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Category: Astronomy

The Webb Telescope is just getting started

The Webb Telescope is just getting started

The New York Times reports: So far it’s been eye candy from heaven: The black vastness of space teeming with enigmatic, unfathomably distant blobs of light. Ghostly portraits of Neptune, Jupiter and other neighbors we thought we knew already. Nebulas and galaxies made visible by the penetrating infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope, named for James Webb, the NASA administrator during the buildup to the Apollo moon landings, is a joint project of NASA, the European…

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Asymmetry detected in the distribution of galaxies

Asymmetry detected in the distribution of galaxies

Katie McCormick writes: Physicists believe they have detected a striking asymmetry in the arrangements of galaxies in the sky. If confirmed, the finding would point to features of the unknown fundamental laws that operated during the Big Bang. “If this result is real, someone’s going to get a Nobel Prize,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the analysis. As if playing a cosmic game of Connect the Dots, the researchers drew lines between…

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Why this universe is more likely than any other

Why this universe is more likely than any other

Charlie Wood writes: Cosmologists have spent decades striving to understand why our universe is so stunningly vanilla. Not only is it smooth and flat as far as we can see, but it’s also expanding at an ever-so-slowly increasing pace, when naïve calculations suggest that — coming out of the Big Bang — space should have become crumpled up by gravity and blasted apart by repulsive dark energy. To explain the cosmos’s flatness, physicists have added a dramatic opening chapter to…

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Should we really be messing with asteroid orbits?

Should we really be messing with asteroid orbits?

Caleb Scharf writes: Things go bump in the cosmic night all the time. Rocky objects collide in planetary systems across our galaxy, providing astute astronomers with telltale signatures of warmly glowing dust from these grinding impacts. Stellar remnants like neutron stars can crash together unleashing bursts of searing gamma-rays, and even black holes can collide and coalesce in events marked by the gargantuan ringing of spacetime as energy ripples outward in gravitational waves. On Sept. 26, 2022, another particularly novel…

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NASA to crash $330m spacecraft into asteroid to see if impact can alter course

NASA to crash $330m spacecraft into asteroid to see if impact can alter course

The Guardian reports: In a few weeks, Nasa controllers will deliberately crash their $330m Dart robot spacecraft into an asteroid. The half-tonne probe will be travelling at more than four miles a second when it strikes its target, Dimorphos, and will be destroyed. The aim of this kamikaze science mission is straightforward: space engineers want to learn how to deflect asteroids in case one is ever discovered on a collision course with Earth. Observations of Dart’s impact on Dimorphos’s orbit…

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Jupiter glows in pictures from Webb telescope

Jupiter glows in pictures from Webb telescope

Live Science reports: Jupiter glows with polar lights and shimmering clouds in new imagery from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). NASA released the sharp new pictures Monday (Aug. 22). The images are composites from several different wavelengths of light. In some of the new images, two of the planet’s moons, Amalthea and Adrastea, sparkle in the gas giant’s orbit, and Jupiter’s faint rings glow like a halo. At the planet’s North and South poles, the northern and southern lights…

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Dark energy may come from giant cosmic voids

Dark energy may come from giant cosmic voids

Paul Sutter writes: Gigantic deserts of almost complete nothingness that make up most of the universe may be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up, new research suggests. That means these vast tracts of nothingness could explain dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to be flinging the universe apart. Zoom all the way out from the solar system and the Milky Way galaxy, and an interesting pattern emerges: the cosmic web, the largest pattern found in nature….

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Webb telescope reveals unpredicted bounty of bright galaxies in early universe

Webb telescope reveals unpredicted bounty of bright galaxies in early universe

Science reports: The James Webb Space Telescope has only been watching the sky for a few weeks, and it has already delivered a startling finding: tens, hundreds, maybe even 1000 times more bright galaxies in the early universe than astronomers anticipated. “No one was expecting anything like this,” says Michael Boylan-Kolchin of the University of Texas, Austin. “Galaxies are exploding out of the woodwork,” says Rachel Somerville of the Flatiron Institute. Galaxy formation models may now need a revision, as…

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Four revelations from the Webb telescope about distant galaxies

Four revelations from the Webb telescope about distant galaxies

Nature reports: NASA built its state-of-the-art James Webb Space Telescope to peer into the distant Universe and back towards the dawn of time — and it’s already doing so spectacularly. In the two weeks since Webb’s first science images and data became available for astronomers to work with, they have reported a flood of preliminary discoveries, including multiple contenders for what could be the most distant galaxy ever seen. Webb’s images reveal a wealth of galaxies glimmering in the distant…

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New theories are taking shape about how planets are made

New theories are taking shape about how planets are made

Rebecca Boyle writes: Start at the center, with the sun. Our middle-aged star may be more placid than most, but it is otherwise unremarkable. Its planets, however, are another story. First, Mercury: More charred innards than fully fledged planet, it probably lost its outer layers in a traumatic collision long ago. Next come Venus and Earth, twins in some respects, though oddly only one is fertile. Then there’s Mars, another wee world, one that, unlike Mercury, never lost layers; it…

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Looking directly towards the edge of time

Looking directly towards the edge of time

Dr Katie Mack writes: “From a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself, James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the Universe” – so went the launch narration when astronomy’s latest superpowered space explorer, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), lifted off from French Guiana on Christmas Day. Like most launch announcements, it employed a bit of poetic license to add to the drama. But now that JWST is settled into its orbit and sending back…

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Jupiter’s moon Europa may have water where life could exist, scientists suggest

Jupiter’s moon Europa may have water where life could exist, scientists suggest

The Guardian reports: Subterranean pools of salty water may be commonplace on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, according to researchers who believe the sites could be promising spots to search for signs of life beyond Earth. Evidence for the shallow pools, not far beneath the frozen surface of the Jovian moon, emerged when scientists noticed that giant parallel ridges stretching for hundreds of miles on Europa were strikingly similar to surface features discovered on the Greenland ice sheet. If the extensive ice…

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First known interstellar object on Earth, scientists say

First known interstellar object on Earth, scientists say

Motherboard reports: An object from another star system crashed into Earth in 2014, the United States Space Command (USSC) confirmed in a newly-released memo. The meteor ignited in a fireball in the skies near Papua New Guinea, the memo states, and scientists believe it possibly sprinkled interstellar debris into the South Pacific Ocean. The confirmation backs up the breakthrough discovery of the first interstellar meteor—and, retroactively, the first known interstellar object of any kind to reach our solar system—which was…

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A bright star in the right place at the right time, provides a glimpse of the cosmic dawn

A bright star in the right place at the right time, provides a glimpse of the cosmic dawn

Science Alert reports: From billions of light-years across the vast gulf of space-time, from the very dawn of the Universe, astronomers have detected the light of a single star. Its discoverers have nicknamed it Earendel, from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning “morning star”; to date, it is the most distant object of its kind ever detected, dating to just 900 million years after the Big Bang. Because Earendel’s light has traveled so far to reach us, its properties are difficult to…

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An ancient solar calendar built by an unknown civilization

An ancient solar calendar built by an unknown civilization

Carly Cassella writes: Long before the Incas rose to power in Peru and began to celebrate their sun god, a little known civilization was building the earliest known astronomical observatory in the Americas. While not quite as old as sites like Stonehenge, these ancient ruins, known as Chankillo, are considered a “masterpiece of human creative genius“, holding unique features not seen anywhere else in the world. Based in the coastal desert of Peru, the archaeological site famously contains a row…

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Massive black holes shown to act like quantum particles

Massive black holes shown to act like quantum particles

Charlie Wood writes: When two black holes collide, the titanic crash ripples out through the very fabric of the cosmos. Physicists have used Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity to predict the rough contours of these gravitational waves as they pass through Earth, and wave after wave has been confirmed by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors. But physicists are starting to flounder as they attempt to use Einstein’s thorny equations to extract ultra-precise shapes of all possible reverberations. These currently…

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