Space and astronomy news
Note: This story has been updated with new images.
It’s Saturn’s turn.
The JWST is aiming its powerful, gold-coated, segmented beryllium mirror at our Solar System’s second-largest, and perhaps most striking, planet. So far, we’ve only got a sneak preview of the raw images without any processing or scientific commentary.
But they’re a start.
Continue reading “Here Come JWST’s First Images of Saturn”
In a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of astronomers used the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawai?i Island to identify exoplanet, AF Lep b, which is three times the mass of Jupiter orbiting a Sun-sized star located approximately 87.5 light-years from Earth. What makes this discovery unique is AF Lep b is the first exoplanet discovered using a method called astrometry, which involves measuring unexpected, miniscule changes in the position of a star relative to nearby stars, which could indicate another object, an exoplanet, is causing gravitational tugs on its parent star.
Continue reading “A Direct Image of a Planet That’s Just Like Jupiter, Only Younger”
Concern over global light pollution is growing. Astronomers are noticing its growing effect on astronomical observations, just as predicted in prior decades. Our artificial light, much of which is not strictly necessary, is interfering with our science.
But there’s more than just scientific progress at stake. Can humanity afford to block out the opportunities for wonder, awe, and contemplation that the night sky provides?
Continue reading “Light Pollution is Out of Control”
After almost two decades of ups and downs, Virgin Galactic sent its first customers to the edge of space aboard its VSS Unity rocket plane.
Today’s 72-minute-long Galactic 01 flight, which took three Italians on a suborbital research mission, marked the start of the company’s commercial operations at Spaceport America in New Mexico.
Continue reading “Virgin Galactic Flies Italians to Edge of Space for Its First Commercial Trip”
Two of the most important telescopes being constructed at the moment are Vera C. Rubin and Nancy Grace Roman. Each has the capability of transforming our understanding of the universe, but as a recent paper on the arxiv shows, they will be even more transformative when they work together.
Continue reading “Nancy Grace Roman and Vera Rubin Will be the Perfect Astronomical Partnership”
It wasn’t long after the Big Bang that early galaxies began changing the Universe. Less than a billion years later, they had already put on a lot of weight. In particular, their central supermassive black holes were behemoths. New images from JWST show two massive galaxies as they appeared less than a billion years after the universe began.
Continue reading “860 Million-Year-Old Quasar Had Already Amassed 1.4 Billion Times the Mass of the Sun”
In the near future, NASA and other space agencies plan to send crews beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to perform long-duration missions on the Moon and Mars. To meet this challenge, NASA is developing life support systems that will sustain crew members without the need for resupply missions from Earth. These systems must be regenerative and closed-loop in nature, meaning they will recycle consumables like food, air, and water without zero waste. Currently, crews aboard the International Space Station (ISS) rely on an Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) to meet their needs.
This system recycles air aboard the station by passing it through filters that scrub excess carbon dioxide produced by the crew’s exhalations. Meanwhile, the system uses advanced dehumidifiers to capture moisture from the crew’s exhalation and perspiration and sends this to the Water Purification Assembly (WPA). Another subsystem, called Urine Processor Assembly (UPA), recovers and distills water from astronaut urine. To boost the WPA’s efficiency, the crew integrated a new component called the Brine Processor Assembly (BPA), which recently passed an important milestone.
Continue reading “Good News! Astronauts are Drinking Almost all of Their Own Urine”
We’ve become familiar with LIGO/VIRGO’s detections of colliding black holes and neutron stars that create gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time. However, the mergers between supermassive black holes – billions of times the mass of the Sun — generate gravitational waves too long to register with these instruments.
But now, after decades of careful observations, astronomers around the world using a different type of gravitational wave detection method have finally gathered enough data to measure what is essentially a gravitational wave background hum of the Universe, mostly from supermassive black holes spiraling toward collision.
Continue reading “After Decades of Observations, Astronomers have Finally Sensed the Pervasive Background Hum of Merging Supermassive Black Holes”
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA-JPL) are busy keeping the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter functioning in Jezero Crater on Mars while these robotic explorers continue the search for ancient microbial life on the Red Planet. But some of those same engineers have also been busy working with LEGO designers on new one-tenth-scale LEGO Technic buildable models of these very same robotic explorers with the goal of inspiring the next generation of NASA scientists and engineers.
Continue reading “NASA and LEGO Continue Brick-Solid Partnership with Perseverance and Ingenuity LEGO Models”
We say it all the time here at UT – getting to space is hard. It’s even more hard to do new and interesting things in space. And when projects get hard, that usually means they cost more money. That is certainly the case for one of the most anticipated missions on NASA’s current docket – the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. And it’s not looking like it’s going to get any easier anytime soon.
Continue reading “The Mars Sample Return Mission is Starting to Look Expensive”