provide the evidence needed to peer into the universe’s origins, but will inform future advances in astronomy and aerospace engineering as well. 

“What we really want is to not only understand what happened, but predict what’s going to happen in the future,” he says.“If we can predict more accurately, we can make better decisions to make sure that we as a species can actually thrive in perpetuity.”

While JWST’s future looks bright at the moment, astronomers warn that space is far from empty: it’s unpredictable. Right now, the telescope lies at the second lagrange point (L2), a stable gravitational area about a million miles from Earth where objects like space junk or micrometeoroids tend to drift. But Jah points out the observatory could be wrecked in a moment, if a large piece of a rocket, a space rock, or small satellite were to collide with JWST. 

Yet with so much hinging on the telescope’s continued success, it’s almost guaranteed that JWST will continue reaching for the horizon, pushing the boundaries of stellar observation for years to come. 

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On Monday evening, President Joe Biden and NASA released the first complete image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), heralding a new era of scientific observation. 

Tuesday morning, during the opening remarks for the JWST image releases, Webb Program Director Greg Robinson asked the audience on NASA’s Goddard Campus if anyone had seen the scene released last night. 

“Well,” he said, after people cheered enthusiastically. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

The JWST team has released five images from its first six months of flight and observation. The telescope is the largest and most powerful observatory released into space, and part of its strength is its ability to capture visuals through infrared light—it adds depth that the human eye can’t detect. 

The telescope is able to look through dust and clouds to see the birth of stars and galaxies more than 13.1 billion years ago, further back in time than humanity had been able to previously observe. The universe is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old, which means, as NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday, that humans are closer than ever before to understanding what happened after the Big Bang, when the universe started. 

“We will be determining questions we don’t even know to ask,” Nelson said. 

[Related: What comes after the James Webb Space Telescope? Some astronomers want LIFE.]

The JWST images depict clusters of galaxies formed about when the sun and Earth formed, water vapor in the atmosphere of an exoplanet 1,000 light years away, the planetary nebula around a dying star, the cosmic evolution of galaxies, and the birth of stars. 

And all of this is just the beginning, said Jane Rigby, the Operations Project Scientist for the JWST. With fuel for another 20 years, the telescope is anticipated to collect data that scientists haven’t yet developed the questions for. 

Prior to this, it took Hubble two weeks to take the farthest-ever image of a galaxy. The JWST will be able to capture images even more distant in a shorter amount of time—all of these images were captured within a week. “With Webb,” Rigby said, “we did this before breakfast.”

Carina Nebula (above)

The top image sparkles with stars—including freshly made ones—in a sea of gas and dust. JWST captured part of the Carina Nebula, an area called NGC 3324, revealing new regions where infant stars are born. Visible light can’t detect the stellar nurseries, thanks to the cosmic dust in the way. But because JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera and Mid-Infrared Instrument use infrared light, the telescope can pierce through the dust, unveiling stars by the hundreds and even galaxies in the background.

Ultraviolet radiation from the young stars has carved into the wall of the nebula, creating the appearance of crags and canyons in the image, which NASA named the Cosmic Cliffs. The scene, 7,600 light-years away, is immense: Some of the pillars of dust and ionized gas are 7 light-years high.

Southern Ring Nebula

Two JWST cameras observed the Southern Ring Nebula, also known as NGC 3132. Two stars, orbiting each other, are encased in layers of gas and dust 2,500 light-years away from Earth. One of the stars is nearing the end of its life; as it dims, the sun expels cosmic debris in bowl-shaped shells.

Data from these images will help astronomers understand these type of events, known as planetary nebulae, in greater detail. The gassy puffs are final gasps in slow-motion. It takes tens of thousands of years for planetary nebulae to extinguish. In the meantime, researchers can study images like this one to understand what molecules make up the stars’ shrouds.

Wasp-96 b

Though it isn’t as flashy as some of JWST’s other images, this data reveals that water vapor is present in the atmosphere of an exoplanet—a planet outside our solar system—more than 1,000 light years away. This information will be crucial in searching for potentially habitable planets beyond Earth. WASP-96 b is just one of more than 5,000 confirmed exoplanets in the Milky Way, and is an extremely hot, gas giant planet unlike Venus or Jupiter. It is also hotter and “puffier” than any planet that orbits our sun, with a temperature pushing 1,000°F and half of Jupiter’s mass but 1.2 times more its diameter. 

On June 21, the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph on JWST measured light from the WASP-96 b system for more than six hours, producing a light curve that provides more data about the makeup of the exoplanet’s atmosphere. On the chart, the peaks and valleys indicate the presence of water vapor detected in the wavelengths of light, showing evidence of haze and clouds that previous studies of WASP-96 b were unable to detect. 

Stephan’s Quintet

This mosaic, constructed from nearly 1,000 image files and more than 150 million pixels, is JWST’s biggest image yet. Five galaxies are seen here. One, named NGC 7318B, is tearing a destructive path through the cluster. JWST has captured the shock waves from its intrusion, as well as gas and dust pulled into swirls and swoops as the galaxies’ gravities interact.

Because four of the five are so close, on the cosmic scale, they provide what NASA calls a “laboratory” to study fundamental processes of galactic evolution. Here, the galaxies have disturbed each others’ gases, and have even triggered the formation of new stars in their neighbors.

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This story has been updated with the now-released first image. It originally posted at 4:36 p.m. on July 11, 2022.

Time travel is often portrayed as a superpower or phenomenon in a fictitious, far off future. But for the James Webb Space Telescope, time travel is kind of its purpose. 

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), was built to peer back into a part of space-time that has never been seen before—when the earliest stars and galaxies formed, more than 13.5 billion years ago. As the largest and most powerful space telescope in NASA’s history, designed in collaboration with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, its launch in December of 2021 marked the end of a 17-year construction process and the start of a decade-long voyage into the depths of the universe. After a six-month tune up in space, the first full-color images from the telescope’s infrared camera were revealed in a White House press conference this evening. 

The final product is a composite of images taken at various infrared wavelengths over 12.5 hours. At the heart lies the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, which offers a “deep-field view” of stars in front of it and behind it, according to the NASA page. The phenomenon that makes this possible is called gravitational lensing, and has been used to detect other major space bodies like supernovas and rogue black holes. SMACS 0723 is so far away from the Milky Way, the image we see is from roughly 4.6 billions years ago.

Late last week, NASA teased a longer list of the telescope’s main targets. Among them are the Carina Nebula, nearly 7,600 light-years away, where there are massive stars several times larger than the sun; the Southern Ring Nebula, which is an expanding cloud of gas around a dying star and is about half a light-year in diameter; and Stephan’s Quintet, 290 million light-years away, which forms a compact galaxy group in the constellation Pegasus.

“What’s crazy is that this is just an appetizer of a much deeper field of research that we’re going to study,” says Heidi Hammel, an interdisciplinary scientist on the JWST project. She has worked with the NASA team over the last 20 years to ensure that the design and construction of the telescope, as it adapted over time, met the standards researchers needed to forge deeper into the universe and its history. 

The ability to image unexplored parts of the universe like SMACS 0723 is just the starting point. “Figuring out the questions we started with is just half the story of what we’ll learn,” Hammel says. “We have an idea of what we’re going to do, and once we start taking data, we’re going to have more questions because we’ll have reached new boundaries and new frontiers.”

[Related: How the James Webb Space Telescope captures ‘first light’]

The science-quality captures revealed today aren’t just meant to be crowd pleasers. As Hammel explains, the images from JWST will provide more accurate and meaningful data that can be used to steer future astronomical research. They go leagues beyond “engineering-quality photos,”  which as Hammel explains, consist of very short exposure and can show interference from light. Since the photos are intended to inform design decisions down on Earth, scientists aren’t worried about fine-tuning the characteristics. But for intricately chosen images of the cosmos, “all those characteristics matter,” Hammel says. “We’ve done careful calibration of the cameras and spectrograph, and we have clarity and confidence that [all] this information is from outer space and not just the camera.”

The telescope uses four advanced gadgets to capture images: the Near-Infrared Camera, the Near-Infrared Spectrograph, the Mid-Infrared Instrument, and the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph with the Fine Guidance Sensor. All these technologies allow JWST to image infrared light and see much deeper into space and its timeline. (NASA’s Hubble Telescope, which launched in 1990 and was one of the largest telescopes at that time, had taken the deepest photo of space until now, capturing galaxies formed 600 million years after the Big Bang.)

The JWST team devised 10 new technologies to make the telescope work, Hammel says. For example, because of the extreme temperatures in space, the sensitive imaging equipment needed specific thermal regulating systems to work. Robert Rashford, president and GEO of Genesis Engineering, the company contracted for this challenge, says that working on JWST was unique. 

“This was the first telescope designed this way,” Rashford says. “Anything above the sunshield was cryogenic, so we had to come up with a more balanced approach to keep things warm when they needed to be in operation, so performance would not be compromised in any way.”

[Related: Everything to know about the James Webb Space Telescope’s super-thin sun shield]

Capturing new wavelengths of light presented another challenge. On Earth, the phrase “speed of light” makes sense in trying to describe something fast. We see light at 186,00 miles per second, so it feels instantaneous. But in space, the distances are so vast, the “speed of light” is much more noticeable. Because it takes time for light to travel through space, the light from the dawn of the universe would have to travel extremely long distances for our telescopes to see it. Light from the sun, for example, takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach our eyes. If the sun exploded, we’d only find out after two listens of the classic Beatles song “Come Together.”

What’s more, because the universe is expanding, wavelengths of light are expanding, too. The creation of a star emits light, and as the visible wavelengths of energy travel outward and farther away, they shift to the infrared light band, which can’t be seen by human eyes. But now that Webb can capture those wavelengths, astronomers will be able to observe light from some of those oldest and most distant epochs, where stars and galaxies were born. The images released today are an early example of what JWST can accomplish and how, with this telescope, looking out at space is quite like looking back in time. 

“Webb is designed to pick up where Hubble can no longer go,” Hammel says. “Webb has deeper sensitivity and can move out into infrared wavelengths where distant objects are more visible.”

This isn’t to say that Hubble is no longer useful. Different telescopes allow scientists to observe different wavelengths of light, so while JWST trains its eye on the outer reaches of observed space, Hubble can continue projects like its Ultraviolet Legacy Library of Young Stars as Essential Standards to observe star formation. 

“One telescope doesn’t hold all the knowledge,” Hammel says. “It’s important not to think that because we have Webb, we’re done. We already know of questions beyond what Webb can do—but at this moment in time, it’s exciting just to open this whole new infrared window.”

[Related: See the stars from the Milky Way mapped as a dazzling rainbow]

For Hammel, these new images reflect much more than a lifetime of work for her, and the many other people involved in the creation and operation of JWST. She sees it as the result of deep global collaboration: More than 300 universities and organizations and fourteen countries have now contributed to the project. Though it may not be immediately obvious to everyone what the scientific significance of these images are, she says, it has the potential to change our understanding of the universe. 

“People all around the world came together to build something that will let humanity explore even further into the cosmos,” Hammel says. “It’s an example of how we can work together as a species to do great and wonderful things—and we need positive things and examples of this in our life right now.”

NASA will be sharing the rest of the images after 10:30 a.m. EST tomorrow. Watch the livestream here.

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Skygazers will have an eventful night this coming Wednesday. An enormous comet is cruising through our solar system, which coincides with a so-called supermoon—the biggest and brightest view of a full moon in 2022. The comet, named C/2017 K2 (PanSTARRS) and nicknamed K2, is estimated to be about 18 to 100 miles wide. Astronomers from NASA expect it to make its closest approach towards Earth on July 13 with the most visibility on July 14.

The K2 comet was first detected through the Hubble Space Telescope in May 2017 between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus—about 2.4 billion kilometers from the sun. NASA reported it was the farthest they have seen a comet enter the solar system’s planetary zone. The K2 comet is believed to have originated from the Oort Cloud, a spherical layer of icy objects where the temperature reaches -440 degrees Fahrenheit. The Oort Cloud is located in the outermost region of our solar system. 

NASA experts speculate most long-period comets—meteors that take more than 200 years to complete their orbit around the sun—come from the Oort Cloud. The city-sized comet of ice and dust may have been gravitationally expelled from the Oort Cloud, beginning a journey spanning millions of years that includes a passing visit to the Earth.

[Related: The biggest comet ever found is cruising through our solar system’s far reaches]

Despite the comet’s massive size, it might be hard to spot at first. While it makes its closest approach to Earth on July 13, it will still be about two Earth-sun distances away. ” It would easily have been a naked-eye comet had it arrived half a year earlier or later,” Quanzhi Ye, an astronomer at the University of Maryland who specializes in comets, told Space.com. 

For a first-hand look at K2, your best bet is to use a small telescope or binoculars. You’ll want to scan for a dim patch of light, which is likely the tail of the comet, at around 11 p.m. EDT on July 14.

Depending on which night you hunt for it, the comet will appear in different places in the sky. On July 14, it will seem to be located near the star cluster called Messier 10; by mid-August, it will be positioned as though it’s at the tip of the constellation Scorpius. (A stargazing app such as Stellarium can be a big help to find celestial objects on the move.)

The comet will remain viewable for people living in the Northern Hemisphere with a telescope until September as it makes its way toward the sun near the end of the year. A live-stream for the K2 comet will be available Thursday at 6:15 p.m. EDT. 

The supermoon will also be visible the evening of July 13 through the morning of July 14. The Virtual Telescope Project is live-streaming the event starting at 3 p.m. EDT on Wednesday. Because the moon will appear at its brightest, without the right telescope, the dazzling light could make it hard to see fainter objects in the heavens like the K2 comet and summer stars.

Correction (July 12, 2022): On readers’ requests, this story has been updated to include additional information for locating K2. The times were also changed from EST to EDT.

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When a star 20 times as massive as our sun dies, it can explode in a supernova and squeeze back down into a dense black hole (with gravity’s help). But that explosion is never perfectly symmetrical, so sometimes, the resulting black holes goes hurtling off into space. These wandering objects are often called “rogue black holes” because they float around freely, untethered by other celestial bodies. 

But that name might be a “misnomer,” according to Jessica Lu, associate professor of astronomy at the University of California Berkeley. She prefers the term “free-floating” to describe these black holes. “Rogue,” she says, implies that the nomads are rare or unusual—or up to no good.

That’s certainly not the case. Astronomers estimate that there are as many as 100 million such black holes that roam around our galaxy. But because they’re solitary, they’re extremely difficult to find. Until recently, these so-called rogue black holes were only known through theory and calculations. 

“They are ghosts, so to speak,” says Lu, who has made it her mission to find the Milky Way’s free-floating black holes. 

[Related: We’re still in the dark about a key black hole paradox]

Earlier this year, two teams of space researchers separately revealed detections of what just might be one of these roaming black holes. One of those teams was led by Casey Lam, a graduate student in Lu’s lab. The other was led by Kailash C. Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Both teams posted their papers on an open-access website without expert review.

The scientists will get more data from the Hubble Space Telescope in October that Lu says should help “resolve the mystery of whether this is a black hole or a neutron star.” “There’s still a lot of uncertainty about how stars die and the ghost remnants that they leave behind,” she notes. When stars much more massive than our sun run out of nuclear fuel, they’re thought to collapse into either a black hole or a neutron star. “But we don’t know exactly which ones die and turn into neutron stars or die and turn into black holes,” adds Lu. “We don’t know when a black hole is born and a star dies, is there a violent supernova explosion? Or does it directly collapse into a black hole and maybe just give a little burp?” 

With star stuff making up everything we know in the world, understanding the afterlife of stars is key to understanding how we, ourselves, came to be.

How to spot a black hole on the loose

Black holes are inherently invisible. They trap all light that they encounter, therefore there’s nothing for the human eye to perceive. So astronomers have to get creative to detect these dense, dark objects. 

Typically, they look for anomalies in gas, dust, stars, and other material that might be caused by the intensely strong gravity of a black hole. If a black hole is tearing material away from another celestial body, the resulting disk of debris that surrounds the black hole can be brightly visible. (That’s how astronomers took the first direct image of one in 2019 and an image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way earlier this year.)

But if a black hole is not inflicting chaos with its gravitational force, there’s hardly anything to detect. That’s often the case with these moving black holes. So astronomers like Lu use another technique called astrometric or gravitational microlensing.

“What we do is we wait for the chance alignment of one of these free-floating black holes and a background star,” Lu explains. “When the two align, the light from the background star is warped by the gravity of the black hole [in front of it]. It shows up as a brightening of the star [in the astronomical data]. It also makes it take a little jaunt in the sky, a little wobble, so to speak.”

The background star doesn’t actually move—rather, it appears to shift off its course when the black hole or another compact object passes in front of it. That’s because the gravity of the black hole warps the fabric of spacetime, according to Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which alters the starlight.

Astronomers use microlensing to study all kinds of temporary phenomena in the universe, from supernovae to exoplanets transiting around their stars. But it’s tricky to do with ground-based telescopes, as the Earth’s atmosphere can blur the images. 

“In astrometry, you’re trying to measure the position of something very precisely, and you need very sharp images,” Lu explains. So astronomers rely on telescopes in space, like Hubble, and a couple of ground-based instruments that have sophisticated systems to adapt for the atmospheric interference. “There are really only three facilities in the world that can make this astrometric measurement,” Lu says. “We’re working right at the cutting edge of what our technology can do today.”

The first rogue black hole? 

It was that brightening, or a “gravitational lensing event” as Lu calls it, that both her and Sahu’s teams spotted in data from the Hubble Space Telescope in 2011. Something, they surmised, must be passing in front of that star.

Figuring out what caused the wobble and change of intensity in a star’s light requires two measurements: brightness and position. Astronomers observe that same spot in the sky over time to see how the light changes as the object passes in front of the star. This gives them the data they need to calculate the mass of that object, which in turn determines whether it’s a black hole or a neutron star. 

“We know the thing that’s doing the lensing is heavy. We know it’s heavier than your typical star. And we know that it’s dark,” Lu notes. “But we’re still a little uncertain about exactly how heavy and exactly how dark.” If it’s only a little bit heavy, say, one and a half times the mass of our sun, it might actually be a neutron star. But if it’s three to 10 times as massive as our sun, then it would be a black hole, Lu explains.

As the two teams gathered data from 2011 to 2017, their analyses revealed distinctly different masses for that compact object. Sahu’s team determined that the roaming object has a mass seven times that of our sun, which would put it squarely in black hole territory. But Lam and Lu’s team calculated it to be less massive, somewhere between 1.6 and 4.4 solar masses, which spans both possibilities. 

[Related: Black holes can gobble up neutron stars whole]

The astronomers can’t be sure which calculation is correct until they get a chance to know just how bright the background star is normally and its position in the sky when something isn’t passing in front of it. They weren’t focused on that star before noticing its uncharacteristic brightness and wobble, so they’re just now getting the chance to make those baseline observations as the lensing effect has faded, Lu explains. Those observations will come from new Hubble data in the fall.

What they do know is that the object in question is in the Carina-Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, and is currently about 5,000 light years away from Earth. This detection also suggests that the nearest roaming black hole to could be less than 100 light years away, Lu says. But that’s not reason for concern.

“Black holes are a drain. If you get close enough, they will consume you,” Lu points out. “But you have to get very close, much closer than I think we typically picture.” The boundary around a black hole marking the line where light can still escape its gravity, called the event horizon, typically has a radius of under 20 miles.

The odds that a roaming black hole could pass through our celestial neighborhood and disrupt life on Earth are “astronomically small,” Lu says. “That’s the size of a city. So a black hole could pass by the solar system and we’d hardly notice.”

But she’s not ruling it out. “I’m a scientist,” she says. “I can’t say no chance.”

Regardless of whether the first teams detected a roaming black hole or a neutron star, Lu says, “the real revolution that these two papers are showing is that we can now find these black holes using a combination of brightness and position measurements.” This opens the door to discoveries of more light-capturing nomads, especially as new telescopes come online, including the Vera C. Rubin Observatory currently under construction in Chile and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope scheduled to launch later this decade.

The way Lu sees it, “the next chapter of black hole studies in our galaxy has already begun.”

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While the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been receiving a lot of attention lately (notably, it was hit by a little space rock), Hubble continues to be a faithful performer as it observes the sky. Recently, a team of astronomers led by Lamiya Mowla at the University of Toronto released Hubble’s largest-ever near-infrared image, creating a composite of the entire Cosmological Evolution Survey (COSMOS) field.

COSMOS is an astronomical survey designed to study the evolution and formation of galaxies. According to the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), this photograph from Hubble “enables astronomers to map the star-forming regions of the Universe and learn how the earliest, most distant galaxies originated.”

Why it matters

The near-infrared wavelength is the longest and reddest wavelength, falling just beyond what the human eye can perceive. Employing it allows astronomers to study some of the universe’s oldest galaxies. Researchers used 3D-DASH (Drift and SHift) technology to create the image, which is now considered “one of the richest data fields for extragalactic studies beyond the Milky Way.” 3D-DASH allows for the identification of phenomena like highly active black holes, galaxies on a path to collision, and gargantuan galaxies. 

“3D-DASH adds a new layer of unique observations in the COSMOS field and is also a stepping stone to the space surveys of the next decade,” says Ivelina Momcheva, head of data science at MPIA and principal investigator of the study. “It gives us a sneak peek of future scientific discoveries and allows us to develop new techniques to analyze these large datasets.” 

Previously, the types of images produced with 3D-DASH were possible from the ground only, and the results were poor resolution, thereby limiting what astronomers could observe. The ability to gather this information from the Hubble telescope now opens new possibilities for study. 

“It was difficult to study these extremely rare events using existing images, which is what motivated the design of this large survey,” Lamiya Mowla notes. 

The final image by 3D-DASH is eight times larger than Hubble’s standard view, created in a manner similar to how a photographer might stitch together photos for a large panorama. The data will aid researchers in the discovery of rare objects and targets of interest for the JWST when it becomes fully operational. But for those who wonder if the JWST will best Hubble’s efforts in the future, not so fast.

“This record is likely to remain unbroken by Hubble’s successor JWST,” writes MPIA in its press release. “[It is] instead built for sensitive, close-up images to capture the fine detail of a small area.”

Space enthusiasts can play around with 3D-DASH themselves. An interactive online model is available to the public and explores various data sets. 

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When you see a distant star in the night sky, it might twinkle and look like it has five points. This is largely a trick of the eye. Zoomed in, most stars are just round balls of gasses and dust. As they age, heat up, consume other matter, and sometimes explode, they take on more abstract and asymmetrical shapes—unlike the pentagrams you scribble on your notebook.

Now let’s zoom out again, way beyond Earth’s field of view. The imprints of individual stars form clusters—more complex than the constellations you know—which mold the immense systems underpinning the universe. These formations are so vast, it’s hard to even guess where their contours might fall.

That’s why astronomers need Gaia. The space observatory, which consists of two spinning telescopes and three “motion detectors,” is mapping out stars and other celestial bodies across the Milky Way. Since it launched in 2013, Gaia has pinpointed 1.8 billion objects, like a “stellar stream” that’s about a billion years old. The mission produced a near-complete 3D rendering of the home galaxy back in 2018, and continues to churn out data for researchers to tinker with. 

[Related: Astronomers just mapped the ‘bubble’ that envelops our planet]

In its latest haul of knowledge, Gaia shares a more intimate profile of the stars it’s documented. On June 13, the European Space Agency (ESA) posted fresh findings from the project, including a trove of light spectroscopy images and records of tsunami-sized tremors across the Milky Way. 

“The catalog includes new information including chemical compositions, stellar temperatures, colors, masses, ages, and the speed at which stars move towards or away from us (radial velocity),” the ESA wrote on its website. “Much of this information was revealed by the newly released spectroscopy data.”

Beyond surveying hundreds of thousands binary systems, asteroids, quasars, and macromolecules, the space observatory also detected oscillating motions emanating from stellar surfaces. Astronomers call these “starquakes.”

“Previously, Gaia already found radial oscillations that cause stars to swell and shrink periodically, while keeping their spherical shape. But Gaia has now also spotted other vibrations that … change the global shape of a star and are therefore harder to detect,” the ESA explained in its post. One of the project collaborators noted that the measurements could be pivotal for the field of asteroseismology, too.

[Related: Inside the tantalizing quest to sense gravity waves]

Meanwhile, the spectroscopy data breaks down starlight like a prism to reveal the contents, distance, and potential origins of the sun’s relatives. Gaia found primordial Big Bang material in some stellar signatures, along with an abundance of metal in denizens at the Milky Way’s core.

“Our galaxy is a beautiful melting pot of stars,” Alejandra Recio-Blanco, a galactic archaeologist at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France, said in a statement. “This diversity is extremely important, because it tells us the story of our galaxy’s formation. It reveals the processes of migration and accretion. It also clearly shows that our sun, and we, all belong to an ever changing system, formed thanks to the assembly of stars and gas of different origins.”

Watch the video below for a deeper dive on the new Gaia information—and a teaser of what’s next for the mission.

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There’s always something new to learn about space, whether it’s how scientists are planning to grow food in microgravity, or how new telescopes will illuminate dark energy. But NASA is adopting a fresh tactic to get people to discover the science behind the agency’s missions: turning future objectives into video games. 

Specifically, a browser game launched on June 2 puts players in control of NASA’s next-generation space telescope. A team of developers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center created Roman Space Observer, designed to inform users about the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission. Named after Nancy Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, the infrared observatory is set to launch in the mid-2020s. 

Once in operation, Roman’s mission will be to aid astronomers in answering key questions about exoplanets and the evolution of the universe—including whether our pale blue dot is the only place where life has thrived. The mission will last about half a decade, but could potentially be extended for another five years if NASA decides Roman still has more to do. 

But for those looking to investigate the intricacies of the mission from the comfort of their home on Earth, Roman Space Observer may be more your style. 

Users undertake Roman’s virtual mission and play as a light-blue block, which represents the telescope’s 18 image sensors that will capture images in its Wide-Field Instrument. The game, available in English and Spanish, also tries to account for how quickly Roman will travel through space while taking these images. Players get one minute of “observation time” to complete the game as they rack up points, earned by catching astrophysical objects. These phenomena range from black holes and glittering supernovae to spiral galaxies and rogue exoplanets, which are planets that roam space untethered to any star.

[Related: Scientists discovered four new Earth-sized rogue planets with no suns]

Courtney Lee, the social media lead for the Roman misson who also led coordination for the game’s development, says that because there’s typically a lot of scientific jargon surrounding NASA missions, some people can feel alienated. Others may be unaware of many of the opportunities the agency provides. Meshing science and videogames is a way to raise visibility for the entire agency, Lee says, and also gets people from all kinds of backgrounds talking about human exploration. 

“Since I’ve been at NASA, I’ve always tried new ways to reach out to different audiences,” Lee says. “I just wanted to create a game to kind of help educate people and meet people where they are.” One of the ways she accomplished that was helping decide exactly what the game should look like. 

Roman Space Observer doesn’t have the polished graphics that dominate major studio games: Instead, it takes inspiration from the 8-bit style of early arcade classics, like Space Invaders or Galaga. NASA’s iteration even operates in much the same way, as players have to use a combination of the spacebar and the arrow keys to move around the screen. 

Yet the application isn’t actually the agency’s first go at gamifying the science behind their technology. NASA has already created activities like Cubesat Builder, a game for upper elementary-school-aged players to build and test mini-spacecraft. But Roman Space Observer is the first to be targeted specifically to adults of all ages. 

Lee worked with the mission’s scientists to ensure her idea would accurately represent what the telescope will detect. One of Roman’s main objectives will be to study invisible dark matter, and it’s an aspect that Lee wanted to make sure was included in the game. 

“It makes up a lot of our universe, and we really don’t know a lot about it,” Lee says. “But the Roman mission is going to help us hopefully understand a little bit more.” 

Humans can only observe dark matter by seeing the gravitational effect it has on other matter, especially on objects like stars and galaxies. Inside the game, that detail is represented by seemingly random distortions that stretch or enlarge the objects as they pass through it. In the real world, dark matter isn’t so easy to identify. Scientists have yet to find out what dark matter is even made of, but they hope to rely on Roman to investigate the location and quantities of dark matter across time and space by measuring its effect across hundreds of millions of galaxies.     

“The Roman Space Telescope is designed to usher in a new paradigm, a new era of space-based astrophysics,” says Dominic Benford, program scientist for the Roman mission. He says that as Roman gazes over large swathes of the sky, its next-generation camera will cover over 100 times the view compared to the cameras on the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, the gold-mirrored observatory that launched in late December 2021. 

“We anticipate within its first month or so, it will have taken more imagery, more sky that Hubble has during its entire lifetime to that point,” says Benford.

Funnily enough, because Roman and JWST will orbit in the same vicinity around the sun, it’s possible for the two to glimpse each other in the lonely dark. Considering how fast they’ll be hurtling through space, that event is unlikely to actually happen. Yet eagle-eyed challengers hunting for Roman Space Observer’s highest score may be able to spot a telltale golden blur streaking across their screens. Although JWST doesn’t appear in every game, it does hold the highest point bounty and is one of the harder entities to catch. (Believe me, I’ve tried.)  

As for what’s next, Benford says that the game is a “nice harkening” back to an earlier era, and he challenges everyone to beat his recent score: nearly 300. 

Lee, meanwhile, says she hopes to get the chance to help turn the online game into a physical one. “Something I really wanted to always do when I started on the mission was reaching people who might not know they’re interested in science,” Lee says. “Video games will kind of bridge that gap.” 

Use this link to check out Roman Space Observer, which is free but currently only available on desktop devices. And good luck trying to beat one of NASA’s own highest scores this month: 1,205. 

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As the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) pushes to the end of its final alignment phase, perfecting its instruments to capture full-color scientific images, it’s making quite the impact.

A few weeks ago, the JWST team detected a micrometeoroid hitting one of the telescope’s 18 hexagonal mirror segments. A micrometeoroid is a piece of space debris, usually left behind by a comet, that’s just a fraction of an inch long. While the majority of them are innocuous, if they pick up enough speed in the vacuum of space, they can cause damage to flying or orbiting craft. But in this case, NASA engineers concluded that the mirror’s functions stayed intact and that operations could go on as planned.

“After initial assessments, the team found the telescope is still performing at a level that exceeds all mission requirements despite a marginally detectable effect in the data,” the agency wrote on its blog. “Thorough analysis and measurements are ongoing.”

JWST is currently in orbit at Lagrange point 2, about 930,000 miles away from Earth. Given the telescope’s remote location, the team that designed it predicted it would face multiple micrometeoroid collisions. So, they made sure to check its durability with both computer simulations and lab-based stress tests. Still, the engineers noted that the real-life impact was much more serious than any they had practiced.

[Related: A fully aligned James Webb Space Telescope captures a glorious image of a star]

The telescope’s 44-pound mirror segments are made of beryllium, a soft, light metal that’s surprisingly hardy against water, air, and heat. They’re also coated in gold to maximize clarity and reflectivity. NASA didn’t specify if there was any superficial damage on the impacted mirror (it might be hard to tell because we can’t see JWST anymore)—but the agency gave some details on how they adjusted the entire system post-crash.

“Webb’s capability to sense and adjust mirror positions enables partial correction for the result of impacts. By adjusting the position of the affected segment, engineers can cancel out a portion of the distortion. This minimizes the effect of any impact, although not all of the degradation can be cancelled out this way. Engineers have already performed a first such adjustment for the recently affected segment C3, and additional planned mirror adjustments will continue to fine tune this correction.”

As JWST snaps into research mode, the team will use data from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center to carefully track meteor showers around Lagrange point 2. That way, they can redirect the mirrors when needed to avoid bombardment. Even then, however, some collisions will be unavoidable. As precious as JWST is, at the end of the day, it’s a next-gen astronomy tool, built to travel far and encounter many unknowns. If Hubble can survive more than 30 years in space, and Voyager 1 for 45, our newest telescope should be able to weather most anything hurtling its way.

Correction (June 10, 2022): The acronym for the James Webb Space Telescope was corrected. Also the word “airborne” was changed to “flying or orbiting” to describe spacecraft accurately.

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As the largest and most complicated human-made contraption ever delivered to the cosmos, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) harrowed astronomers with its launch last year. The telescope has unprecedented sensitivity to peer deeper into the inky universe and resolve distant objects. But the next generation of further-seeing telescopes may not necessarily have to beat JWST’s heft to top its vision. 

“If you want to keep getting a better angular resolution, then either you have to build bigger and bigger telescopes—or you have to switch to interferometry,” says Scott Gaudi, an astronomer and exoplanet hunter at the Ohio State University.

Nulling interferometry is an observation technique that gathers data on astronomical objects by mixing light from multiple simultaneous views of the same target. Nulling refers to how this light can be combined to block out the overwhelming background from an object, such as a star, to enhance the signals originating from a much fainter target, such as the orbiting planet that basks under the star’s glare. The technique gets around one of the thorniest challenges for exoplanetary observations: the contrast problem. Compared to other rival technologies, nulling interferometry may be the best candidate to dim down starlight by ten billion times or more—enough to reveal an Earth-sized planet’s lurking presence. And these rocky bodies are prime candidates for housing extraterrestrial life.  

[Related: There is no Planet B]

For higher sensitivity and better resolution, each collector of light needs to be spaced out hundreds of meters from each other. Here’s the innovative part: Instead of deploying an unwieldy contraption spoked with multiple detectors, another solution is to remove any bridging struts in the deadspace between the collectors and rely on formation flying. The advantages of autonomous formation flyers are profound—these detectors can move outward or inward to home in on different targets, swivel around, and merry-go-round the central collector to modulate the astronomical signals they receive. 

“Interferometry just keeps coming up—over and over and over,” says Gaudi. “I think that it’s very much in the future.” 

While a space nulling interferometer isn’t going to be deployed in the next decades, one effort led by Sascha Quanz, an astrophysicist at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, is pushing nulling interferometry from the drawing board to reality. The mission he champions makes no secret of its purpose: LIFE, which also stands for the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets, will scour the cosmos for Earth-like and potentially habitable exoplanets. His team’s proposed infrared observatory involves five individual spacecraft flying in sync to achieve the resolution of a telescope with a 1,970-feet-wide primary mirror. (In contrast, the primary mirror of the world’s largest space observatory, JWST, is 21 feet wide.) Last year, the European Space Agency (ESA) selected exoplanet hunting as one of its three major mission themes in the coming decades, for which LIFE could be a major contender to carry it through. LIFE’s concept is picking up steam, but it’s not the first time nulling interferometry in space has garnered interest—decades ago, the idea was foiled by technological and financial hurdles that made extraterrestrial nulling interferometry practically infeasible. In the decades since, technology improvement has brought nulling interferometry closer to reality than ever before. LIFE could be the mission to pull off nulling interferometry’s redemption story.

The origins of LIFE

Before the 2000s, exoplanet discoveries were far and few in between, because humankind simply didn’t have the tools to seek them out. But not for the lack of trying—scientists floated around ideas for exoplanet hunters that were considered far too ambitious for their time.  

Nulling interferometry was first proposed by Stanford University electrical engineer Ronald Bracewell in 1978. Later, NASA and ESA independently picked up the concept by giving the green light to the Terrestrial Planet Finder Interferometer (TPFI) and Darwin missions in 2002 and 1993 respectively. To the chagrin of the scientific community, budget constraints led to the cancellation of TPFI in 2007. In the same year, ESA scrapped Darwin. In both missions, technology and exoplanet knowledge back then were decidedly insufficient to justify the gargantuan financial costs. Both space agencies shelved the ideas, consigning them to the dusty depths of history as dead-end projects. 

Back then, exoplanet hunting was a risky venture. Perhaps the investment in a radical new technology such a space nulling interferometry wasn’t worth it if there weren’t many new worlds to unveil in the first place. 

All that changed when a new kid arrived on the block: Kepler. 

The nifty space telescope used a method called “transits” to root out covert exoplanets. It stared at a star long enough for an exoplanet to orbit around it several times; periodic blips in the starlight would hint at a possible exoplanet that was transiting in front of—essentially photobombing—the star. To carry out the transit method, this steadfast stargazer surveyed the same patch of sky throughout its heyday. 

Kepler first set up shop in 2009 and detected its first previously unknown exoplanet a year later. Hundreds of exoplanets had been discovered in the decade before Kepler’s debut. Nevertheless, the number was too low for scientists to know whether exoplanets, let alone habitable ones, were common or rare—until the Kepler mission ushered in a gold rush of exoplanetary discovery. As many stars as there are strewn across galaxies, even more exoplanets populate the universe, scientists realized. Among the more than 5,000 currently known exoplanets, Kepler scoped out more than half of them in the nine years it silently sentineled the night sky. 

Despite Kepler’s productivity, the transit technique comes with its own limitations: It’s essentially a long waiting game for exoplanets to complete several round trips around their stars. As such, the steadfast stargazer can only afford to stare at the same sliver of sky for several years at a time. Imagine the bonanza of exoplanets scientists could uncover, says Quanz, if humanity had an observatory that could behold the entire cosmos and track exoplanets in real time without having to wait for them to complete their orbits. 

Quanz and his team took the statistics from Kepler’s productivity and simulated the rate of return of a hypothetical  mission like LIFE that can detect exoplanets directly. “We simply wanted to get a first feeling,” says Quanz, “and the answer was just overwhelming.” He recalls communicating his early calculations to veteran researchers more senior than him over dinner in around 2017. Guess how many exoplanets DARWIN could have unearthed, he asked them. One professor randomly hedged the number twelve, Quanz remembers. Stunning his listeners, Quanz told them that in less than a year, a mission like LIFE could pin down more than 300. 

“It was just this excitement, knowing what this mission could deliver,” says Quanz. In the years since TPFI and Darwin, technology has progressed to the point where space-based nulling interferometry is no longer unthinkable. Instead, an initiative like LIFE is well on the way to being feasible. “I was just fixated by this idea,” adds Quanz. 

Flying space telescopes, reimagined

If nulling interferometry ends up being the next big wrinkle in space exploration, it will be because of young determined minds like Quanz, says Bertrand Mennesson, an astrophysicist at NASA. Mennesson himself was one of the scientists working on TPFI before he was diverted towards other projects. “It’s good to have new people looking at this and maybe coming to new conclusions,” he adds. One such example is whether the technology is reasonably achievable in the first place. The next step will require bringing together different space teams to put together a working prototype and vie for substantial funding. 

High up on the to-do list is the demonstration of formation flying among autonomous spacecraft. LIFE will be made up of four separate collector spacecraft that gather infrared signals from exoplanets backlit against their stars, before redirecting the radiation to a central probe. For LIFE to work, scientists need to ready their propulsion systems, inter-spacecraft communication, and ability to hold steady to the precision of the wavelengths that they operate at. These autonomous infrared collectors will be spaced out thousands of feet apart, the deviation from their target positions can only be at most a tenth of the width of human hair. 

The rise of small satellites (smallsats) and swarm technologies in recent years will be critical for whipping formation flying into shape to give  LIFE—or nulling interferometry—a new lease on life. Smallsats and Cubesats in low Earth orbit are suitable prototype platforms to debut formation flying. A handful of orbital formation flyers have been deployed close to Earth—with several more slated for the near future—as testbeds to iron out various aspects of the technology. These incremental steps will prove the feasibility of formation flying in the decades to come. 

Another challenge for LIFE is to whittle the current landscape of infrared technology into shape. Fortunately, the development of JWST accelerated mid infrared optics that the new project will eventually make use of. Infrared is the preferred wavelength of light for planet-seeking interferometers, as many chemicals in planetary atmospheres absorb at this wavelength. Not only will LIFE have higher sensitivity to reveal new habitable planets in the first place, it may also deliver on its namesake—to allow scientists to study potential biosignatures such as methane and carbon dioxide on the planetary surfaces in further detail.  

In the meantime, there’s no lack of effort to develop and make good use of Earth-bound infrared interferometers while scientists wait for one in the sky. This solution gets around formation flying, since individual telescopes can be shuffled more easily on the ground. (At Chile’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer, each of its four constituent auxiliary telescopes can be shuttled around atop trucks.) However, these telescopes have to contend with the nemesis of infrared astronomy: the atmosphere, which sponges up this radiation from the heavens. Turbulence in the air also blurs out these faint extraterrestrial readings—it’s like looking up and watching the outside world from the bottom of a swimming pool, says Barnaby Norris, an astrophysicist from the University of Sydney, Australia. 

A new hope for the mission

As much as space-based nulling interferometry seems inevitable, space agencies have not drawn out concrete plans to carry it through so far. 

Nulling interferometry isn’t one of ESA’s confirmed missions, and neither has ESA allocated funding specifically for a concerted commitment to develop the technology. “For the moment, it is not on our immediate agenda,” at least not until 2050, says Günther Hasinger, ESA’s director of science. “To put that technology in space right now is just too demanding.” 

Across the Atlantic Ocean, NASA is actively pursuing alternative starlight-blocking technologies that are practically simpler but more suited to slightly shorter wavelengths. Mennesson says that these techniques aren’t necessarily substitutes for nulling interferometry, but can complement the latter in the search for extraterrestrial life. 

[Related: With the arrival of Africa’s next radio telescope, Namibia sees a new dawn in astronomy]

Still, nulling interferometry’s ability to resolve distant Earth-like planets by honing in on mid infrared wavelengths is a niche no other exoplanet-questing method can fill. 

“There’s obviously a lot of work to be done on the technology,” says Norris, “but I don’t think there’s anything insurmountable.” 

Quanz says he will explore all avenues, such as approval from space agencies or collaboration with private entities, to bring LIFE to life. 

He’s inspired by the very person whose mission LIFE has to thank: William Borucki, a retired space scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, California, and the principal investigator of the Kepler mission. It may be hard to imagine that Kepler, the most revolutionary exoplanet hunter humanity has brandished so far, had itself a rocky start: The mission concept was rejected by NASA four times since the early 1990s before it was eventually deployed nearly two decades later. 

Quanz remembers getting this advice from Borucki at a conference in Cascais, Portugal in 2014: “If you’re really convinced by something … you have to stand up for it and just make it happen.” Following this star-studded legacy, LIFE will pick up where its predecessors left off and shoot for the skies. 

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After sailing more than a million miles away from Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is now only two months away from beginning scientific operations. NASA announced on April 28 that the powerful spacecraft is about to wrap up the final phase of preparations, a process called science instrument commissioning. 

While the JWST has reached this last crucial stage in the setup process, it still has a number of steps and benchmarks before official data capture begins. 

The JWST is more than a telescope that collects images—it is also a toolbox of scientific equipment. While JWST recently fully aligned its 18 hexagonal mirror segments—a milestone that allows the space telescope to take clearer, sharper pictures of deep space—many of its instruments are still being fine tuned, says Klaus Pontoppidan, project scientist for JWST at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

“Astronomers are a quantitative bunch,” says Pontoppidan. “They want more than pretty images, they want to be able to actually make quantitative measurements.” 

The new phase involves confirming each of the instrument’s functions, assessing their performance, and calibrating their systems to ensure essential operation sequences can be followed all the way through. This stage is crucial to make sure all future data collection runs smoothly. “Everybody wants to get to the science as quickly as possible, but we do have to make sure that the instruments actually are able to deliver that science,” Pontoppidan says.

Some of the evaluations on the JWST’s checklist include a moving target test which will be used to track an asteroid through space, and making sure it can recognize the signatures of planets beyond our solar system, or exoplanets. Another test will involve pointing the telescope at different portions of the sky, specifically the Large Magellanic Cloud, to measure and then correct any optical distortions its instruments might have. 

The telescope is equipped with four instruments, each designed to conduct specific data collection. The series of cameras and spectrography sensors are calibrated to pick up electromagnetic waves in the mid- and near-infrared range—these are waves emitted by distant cosmic objects that are invisible to our eyes. Once performance tests wrap up, the instruments will detect and take pictures of distant galaxies and newly forming stars, as well as obtain mass, temperature, chemical composition and other physical properties of numerous celestial bodies.

Already, some of these tools have reported back initial pictures. Throughout the few months of testing, the measurements JWST takes won’t be used for research, says Scott Friedman, an observatory scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a commissioning scientist for the JWST mission. Instead, they’ll be used to ensure that all systems are as they say, ready to fire.

[Related: A fully aligned James Webb Space Telescope captures a glorious image of a star]

The final stage is about four months into the six-month process. Although they are a few days behind Friedman says if everything else continues on schedule the spacecraft could be ready to handle its first year of science responsibilities by June. But like all new systems, the team and the telescope have a learning curve to conquer. 

“We’ve had a very detailed plan for quite a long time about how we would progress and what activities we would do,” says Friedman. “Not everything has been perfect, but by and large things have gone better than we could have hoped.”

With only weeks to go, astronomers and non-scientists alike are highly anticipating what discoveries the space telescope will make once instrument commissioning completes. Pontoppidan plans to celebrate by releasing brand new color images of the universe to the public. 

“I always felt that building these big astronomical experiments gets to some of the core of what makes us human,” he says, “to discover the world, to discover where we’re coming from [and] where we’re going in entirely new ways.”

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The James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) main mirror segments are fully aligned, and now this NASA telescope is able to produce the highest resolution infrared images ever taken from space. 

NASA released the first picture from the fully aligned telescope on Wednesday, showing the star 2MASS J17554042+6551277. Though other telescopes have previously photographed the star, JWST captured it with higher resolution. The telescope also detected other stars and galaxies in the background. These are called “deep field” images. 

“This is going to be the future from now on,” said Jane Rigby, JWST operations project scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, according to Space.com. “Wherever we look, it’s a deep field. Without even really breaking a sweat, we’re seeing back in time to galaxies that we’re seeing the light as it looked billions of years ago.”

It’s a feat that would be impossible had the space telescope’s 18 mirror segments not been aligned precisely. Those 18 hexagonal segments make up JSWT’s 21.3-foot-wide primary mirror. These hexagons had to travel to space folded—the mirror could only be unfolded after the telescope reached its targeted Lagrange point, 930,000 miles from Earth. There, it unfurled its sun shield and other components. 

Aligning the telescope’s many mirror segments was no small task, especially in the extreme conditions of space. This was achieved by finely controlling multiple motors behind each segment. It was a crucial phase and a big milestone, allowing NASA to produce images with unprecedented clarity, as it did this week. 

“We have exceeded every expectation,” Scott Acton, JWST’s lead wavefront sensing and control scientist, said in a video on the telescope’s official YouTube channel. “The telescope has performed better than the models said it should.”

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope showed us its first star]

The $10 billion telescope mission is the most complex and expensive observatory of its kind ever launched into space. It has been decades in the making, and so these advancements have been highly anticipated.

“More than 20 years ago, the JWST team set out to build the most powerful telescope that anyone has ever put in space and came up with an audacious optical design to meet demanding science goals,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator of science, said in a statement. “Today we can say that design is going to deliver.”

There are still a few alignment steps to go for the optical telescope, and then the team will prep the science instruments on JWST. NASA says the telescope’s first full-resolution imagery and science data will be released in the summer. Once all of its instruments are fully operational, it should help astronomers unravel some of the universe’s biggest mysteries.

“Of all the sleepless nights I’ve had and the worries that I’ve had, they are all behind us now,” said Zurbuchen, according to Space.com. “There’s still a mountain to climb, those important tasks that need to be done. But we are way up that mountain.”

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Astronomers have just confirmed the largest icy comet ever observed—and it’s headed in our direction.  It’s a harmless giant, though. At its closest point to Earth, around the year 2031, astronomers say it will reach 1 billion miles away from the sun, about the distance of the planet Saturn. 

The Hubble Space Telescope took new observations of the monster comet, C/2014 UN271, also called the Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet after its discoverers, Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein. The comet was first observed in November 2010, when it was about as far away as Neptune, in the outer reaches of our solar system. Since then, astronomers have been trying to determine its true size and trajectory.

The team that just confirmed the comet’s size used the Hubble to take five photos of it on January 8, 2022. They then analyzed those images to see if they could distinguish the rocky nucleus at the center of the comet from the envelope of dust and other particles haloed around it. With those images, they estimate that the Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet’s nucleus is approximately 80 miles across, making it larger than the state of Rhode Island. The team published their findings on Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“This is an amazing object, given how active it is when it’s still so far from the sun,” the paper’s lead author Man-To Hui of the Macau University of Science and Technology said in a statement. “We guessed the comet might be pretty big, but we needed the best data to confirm this.”

This comet is more than 30 percent bigger than the previous record holder, a comet spotted in 2002 with a nucleus of about 60 miles across. It also has a staggering estimated mass of 500 trillion tons, 100,000 times greater than typical comets in our solar system. 

The Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet is currently at the edge of our solar system and has been shooting toward the sun for over 1 million years, traveling at 22,000 mph. Its origin is a mystery, though it is hurtling toward us from the Oort Cloud, which astronomers hypothesize to be a nesting ground for trillions of comets. The cloud’s closest edge lies somewhere 2,000 to 5,000 times the distance between the sun and Earth, according to best estimates, while its farthest edge may extend at least a quarter of the way toward Alpha Centauri, the stars nearest to our solar system.

[Related: Scientists finally solve the mystery of why comets glow green]

“This comet is literally the tip of the iceberg for many thousands of comets that are too faint to see in the more distant parts of the solar system,” study co-author David Jewitt, a professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a statement. “We’ve always suspected this comet had to be big because it is so bright at such a large distance. Now we confirm it is.”

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This article was originally featured on Popular Photography.

NASA is always searching for new ways to extend its ability to see into the outer reaches of the universe and, in its latest series of experiments, it’s exploring a method that could enable it to build telescopes ten—or even 100—times larger than the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Here are the exciting details.

Size is everything

The Laws of Physics are (annoyingly) physical in nature so, when it comes to optics, size is everything. For telescopes, this means bigger is always better. 

Larger telescopes are able to gather more light, which allows astronomers to see smaller, darker, and more distant objects with greater clarity. Although the JWST is more technologically advanced than the Hubble Space Telescope, one of its biggest advantages is that its primary mirror is around 6.25-times bigger. It collects a lot more light so it can see further—and there is nothing Hubble can do to change that. 

But size comes with a huge cost—both in dollars and convenience. The whole JWST project has cost $10 billion. Construction on the primary mirror started in 2004, and just aligning the mirror-segments in space takes three months. The reason the mirror-segments need to be aligned in the first place is because they were flat-packed for easy transportation. When the JWST is fully deployed, it’s about the size of a tennis court (69.5 by 46.5 feet), and no rocket on Earth is presently able to fly something that large into orbit.

Liquids do the work

For NASA, this means that any technology that allows them to create larger telescopes, without the hassle it currently takes to construct and assemble them, is pretty exciting. This is where liquid lenses come in. 

As NASA explains in its blog post announcing the latest experiments, liquids have surface tension: “an elastic-like force that holds them together at their surface.” It’s this that keeps small droplets of water spherical here on Earth, at least until the force of gravity acting on them gets too much and they collapse under their own weight. 

In space, though, gravity isn’t as much of a problem. There’s almost no limit on the size a spherical droplet can be. (This causes certain toilet problems.) That’s why NASA wants to explore if it’s possible to make high-precision optics using liquids.

As Edward Balaban, principal investigator of the Fluidic Telescope Experiment, or FLUTE, explains:

“In microgravity, liquids take on shapes that are useful for making lenses and mirrors, so if we make them in space, they could be used to build telescopes that are dramatically bigger than was previously thought possible.”

So far, the FLUTE team has proved the concept in a series of experiments here on Earth. 

Using a bucket filled with water, they were able to make lenses with “an outstanding surface quality comparable or even better than achievable with the best polishing methods”. Even better, “they took only a tiny fraction of the time to construct.”

With the proof of concept confirmed, they tested their ideas on two ZeroG parabolic flights, where they had a total of 50 periods of 15 to 20 seconds of weightlessness. Once again, they were able to successfully create liquid lenses—at least until the parabolic arc leveled out and gravity kicked back in. 

Next steps

The next step is to conduct these liquid experiments on the International Space Station. All the gear is currently up there awaiting the arrival of the Axiom-1 astronauts in the next few days. Mission Specialist Eytan Stibbe will be in charge of running the test, which will involve making lenses from liquid polymers in micro-gravity, then curing them—either with UV light or heat—so they can be returned to Earth for further study. 

“We expect this approach will create perfectly shaped and smooth surfaces: the best surfaces to turn into mirrors,” says Vivek Dwivedi, a FLUTE scientist at Goddard. And that would get NASA one step closer to a giant space telescope. 

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The Hubble Space Telescope has added yet another remarkable discovery to its legacy: It has spotted the farthest star ever found, a star that began to emit light within the first billion years after the big bang. The star is so far away that its light takes 12.9 billion years to reach Earth. 

Hubble spotted the star WHL0137-LS, nicknamed “Earendel,” which is Old English for “morning star” or “rising light,” with a combination of its powerful instruments and lucky cosmic alignment. The mass of a huge galaxy cluster, called WHL0137-08, warped space through an effect called gravitational lensing. That distorted portion of the cosmos magnified the distant star’s light, and Hubble was in the right place to get a glimpse. The findings were published Wednesday in Nature. 

“It’s by far the most distant individual star that we’ve ever seen,” NASA’s Jane Rigby, a co-author of the paper, told National Geographic. “This will be our best chance to study what an individual, massive star was like in the early universe.”

Earendel’s light, as Hubble observed it, was shining within 900 million years after the big bang, at a time called “redshift 6.2”. The discovery is a major leap from the next-farthest star ever detected, which existed at “redshift 1.5,” when the universe was around 4 billion years old.

The star was so much farther than the previous most-distant star, “we almost didn’t believe it at first,” astronomer Brian Welch of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and lead author of the paper said in a statement. Studying Earendel has the potential to teach astronomers more about how earlier stars differ from newer, younger stars, he added. 

“Earendel existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials as the stars around us today,” Welch said. “Studying Earendel will be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar with, but that led to everything we do know. It’s like we’ve been reading a really interesting book, but we started with the second chapter, and now we will have a chance to see how it all got started.”

[Related: A fully aligned James Webb Space Telescope captures a glorious image of a star]

In a gravitational lens, warped space causes a natural magnifying glass. Magnification is the most intense along a line called the “critical curve.” The critical curve lined up so well that it intensified Earendel’s light by a factor of 1,000 to 40,000 times. Even so, the star appeared like a smudge to Hubble. Welch and his team have been poring over readings for that smudge of light for the last three and a half years.

“It’s sort of pretty amazing to find this,” Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz who was not involved in this research, told NPR. “It’s remarkable to find an object like that right on the most highly magnified part. That, in itself, is sort of an astonishing discovery.”

Earendel is 8.2 billion years older than our solar system, and at least 50 times more massive than our sun. But the team of astronomers is unsure whether Earendel is just one star, or actually a pair of binary stars. The team plans to conduct follow-up observations with NASA’s recently launched James Webb Space Telescope. Luckily, Earendel is expected to stay in that high-magnification zone for years to come.

“With Webb, we may see stars even farther than Earendel, which would be incredibly exciting,” Welch said. “We’ll go as far back as we can. I would love to see Webb break Earendel’s distance record.”

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NASA has officially confirmed the existence of more than 5,000 exoplanets—planets that exist outside our solar system—as of Monday. A new batch of 65 confirmations pushed the tally up to 5,005 on the agency’s Exoplanet Archive. 

The 5,000-plus alien worlds are diverse. Some are small and rocky. Others are gas giants that dwarf Jupiter. Some exoplanets orbit two stars at once, while others orbit long-dead stars. So far, the confirmed exoplanets break down into: 30 percent gas giants, 35 percent Neptune-like dark and icy worlds, and 31 percent super-Earths (planets up to 10 times Earth’s mass but smaller than Neptune’s). Just 4 percent are rocky planets comparable in size to Earth or Mars. Confirming 5,000 of these planets is remarkable, but it’s only the start. There are likely hundreds of billions of exoplanets in our galaxy, the Milky Way, alone.

Five thousand is “not just a number,” Jessie Christiansen, science lead for the exoplanet archive and a research scientist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech in Pasadena, said in NASA’s announcement. “Each one of them is a new world, a brand-new planet. I get excited about every one because we don’t know anything about them.”

Exoplanet discovery was, for a while, limited by the technology we have on Earth—we can only peer so far into the cosmos from our own rocky planet, and Earth’s atmosphere can interfere with readings. The advent of telescopes launched into space dramatically increased our exoplanet detection capabilities. And with even greater advancements in science, and new observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope, even more exoplanet discoveries are almost inevitable. 

“Of the 5,000 exoplanets known, 4,900 are located within a few thousand light-years of us,” Christiansen said in a Q&A with Caltech. “And think about the fact that we’re 30,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy; if you extrapolate from the little bubble around us, that means there are many more planets in our galaxy we haven’t found yet, as many as 100 [billion] to 200 billion. It’s mind-blowing.”

[Related: On this blisteringly hot metal planet, a year lasts only 8 hours]

Astronomers have been pinpointing exoplanets since 1992, when radio astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail announced the discovery of two planets orbiting a pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star that pulses with radiation signals. They published their findings in Nature. 

Exoplanet research since then has boomed, especially after the Kepler space telescope launched in 2009. During its 9 years in operation, Kepler helped scientists rack up 2,700 exoplanet discoveries—and astronomers are still parsing its immense logs and readings to see if they missed any planets hiding in the mounds of data.

“Now, exoplanets are almost ordinary,” Christiansen told Caltech. “My colleague David Ciardi [chief scientist for the NASA Exoplanet Archive] pointed out the other day that half of the people alive have never lived in a world where we didn’t know about exoplanets.”

But there’s still much more to learn and discover, Christiansen said. “Now that we have enough planets, we can really slice and dice and ask how different kinds of planets are made,” or how the different ages of stars affect their orbiting planets. “The more planets we have,” she added, “the more answers we have.”

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A European radio telescope array just reached a major milestone in its quest to paint a picture of the radio night sky—and you can explore highlights of this mind-blowing cosmic map for yourself.

A team of scientists working on the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) radio telescope in Europe published an overview of a new, freely available data package that covers 27 percent of the Northern sky. The data will be useful for researchers studying everything from the evolution of galaxies, black holes, exoplanets, and certain types of stars. These researchers are also looking for non-experts to get involved–they need your help to spot the wonders of the cosmos in all of those images.

LOFAR senses radio waves, as opposed to optical light captured by telescopes such as NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. LOFAR also targets lower-frequency light than most other radio telescopes. It will map the entire Northern sky with very good resolution, says Timothy Shimwell, an astronomer at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, which operates the LOFAR telescope.

The map is already incredibly detailed. With more than 4 million radio sources, most of which are galaxies, this data release has “more radio sources in it than all other surveys of the entire sky combined,” says Joe Callingham, a radio astronomer at Leiden University who contributed to LOFAR and will use its data in his research.

The telescope is essentially a large antenna stretching across Europe, built from smaller antennas. The hardware of the telescope doesn’t look cutting edge. The setup that detects lower frequencies is literally “a stick in the ground with some wires coming off it,” says Shimwell. The machine that detects higher frequencies, meanwhile, is essentially “a big styrofoam box with, like, a bow-tie shaped antenna inside it.” These are both relatively inexpensive compared to building a set of huge radio dishes like many other telescopes.The real brains of LOFAR are in the processing that’s done afterwards, Shimwell says. “It’s almost like a software telescope.”

The team released this visualization that shows radio sources from the new sky maps as an interactive 3D map. To check it out, first click on the link–then be patient as it may take a few minutes to load–and it’ll bring up the map.

On the “ground” of the visualization you can see a circle of disembodied Earth where the main antennas based in the Netherlands are planted. The cones of bright spots represent the view of the telescope—the areas of the sky it has scanned already. The bright spots are mostly galaxies that the telescope has imaged.

You can rotate the view in any direction by holding down left-click and moving the mouse (or hit the “Toggle rotation” button in the top left of the screen to get a 360-degree view). You can also pan left, right, up, down by holding down right-click, and zoom in and out by scrolling to get a sense of what’s happening in our galactic neck of the woods. From certain angles, you can see how some regions are more or less dense with galaxies. 

[Related: The ‘double-disk’ shape of the Milky Way could be common across galaxies]

Like the constellations you see when you look up at the night sky, LOFAR sees radio sources as a flat canvas. But the stars and galaxies spotted are actually spread out in three dimensions—two objects might appear to be close to each other in the sky while, in reality, one is much farther away. For example, the stars Betelgeuse and Bellatrix make up each shoulder in the constellation Orion, appear close together in the sky. But Betelgeuse is roughly twice as far away as Bellatrix is from Earth.

By combining the radio maps with data from another project, the LOFAR team could figure out how far away many of the radio sources in their dataset were. A team member used these measurements to make the distance of each bright spot correspond to its real distance in the cosmos.

“All of the data in that visualization is actually real,” Shimwell says. The radio sources aren’t all galaxies, but astronomers expect around 99.9 percent should be, Callingham says. Stars, unless they’re doing something strange, aren’t as bright as galaxies in radio frequencies, he says.

In 2019 the team published their first data release on 2 percent of the sky. They hope to complete the whole Northern sky in three or four years, Shimwell says.

With the enormous amount of data, scientists need people to help sort through images and train algorithms to sort through them better. You can join a citizen science project to help spot supermassive black holes and star forming galaxies in the images.

The new LOFAR dataset “is a really exciting and fantastic data product,” says Marin Anderson, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Project Scientist for the Owens Valley Long Wavelength Array, a different radio observatory. The density of radio sources it has detected is more than eight times what other similar radio telescopes have been able to pick up, she says. 

Anderson’s research focuses on radio signals that change over time—like those from stars and exoplanets.The low-frequency range of the telescope will assist that kind of research, because emissions from stars and exoplanets are also better seen in low-frequency radio, compared to the frequencies that most radio telescopes see. Anderson is also gratified to see the sharpness of images from LOFAR.

“When you look at an image from Hubble…it’s mind blowing,” Anderson says. But usually when you look at a radio image, even if there’s lots of science packed into it, it’s “just a fuzzy blob.” In these sharper images, radio astronomers finally have something equivalent.

Click here to explore the 3D map of these galaxies and stars.

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Sometimes gravity unifies galaxies; sometimes it creates strife. But documenting these paradoxical processes is always a feat, even in the age of advanced space telescopes and astronomical modeling.

On February 14, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) posted a Hubble image depicting three galaxies swirling into one. The newborn formation is located 681 million light-years away from Earth in the Cancer constellation. The gravitational force of the triple merger is so intense, it’s packing dust into new stars and causing bulges in the galactic cloud (an effect known as tidal distortion). 

Mergers are a common way for galaxies to grow and shape stars in disparate conditions. (The Milky Way as we know it is likely a result of a merger, based on the massive hump at its center.) The events can either be “gas wet,” meaning the parties involved are cold and gassy, or “gas dry,” where the bodies are older and have used up their gases. Wet mergers have a higher rate of star formation, and often birth bright, elliptical galaxies. 

The merger that Hubble spied in the Cancer constellation has been in progress for more than a century. Labeled IC 2431, it was first discovered in 1896 by French astronomer Stephane Javelle who used a much smaller ground telescope. Though he identified it as a quadruple merger, NASA and ESA researchers think there are three galaxies in the gaseous churn.

Meanwhile, 5,000 light-years away in the Rosette Nebulae, a collision between two passing galaxies is leading to “a firestorm of star formation.” On February 22, NASA and the ESA posted a Hubble shot of the ancient galaxy NGC 2444 yanking at the spiral galaxy NGC 2445 during an eons-long driveby. As NGC 2444 lumbers along, its massive gravitational field is teasing out NGC 2445’s gases, creating a trail of young blue stars. The newborn stellar masses rest at the heart of the smaller galaxy, and are estimated to be one to two million years old. 

But there’s a dark side to this pairing, too. The Hubble image reveals a web of black gases leaking out from the core of the star birth; its origins and components are still largely a mystery. “Radio observations reveal a powerful source in the core that may be spearheading the outbursts,” the ESA writes in its post. “The radio source may have been produced by intense star formation or a black hole gobbling up material flowing into the center.”

The two space agencies plan to scan the formation again once the James Webb Space Telescope is fully operational. Webb’s infrared-light camera should be able to detect more stars that are shrouded in dust and invisible to Hubble’s decades-old instruments. 

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