Cosmic Log
NASA is serving up a double scoop of delicious Saturn imagery in two flavors — near-infrared and visible light. The subtle differences between the James Webb Space Telescope’s infrared view and the Hubble Space Telescope’s visible-light view can help scientists dig deeper into the workings of the ringed planet’s atmosphere.
The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy may not be as voracious as the gas-gobbling monsters that astronomers have seen farther out in the universe, but new findings from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveal that its surroundings are flaring with fireworks.
JWST’s readings in two near-infrared wavelengths have documented cosmic flares that vary in brightness and duration. Researchers say the accretion disk of hot gas surrounding the black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, throws off about five or six big flares a day, and several smaller bursts in between. The observations are detailed today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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.
They may be dwarf planets, but they’re not dead planets.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has provided scientists with evidence of geothermal activity deep within two far-out dwarf planets, Eris and Makemake.
“We see some interesting signs of hot times in cool places,” Christopher Glein, an expert in planetary geochemistry at the Southwest Research Institute, said this week in a news release. Glein is the lead author of a study analyzing the JWST findings that was recently published by the journal Icarus.
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 …
Readings from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope confirm the presence of carbon-based molecules including methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a distant planet known as K2-18 b — which supports previous suggestions that it might be the kind of ocean-covered world capable of harboring marine life.
K2-18 b, which was first detected in 2015 using data from NASA’s now-retired Kepler space telescope, lies in the habitable zone of a star system that’s about 120 light-years away in the constellation Leo. It’s about 8.6 times as massive as Earth, and astronomers regard it as a sub-Neptune — a type of planet that doesn’t exist in our solar system.
Since its initial detection, astrobiologists have been interested in the world’s potential for habitability. They suspected it might be what’s called a Hycean planet — a type of world that’s massive enough to hold onto a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a globe-spanning sea. The evidence has been piling up: In 2019, researchers reported the chemical signature of water vapor and clouds in K2-18 b’s atmosphere.
The fact that JWST detected an abundance of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2), along with a shortage of ammonia (NH3), is consistent with the atmospheric modeling for Hycean planets.
After a quarter-century of development, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is a smashing success. But senior project scientist John Mather, a Nobel-winning physicist who’s played a key role in the $10 billion project since the beginning, still sees some room for improvement.
Mather looked back at what went right during JWST’s creation, as well as what could be done better the next time around, during a lecture delivered today at the American Astronomical Society’s winter meeting in Seattle.
The seeds for JWST were planted way back in 1989, a year before the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. Mather said the scientists who were planning for what was initially known as the Next Generation Space Telescope took a lesson from the problems that plagued Hubble — problems that required an on-orbit vision correction.
“No. 1 lesson from Hubble program was, figure out how you’re going to do this before you do it, and make sure the technologies are mature,” he said.
The JWST team designed a segmented mirror that could be folded up for launch, and then unfolded in space to create a 21-foot-wide reflective surface. An even wider sunshade blocked out the sun’s glare as the telescope made its observations from a vantage point a million miles from Earth.
Mather cycled through the new space telescope’s greatest hits — including a deep-field view with a gravitational-lensing galaxy cluster that brought even more distant objects into focus. “There is actually a single star which is magnified enough that you can recognize it in the image,” Mather said. “When we talked about this in the beginning, I thought the odds of this happening are too small. … I am completely stunned with this result.”
It’s not yet clear whether the Seahawks will be in the Super Bowl, but Seattle is in the spotlight this week for the “Super Bowl of Astronomy” — and there’s already an obvious choice for MVP.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is taking center stage at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which has drawn more than 3,400 masked-up registrants to the Seattle Convention Center to share astronomical research and figure out their next moves on the final frontier.
The twice-a-year AAS meetings are often compared to scientific Super Bowls — although the fact that this week’s meeting came on the heels of the soccer world’s biggest event led the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab to call it the “World Cup of Astronomy and Astrophysics” instead.
This is the second post-pandemic, in-person meeting for AAS, following up on last June’s AAS 240 meeting in Pasadena, Calif. The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope was launched a little more than a year ago, but the telescope’s first full-color images and science data weren’t released until July — a month after AAS 240. That makes this week’s gathering something of a coming-out party for JWST.
Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who serves as JWST’s operations project scientist, said there’s “nothing but good news” about the telescope’s performance. “The science requirements are met or exceeded across the board,” she said during a plenary lecture. “It’s just all so gorgeous.”
A few years from now, we just might look back at 2022 as Year One for a new age in aerospace: It was the year when NASA’s next-generation space telescope delivered the goods, when NASA’s moon rocket aced its first flight test, and when an all-electric passenger plane built from the ground up took to the skies.
I’ve been rounding up the top stories in space on an annual basis for 25 years now (starting with the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997), and 2022 ranks among the biggest years when it comes to opening up new frontiers on the final frontier. The best thing about these frontier-opening stories — especially the James Webb Space Telescope and the Artemis moon program — is that the best is yet to come.
Check out my top-five list for the big stories of the past year, plus five aerospace trends to watch in the year ahead.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Side-by-side pictures from NASA’s 32-year-old Hubble Space Telescope and the brand-new James Webb Space Telescope may draw oohs and ahhs, but they don’t give you a full sense of just how much more astronomers are getting from the new kid on the cosmic block.
Fortunately, new tools for data visualization can get you closer to the sense of wonder those astronomers are feeling.
“The public is just presented with these beautiful pictures, and they think, ‘Oh, wow, that’s great,’” says Harvard astronomer Alyssa Goodman. “But in my opinion, they could learn a lot more from these images.”
Goodman laid out strategies for getting a better appreciation of JWST — and a better appreciation of the technologies that are transforming modern astronomy — this week at the ScienceWriters 2022 conference in Memphis.