Tag: Astronomy

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Cosmic Space

Webb Telescope expands the frontier of early galaxies

JWST image highlighting galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0
An infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam instrument reveals the galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0 as it existed 290 million years after the big bang. (Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STSci / B. Robertson, UCSC / B. Johnson, CfA / S. Tacchella, Cambridge / P. Cargile, CfA)

Astronomers say infrared readings from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have revealed a new record-holder for the most distant galaxy observed in the universe — a smudge of stars whose light started its journey a mere 290 million years after the big bang.

The galaxy, known as JADES-GS-z14-0, dethroned the previous champion, which scientists detected in 2022. JADES-GS-z14-0 is thought to be about 40 million years older, based on a detailed analysis of spectroscopic data. Because the age of the universe is estimated at 13.8 billion years, the light from the galaxy took more than 13.5 billion years to reach JWST’s detectors.

Scientists also detected another galaxy, designated JADES-GS-z14-1, that was nearly as distant. And there are likely to be even more distant galaxies still waiting to be discovered.

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Universe Today

How did Pluto get its heart? Scientists suggest an answer

New Horizons view of Pluto
The heart-shaped region of Pluto's surface was formed at least in part by a cataclysmic "splat," scientists say. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

The most recognizable feature on Pluto is its “heart,” a relatively bright valentine-shaped area known as Tombaugh Regio. How that heart got started is one of the dwarf planet’s deepest mysteries — but now researchers say they’ve come up with the most likely scenario, involving a primordial collision with a planetary body that was a little more than 400 miles wide.

The scientific term for what happened, according to a study published today in Nature Astronomy, is “splat.”

Astronomers from the University of Bern in Switzerland and the University of Arizona looked for computer simulations that produced dynamical results similar to what’s seen in data from NASA’s New Horizons probe. They found a set of simulations that made for a close match, but also ran counter to previous suggestions that Pluto harbors a deep subsurface ocean. They said their scenario doesn’t depend on the existence of a deep ocean — which could lead scientists to rewrite the history of Pluto’s geological evolution.

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Universe Today

Scientists confirm that our galaxy’s ‘wave’ is waving

Radcliffe Wave model
This illustration shows how the Radcliffe Wave moves through the backyard of our sun (shown as a yellow dot). The white line represents the wave's current shape and motion. Magenta and green lines show how the wave is expected to move over time. (Credit: Ralf Konietzka, Alyssa Goodman and WorldWide Telescope via CfA)

Astronomers say there’s a wave rippling through our galactic neighborhood that’s playing a part in the birth and death of stars — and perhaps in Earth’s history as well.

The cosmic ripple, known as the Radcliffe Wave, was identified in astronomical data four years ago — but in a follow-up study published today in the journal Nature, a research team lays out fresh evidence that the wave is actually waving, like the wave that fans in a sports stadium create by taking turns standing up and sitting down.

“Similar to how fans in a stadium are being pulled back to their seats by the Earth’s gravity, the Radcliffe Wave oscillates due to the gravity of the Milky Way,” study lead author Ralf Konietzka, a researcher at Harvard and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, or CfA, said in a news release.

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Cosmic Space

Probes put planets on parade, from Mars to Uranus

JWST infrared image of Uranus
An infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows Uranus and its rings. (NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / Andrea Luck CC BY)

Fresh imagery from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals the rings of Uranus in all their infrared glory.

The newly released view of the seventh rock from the sun is just one of the stunning shots of extraterrestrial scenes recently sent back by interplanetary probes. The past few days have also brought noteworthy images of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter lying dormant on Mars and volcanoes flaring up on a moon of Jupiter.

But wait … there’s more: Research based on readings from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is turning a spotlight on Mimas, a Saturnian moon that looks like the Death Star from the Star Wars movie. Could Mimas’ icy crust conceal a watery ocean? Stay tuned …

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GeekWire

NASA boosts far-out radio dishes and other wild ideas

Concept illustrations from NIAC Phase I projects
This collage highlights several concepts proposed by 2024 NIAC Phase I awardees. (NASA Illustration)

A proposal to build a far-flung set of radio antennas to measure the cosmos is one of 13 far-out concepts to receive seed funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program.

University of Washington astronomer Matthew McQuinn will receive a grant of $175,000 to flesh out his plan for a solar-system-scale interferometer capable of determining cosmological distances with precision that’s an order of magnitude beyond what’s possible today.

The plan would require building and launching a constellation of four radio dishes, each measuring at least several meters (yards) in diameter. The detectors would have to be widely separated, far out in deep space. How far out? “The science gets interesting when they are more than about 10 AU apart,” McQuinn told me in an email. That distance of 10 AU is just a bit less than the width of Jupiter’s orbit.

The detectors would be on the lookout for fast radio bursts that flash from beyond our Milky Way galaxy. By measuring the difference in arrival times at the different detectors, scientists could calculate the distance to the source of a burst with sub-percent precision. “It’s kind of like GPS localizations, but applied to fast radio bursts,” McQuinn explained.

In his proposal, McQuinn says such measurements could lead to new discoveries in fields ranging from gravitational-wave detection to the study of dark matter. McQuinn and a UW colleague, Kyle Boone, lay out the details in a research paper that was published last year in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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GeekWire

Asteroid-hunting algorithm passes a tricky test

Bird's eye view showing orbital paths for Earth and asteroid 2022 SF289 at closest approach
A bird’s-eye view of the solar system shows the orbital path for Earth in blue and the projected orbit for the asteroid known as 2022 SF289 at its closest approach in green. Orbits of Venus and Mars are shown in orange and red. (Credit: Joachim Moeyens / UW / OpenSpace)

A new technique for finding potentially hazardous asteroids before they find us has chalked up its first success.

In this case, the asteroid isn’t expected to threaten Earth anytime in the foreseeable future. But the fact that the technique — which uses a new computer algorithm called HelioLinc3D — actually works comes as a confidence boost as astronomers get set to step up the asteroid hunt with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.

The University of Washington’s DiRAC Institute will play a leading role in analyzing the data from the Rubin Observatory, and HelioLinc3D is meant to make the job easier.

It’ll be another couple of years before the Rubin Observatory starts surveying the skies, but researchers put HelioLinc3D to the test by feeding it data from the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS.

During the July 18 test run, the algorithm combined fragments of ATLAS data from four nights of observations to identify an asteroid that had been previously missed.

The asteroid, designated 2022 SF289 and described in a Minor Planet Electronic Circular, is thought to be about 600 feet wide. That’s wide enough to cause widespread destruction on Earth in the event of an impact. The good news is that projections of 2022 SF289’s orbital path show it staying 140,000 miles away from Earth at its closest. Nevertheless, the space rock fits NASA’s definition of a potentially hazardous asteroid because of its estimated size and the fact that it can come within 5 million miles of our planet.

UW researcher Ari Heinze, the principal developer of HelioLinc3D, said the algorithm’s success should carry over to the Rubin Observatory’s future database.

“By demonstrating the real-world effectiveness of the software that Rubin will use to look for thousands of yet-unknown potentially hazardous asteroids, the discovery of 2022 SF289 makes us all safer,” Heinze said in a news release.

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Scientists find evidence of a gravitational wave ‘hum’

Illustration: Ripples in spacetime caused by gravitational waves
Scientists monitor how ripples in spacetime affect the timing of signals from pulsars. (Credit: Aurore Simonnet for NANOGrav Collaboration)

Astrophysicists have found the best evidence yet for a low-frequency “hum” of gravitational waves rippling through the cosmos, based on 15 years’ worth of ultra-precise measurements checking the timing of radio pulses from distant stars.

The evidence, newly published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, comes from several teams of researchers working in the U.S. and Canada as well as Europe, India, Australia and China.

The teams monitored radio emissions from a total of 115 ultra-dense, spinning stars known as pulsars. Nearly 70 of those pulsars were observed by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, known as NANOGrav.

“This is key evidence for gravitational waves at very low frequencies,” Vanderbilt University’s Stephen Taylor, who co-led the search and is the current chair of the NANOGrav Collaboration, said today in a news release. “After years of work, NANOGrav is opening an entirely new window on the gravitational-wave universe.”

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Universe Today

AI produces a sharper image of M87’s black hole

Three views of M87's black hole
Three views of a black hole, from left to right: Event Horizon Telescope's original image, PRIMO reconstruction and image blurred to match EHT's resolution. (Credit: Lia Medeiros et al. / ApJL, 2023)

Astronomers have used machine learning to sharpen up the Event Horizon Telescope’s first picture of a black hole — an exercise that demonstrates the value of artificial intelligence for fine-tuning cosmic observations.

The image should guide scientists as they test their hypotheses about the behavior of black holes, and about the gravitational rules of the road under extreme conditions.

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Study documents satellite interference with Hubble

Satellite streaks on Hubble images
Satellite streaks cross these images from the Hubble Space Telescope. (NASA / ESA / STScI / Kruk et al. / Nature)

An analysis of more than 100,000 images from the Hubble Space Telescope, conducted with the aid of artificial intelligence and hundreds of human volunteers, confirms that satellites including SpaceX’s Starlink spacecraft are increasingly interfering with astronomical observations.

The images used in the study, which is the subject of a paper published today by Nature Astronomy, largely predate the deployment of Starlink broadband internet satellites. But the trend line suggests that more and more satellites will cause more and more interference.

“This is an attempt to define a baseline before the swarm of artificial satellites for future follow-up studies of the impact of megaconstellations on space-based astronomy,” said the research team, which is led by Sandor Kruk of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

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Fireball lights up Seattle’s skies as webcams watch

Fireball blazing in skies over Seattle
Corey Clarke’s webcam captured the flash of a meteor. (Courtesy of Corey Clarke via Twitter)

It’s cool to see a fireball — but even cooler to capture it on video. At least that’s the way Seattle engineer/photographer Corey Clarke sees it.

Clarke’s webcam happened to be pointing in the right direction to record the fireball’s flash through wispy clouds at around 11 p.m. PT Monday night. His day job at ServiceNow focuses on hardware reliability, but he’s also a photographer who specializes in wildlife shots, landscapes and views of the night sky.

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