Universe Today

January 17, 2025January 17, 2025 by Evan Gough

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

Astronomers have created 3D maps of two giant molecular clouds in the Milky Way's Central Molecular Zone (CMZ). What happens to them in such an extreme environment? Image Credit: Alboslani et al. 2025.

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

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

January 17, 2025January 17, 2025 by David Dickinson

Review: Dwarf Lab’s New Dwarf 3 Smartscope

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

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

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

January 17, 2025January 17, 2025 by Andy Tomaswick

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

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

January 16, 2025January 11, 2025 by Paul M. Sutter

Dark Matter Can’t Be Too Heavy

Technicians scanning for dust on the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Dark Matter Detector. Credit: LZ Experiment

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

January 16, 2025January 11, 2025 by Paul M. Sutter

Space Itself May Have Created Galaxies

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

January 16, 2025January 11, 2025 by Paul M. Sutter

A Flexible, Adaptable Space Metamaterial

An illustration of the Gateway’s Power and Propulsion Element and Habitation and Logistics Outpost in orbit around the Moon. Credits: NASA

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

January 16, 2025January 17, 2025 by Alan Boyle

SpaceX Catches Booster But Loses Ship in Starship Test Flight

Super Heavy booster settling into launch-tower arms — SpaceX's Starship Super Heavy booster comes in for a launch-tower catch at the Starbase launch site. (SpaceX via X)

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

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

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

January 16, 2025January 16, 2025 by Evan Gough

The Most Accurate View of the Milky Way

Gaia showed us that our galaxy's disk, the dark brown horizontal spanning from one side to the other, has a bit of a wave to it. Gaia also showed us that the Milky Way has more than two spiral arms and that they aren't as pronounced as we thought. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

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

January 16, 2025January 16, 2025 by Matt Williams

Webb and ALMA Team Up to Study Primeval Galaxy

The radio telescope array ALMA has pin-pointed the exact cosmic age of a distant JWST-identified galaxy, GHZ2/GLASS-z12, at 367 million years after the Big Bang. Image Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/T. Treu, UCLA/NAOJ/T. Bakx, Nagoya U.

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

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

January 16, 2025January 16, 2025 by Andy Tomaswick

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

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