Universe Today

On Thursday, January 16th, at 02:03 AM EST, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket took off on its maiden flight from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This was a momentous event for the company, as the two-stage heavy-lift rocket has been in development for many years, features a partially reusable design, and is vital to Bezos’ plan of “building a road to space.” While the company failed to retrieve the first-stage booster during the flight test, the rocket made it to orbit and successfully deployed its payload -the Blue Ring Pathfinder – to orbit (which has since begun gathering data).

According to the most recent statement by Blue Origin, the second stage reached its final orbit following two successful burns of its two BE-3U engines. The successful launch of NG-1 means that Blue Origin can now launch payloads to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), a huge milestone for the commercial space company. “I’m incredibly proud New Glenn achieved orbit on its first attempt,” said Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp in a company statement. “We knew landing our booster, So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance, on the first try was an ambitious goal. We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring. Thank you to all of Team Blue for this incredible milestone.”  

The rocket is named in honor of NASA astronaut John Glenn, a member of the Mercury 7 and the first American astronaut to orbit Earth as part of the Liberty Bell 7 mission on July 21st, 1961. This is in keeping with Blue Origin’s history of naming their launch vehicles after famous astronauts, such as the New Shepard rocket. This single-stage suborbital launch vehicle is named in honor of Alan Shepard, the first American astronaut to go to space as part of the Freedom 7 mission on May 5th, 1961.

Unlike the New Shepard, a fully reusable vehicle used primarily for space tourism and technology demonstrations and experiments, the New Glenn has a reusable first stage designed to land at sea on a barge named Jacklyn, or Landing Platform Vessel 1 (LPV1). While the second stage is not currently reusable, Blue Origin has been working on a reusable second stage (through Project Jarvis) since 2021. While development began on the New Glenn in 2013, the rocket has been stuck in “development hell” since 2016, shortly after it was first announced.

As a result, Blue Origin began lagging behind its main competitor (SpaceX) and missed out on several billion dollars worth of contracts. This included the company’s failure to secure a National Security Space Launch (NSSL) procurement contract and the U.S. Space Force’s termination of their launch technology partnership in late 2020. In 2021, the ongoing delay led to Jeff Bezos announcing that he would step down as CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to take the helm at Blue Origin. By February 2024, the first fully-developed New Glenn rocket was unveiled at Launch Complex 36.

This mission not only validated the launch vehicle that is vital to the company’s future plans in space. It also served as the first of several demonstrations required to be certified for use by the National Security Space Launch program. “The success of the NG-1 mission marks a new chapter for launch operations at the Eastern Range, redefining commercial-military collaboration to maintain SLD 45’s position as the world’s premier gateway to space,” wrote Airman 1st Class Collin Wesson of the U.S. Space Force (USSF) Space Launch Delta 45 (SLD 45) Public Affairs, shortly after the launch.

These plans include the launch of Amazon’s proposed constellation of internet satellites (Project Kuiper) and the creation of the Orbital Reef – a proposed commercial space station under development by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. They have also secured a contract with NASA to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission, two satellites that will study how solar wind interacts with Mars’ magnetic environment and drives atmospheric escape. NASA has also contracted with Blue Origin to provide payload and crewed launch services for the Artemis Program.

Artist’s concept of the Blue Moon Mk. II lander. Credit: Blue Origin

This includes the cargo lander Blue Moon Mark 1 and the Mark 2 that will transport the Artemis V astronauts to the lunar surface. This flight and those that will follow place Blue Origin among other commercial space companies poised to break up the near-monopoly SpaceX has enjoyed for over a decade. Said Jarrett Jones, the Senior VP for Blue Origin’s New Glenn:

“Today marks a new era for Blue Origin and for commercial space. We’re focused on ramping our launch cadence and manufacturing rates. My heartfelt thanks to everyone at Blue Origin for the tremendous amount of work in making today’s success possible, and to our customers and the space community for their continuous support. We felt that immensely today.” 

Further Reading: Blue Origin

The post New Glenn Reaches Orbit, but Doesn't Recover the Booster appeared first on Universe Today.

Six or seven billion years ago, most stars formed in super star clusters. That type of star formation has largely died out now. Astronomers know of two of these SSCs in the modern Milky Way and one in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), and all three of them are millions of years old.

New JWST observations have found another SSC forming in the LMC, and it’s only 100,000 years old. What can astronomers learn from it?

SSCs are responsible for a lot of star formation, but billions of years have passed since their heyday. Finding a young one in a galaxy so close to us is a boon for astronomers. It gives them an opportunity to wind back the clock and see how SSCs are born.

New research published in The Astrophysical Journal presents the new findings. It’s titled “JWST Mid-infrared Spectroscopy Resolves Gas, Dust, and Ice in Young Stellar Objects in the Large Magellanic Cloud.” The lead author is Omnarayani (Isha) Nayak from the Space Telescope Science Institute and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

At about 160,000 light-years away, the LMC is close in terms of galactic neighbours. It’s also face-on from our vantage point, making it easier to study. The N79 region in the LMC is a massive star-forming nebula about 1600 light-years across. The JWST used its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and found 97 new young stellar objects (YSOs) in N79, where the newly discovered super star cluster, H72.97-69.39, is located.

This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope shows N79, a region of interstellar atomic hydrogen that is ionized and is captured here by Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). N79 is a massive star-forming complex spanning roughly 1630 light-years in the generally unexplored southwest region of the LMC. At the longer wavelengths of light captured by MIRI, Webb’s view of N79 showcases the region’s glowing gas and dust. Star-forming regions such as this are of interest to astronomers because their chemical composition is similar to that of the gigantic star-forming regions observed when the Universe was only a few billion years old, and star formation was at its peak. Image Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, M. Meixner CC BY 4.0 INT

Stellar metallicity increases over time as generations of stars are born and die. The LMC’s metallic abundance is only half that of our Solar System, meaning the conditions in the new SSC are similar to when stars formed billions of years ago in the early Universe. This is another of those situations in astronomy where studying a particular object or region is akin to looking into the past.

“Studying YSOs in the LMC gives astronomers a front-row seat to witness the birth of stars in a nearby galaxy. For the first time, we can observe individual low-mass protostars similar to the Sun forming in small clusters—outside of our own Milky Way Galaxy,” said Isha Nayak, lead author of this research. “We can see with unprecedented detail extragalactic star formation in an environment similar to how some of the first stars formed in the universe.”

The YSOs near the SSC H72.97-69.39 (hereafter referred to as H72) are segregated by mass. The most massive YSOs are concentrated near H72, while the less massive are on the outskirts of N79. The JWST revealed that what astronomers used to think were single massive young stars are actually clusters of YSOs. These observations confirm for the first time that what appear to be individual YSOs are often small clusters of protostars.

A composite image created using JWST NIRCam and ALMA data. Light from stars is shown in yellow, while blue and purple represent the dust and gas fueling star formation. Image Credit: NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/S.Dagnello

This finding brings attention to the complex processes of early star formation. “The formation of massive stars plays a vital role in influencing the chemistry and structure of the interstellar medium (ISM),” the authors write in their published research. “Star formation takes place in clusters, with massive stars dominating the luminosity.”

One of the five young stars is over 500,000 times more luminous than the Sun. As revealed by the JWST Near InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), it’s surrounded by more than 1,550 young stars.

This Spitzer image from the new research shows the N79 region in the LMC. N79 consists of three giant molecular clouds. Spitzer data showed that each of the red circles is a massive young stellar object of at least eight solar masses. However, the JWST has revealed that three of them, with the exception of the one in N79W, aren’t individual YSOs; they’re clusters. Together, they could make up a very young super star cluster. Image Credit: Nayak et al. 2025.

Previous Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations hinted at what might contribute to the formation of SSCs. ALMA showed that colliding filaments of molecular gas at least one parsec long are in the region. These filaments could be behind H72’s formation.

This figure from previous research shows ALMA observations of the region near the super star cluster H72. Each one shows carbon monoxide in a different velocity channel. The white “x” shows the location of H72. “Scrolling through the channels it is clear there is a filament in the northeast to southwest direction and a distinct filament in the northwest to southeast direction,” the authors explain. Image Credit: Nayak et al. 2019.

This work highlights JWST’s power to resolve complex star formation locations in other galaxies. Not only did the JWST show us that what appeared to be individual YSOs are actually groups of stars, but it allowed the researchers to determine their mass accretion rates and chemical properties. The JWST’s new data gives astronomers new insights into complex chemistry, including the presence of organic molecules, dust, and ice in star-forming regions.

The post Astronomers are Watching a Newly Forming Super Star Cluster appeared first on Universe Today.

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?

Researchers have found a novel way to study two of the GMCs in the CMZ. The clouds are named “Sticks” and “Stones” and astronomers have used decades of X-ray observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory to probe the 3D structures of the pair of clouds.

University of Connecticut Physics Researcher Danya Alboslani and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Samantha Brunker are both with the Milky Way Laboratory at the University of Connecticut. They’ve produced two manuscripts presenting their new X-ray tomography method and their results. Brunker is the lead author of “3D MC I: X-ray Tomography Begins to Unravel the 3-D Structure of a Molecular Cloud in our Galaxy’s Center,” and Alboslani is the lead author of “3D MC II: X ray echoes reveal a clumpy molecular cloud in the CMZ.” Brunker and Alboslani are also co-authors on each paper. Alboslani also presented her results at the recent 245th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

When gas from elsewhere in the galaxy reaches Sgr A*, it forms an accretion ring around the SMBH. As the gas heats up, it releases X-rays. These X-ray emission are only intermittent, and in the past, some of these episodes have been very intense. The X-ray travel outward in all directions, and while we didn’t have the capability to observe them, they interacted with GMCs near the CMZ. The clouds first absorbed them the re-emitted them in a phenomenon called fluorescence.

“The cloud absorbs the X-rays that are coming from Sgr A* then re-emits X-rays in all directions. Some of these X-rays are coming towards us, and there is this very specific energy level, the 6.4 electron volt neutral iron line, that has been found to correlate with the dense parts of molecular gas,” says Alboslani. “If you imagine a black hole in the center producing these X-rays which radiate outwards and eventually interact with a molecular cloud in the CMZ, over time, it will highlight different parts of the cloud, so what we’re seeing is a scan of the cloud.”

The Central Molecular Zone; the Heart of the Milky Way. Image Credit: Henshaw / MPIA

The center of the galaxy is choked with dust that obscures our view of the region. Visible light is blocked, but the powerful X-rays emitted by Sgr A* during accretion events are visible.

Typically, astronomers only see two dimensions of objects in space. According to Battersby, their new X-Ray tomography method allows them to measure the GMCs’ third dimension. Battersby explains that while we typically only see two spatial dimensions of objects in space, the X-ray tomography method allows us to measure the third dimension of the cloud. It’s because we see the X-rays illuminate individual slices of the cloud over time. “We can use the time delay between illuminations to calculate the third spatial dimension because X-rays travel at the speed of light,” Battersby explains.

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory has been observing these X-rays for two decades, and as it observes them it sees different “slices” of the clouds, just like medical tomography. The slices are then built up into a 3D image. These are the first 3D maps of star-forming clouds in such an extreme environment.

This figure from Brunker’s paper on the “Sticks” cloud illustrates how the X-ray tomography works. Each coloured line represents a different “slice” of the cloud from a specific year. Image Credit: Brunker et al. 2025.

The X-ray tomography method has one weakness. The X-ray observations aren’t continuous, so there are gaps. There are also some structures visible in submillimeter wavelengths that aren’t seen in X-rays. To get around that, the pair of researchers used data from the ALMA and the Herschel Space Observatory to compare the structures seen in the X-ray echoes to those seen in other wavelengths. The structures that are missing in X-rays but visible in submillimeter wavelengths can also be used to constrain the duratio of X-ray flares that illuminated the clouds.

“We can estimate the sizes of the molecular structures that we do not see in the X-ray,“ says Brunker, “and from there we can place constraints on the duration of the X-ray flare by modeling what we would be able to observe for a range of flare lengths. The model that reproduced observations with similar sized ‘missing structures’ indicated that the X-ray flare couldn’t have been much longer than 4-5 months.”

This figure from Brunker’s paper shows ALMA observations, which show the presence of H2CO (formaldehyde) combined with Chandra’s X-ray observations. Blue is X-rays and pink is ALMA data. Purple is where they overlap. Each panel is from a different year. Image Credit: Brunker et al. 2025.

“The overall morphological agreement, and in particular, the association of the densest regions in both X-ray and molecular line data is striking and is the first time it has been shown on such a small scale,” says Brunker.

Detecting a third dimension of the clouds in this extreme environment could open new avenues of discovery.

“While we learn a lot about molecular clouds from data collected in 2D, the added third dimension allows for a more detailed understanding of the physics of how new stars are born,” says Battersby. “Additionally, these observations place key constraints on the global geometry of our Galaxy’s Center as well as the past flaring activity of Sgr A*, central open questions in modern astrophysics.”

When it comes to how new stars from, there are many unanswered questions. While we know turbulence in GMCs can inhibit star formation, the exact mechanism is unkown. Astronomers are also uncertain how environmental factors affect star formation. There are many others and some of them can be answered by watching how GMCs behave in extreme environments.

There are also many questions regarding Sgr A*’s X-ray flaring. Astronomers aren’t certain how factors like magnetic reconnection events near the black hole and hot spots in the accretion flow affect X-ray flaring. They also aren’t certain why X-ray flaring occurs in random intervals. That’s just a sample of unanswered questions that could be addressed by studying GMCs in the galactic centre.

If all large galaxies contain SMBHs, which seems increasingly likely, then all large galaxies have CMZs that are extreme environments. The CMZs and the SMBHs are the heart of galaxies, and astrophysicists are keen to understand the processes that play out there, and if stars are able to form there.

“We can study processes in the Milky Way’s Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) and use our findings to learn about other extreme environments. While many distant galaxies have similar environments, they are too far away to study in detail. By learning more about our own Galaxy, we also learn about these distant galaxies that cannot be resolved with today’s telescopes,” says Alboslani.

Alboslani presents her results in this video from AAS 245. Her presentation begins at the 32:40 mark.

The post Sticks and Stones: The Molecular Clouds in the Heart of the Milky Way appeared first on Universe Today.

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

Dwarf Lab’s Dwarf 3 smartscope.

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 (!)

We’ve also had the chance to use Unistellar and Vaonis units in the past, and were curious to see how the tiny Dwarf 3 would compare.

Smartscope Revolution

The specifications for the small unit are impressive:

The Dwarf 3 has two ‘eyes’: a 35mm (telephoto) and a 3.4mm wide-angle lens. The focal lengths for the two are 150mm (telephoto) and 6.7mm for the wide-angle (an effective equivalent of 737mm/45mm for the two).

The optics feature Sony IMX 678 Stravis 2 sensors, a CMOS chip with an effective 8.4x megapixel array, an upgrade from the IMX 415 used in the Dwarf 2.

Modern GoTo systems really put me out of a job…and that’s probably a good thing. I learned how to find things the ‘old way’ by starhopping and peering at a star chart under a red light. Dwarf 3 and other smartscopes use a method known as ‘plate-solving,’ looking at sections of the sky on startup and comparing them to a database versus the GPS position. The Dwarf Lab app features a digital planetarium view, to give even a novice user a common sense feel for the sky.

Dwarf 3 was spot on with pointing, and even maps out local obstructions on startup as no-go zones. Startup was quick, and the app is intuitive to use.

Using Dwarf 3 The Andromeda galaxy and satellite galaxies, as seen in the Dwarf Lab app.

You can use the planetarium sky feature with its grid overlay to manually aim the telescope at a given point in Right Ascension and Declination, handy for, say, if a new bright comet appears in the sky. Newer comets such as G3 ATLAS were in the updated database.

I’d rate the compactness of the unit and ease of use and portability for travel as a big plus. The unit only weighs 1.3 kilograms (2.8 pounds), and attaches to a standard camera tripod. Though the unit needs a stable, level site to operate, it never protested, balked or failed to deliver even when moderate vibrations were present.

Visible (VIS), Astro, and Dual band filters are built in to the optics, and the unit comes with a magnetic snap in place solar filter.

Solar viewing with the Dwarf Labs app.

The battery life for the telescope is advertised as 4-6 hours, and the unit has a generous 10000 mAh built-in battery. The Dwarf 3 also has an internal storage capacity of 128Gb (gigabytes). I used the telescope in sub-freezing January temperatures for about an hour during the Mars occultation, without a problem.

The unit will also output and support JPEG, PNG, TIFF and FITS files, though of course, larger FITS files will also take up more storage room.

The scope hooks to your phone via wifi/bluetooth, and even features an NFC ‘smart-touch’ connection capability. Though you need a wireless connection to control the telescope from your tablet or phone, the unit will work in the field as a standalone unit. That is, without a network connection.

Putting the Dwarf 3 Through Its Paces

On startup and initialization the scope gives two views: one wide and one telephoto, about 2.93x 1.65 degrees across. The Pleiades filled up the view nicely. The wide view works great as a finderscope for manually slewing to targets. The manual slew rate is variable as well.

The Pleiades (M45) with the Dwarf 3 telescope; the system easily captured some of the dusty reflection nebulae surrounding the young stars.

The telescope can be used in both terrestrial and astronomical applications. I could even envision the unit installed in a mini-‘bird house’ style observatory on a balcony or rooftop, allowing the user to sit inside and remotely observe the sky. These days, it’s rare that a new piece of tech inspires out-of-the-box thinking as to what might be possible, but the Dwarf 3 does just that.

Of course, with such a wide view, the Dwarf 3 really shines in deep-sky astrophotography. This is true even from brightly lit downtown areas, a real plus.

The Orion Nebula… imaged with the Dwarf 3 under the bright downtown lights of Bristol, Tennessee.

A sunglasses-looking filter magnetically snaps in place over both lenses for solar viewing. Like a standard rich-field refractor, the Dwarf 3 also delivers decent lunar views, but planets will appear as small dots.

Using a camera control app with Real Time Streaming Protocol capability will allow users to live stream the Dwarf 3 and record and broadcast live views. This would be handy for streaming eclipses or occultations live.

Dwarf 3: Deep-Sky Downtown Astronomy

What we like: The Dwarf 3 is very portable, and packs a lot in a small package. As I get older, I take a dim view of lugging gear outside, cobbling things together and contorting to view and tend to troubleshooting things in the dark, all for maybe an hour’s use. The Dwarf 3 is light and easy to deploy, allowing me to spend more precious time actually observing. Smartscopes also work great at public star parties, as I can simply narrate the wonders of what we’re seeing, while the GoTo system does all of the grunt work.

The Moon occults the Pleiades (a composite of two images).

What we don’t like: You have to remember to download the images before shutting down the unit… this a tiny step to remember for sure, in an otherwise outstanding product.

How does Dwarf 3 stack up against other smart telescopes out there? Well, the biggest difference is the price: at $499, it’s a fraction of the cost of most competitors out there. Increasingly, the argument that ‘yeah, but you could buy a (insert the name of a telescope/camera) for that price’ doesn’t hold up. Of course, it’s hard to beat the physics of optics in terms of resolution with smaller units. Increasingly, smaller units get around this by simply staring at faint light sources for longer, and letting deep sky images stack and build up.

Bottom line: The Dwarf 3 is definitely worth the price, either as a quick travel-scope for the seasoned observer, or a beginner scope to show users the wonders of the cosmos.

The post Review: Dwarf Lab’s New Dwarf 3 Smartscope appeared first on Universe Today.

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.

JPL is one of NASA’s most prolific centers, nestled in the hills around Pasadena, California. Employees there are responsible for missions as wide-ranging as Psyche, which will soon visit the “Queen of the asteroid belt,” and Ingenuity, the helicopter that performed the first-ever powered flight on another planet.

Despite having their eyes set on the heavens, JPL’s engineers, technicians, and administrators still have to deal with earthly matters occasionally. It receives around $2.4 billion annually in funding from NASA, representing around 10% of the agency’s budget. However, over the past years, the center has laid off almost 1,000 employees out of the approximately 6,000 that work there. Those layoffs were mainly due to budgetary constraints and difficulties with some missions they were planning, such as the struggling Mars Sample Return mission.

New report on the efforts to save JPL.
Credit – KCAL News YouTube Channel

But the LA fires, particularly one that started in nearby Eaton Canyon, brought home a much more immediate concern—a threat to the center’s physical survival. The Eaton Canyon fire, which started on the morning of January 7th in the nearby town of Altadena, expanded to over 10,000 in little more than a day.

As firefighters scrambled to contain the blaze, it began to burn developed areas, such as the northern side of Altadena itself. On January 11th, NASA sent a B200 aircraft over the area with AVIRIS-3 to capture an image of the first, which you can see in the headline of this article. If you look closely, on the left-hand side of the image, you can see three letters—JPL.

Using a very unscientific measuring technique based on the kilometer scaling provided in the picture, it looks like the first got within one single km of one of the world’s foremost propulsion research labs. Admittedly, there seemed to be a physical barrier labeled as the “Hahamongna watershed” between JPL and the fire, but given the drought that the LA region has been suffering through lately, it is dubious how effective that barrier might have been.

Wildfires cause very personal tragedies, as discussed in this story about JPL employees.
Credit – KCAL News YouTube Channel

Luckily, as of this reporting, the Eaton fire has largely been contained and is no longer expanding. So it seems that JPL has been spared, at least in this round of southern California’s seemingly never-ending cycle of fires. However, almost 5,000 structures were destroyed in nearby towns – some of them undoubtedly belonging to JPL employees. 

While the center itself might have been spared, its employees will undoubtedly be dealing with the fallout of these fires for some time to come. NASA has started a Disaster Response Coordination System, where the agency uses its Earth-monitoring know-how to support other agencies dealing with disasters on the ground. This time, though, some of its best engineers and support staff might have to deal with their own personal tragedies before being able to help the agency that employs them.

Learn More:
NASA – Eaton Fire Leaves California Landscape Charred
UT – NASA’s JPL Lays Off Another 325 People
UT – NASA’s JPL Lays Off Hundreds of Workers
UT – NASA is Keeping an Eye on InSight from Space

Lead Image:
Map of the fires showing it proximity to JPL and downtown Pasadena.
Credit – NASA

The post The Los Angeles Fires Got Extremely Close to NASA’s JPL Facility appeared first on Universe Today.

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

By now we have a vast abundance of evidence for the existence of dark matter. That’s because cosmological observations just aren’t adding up. All our measures of luminous matter fall far short of the total gravitational effects we see in galaxies, clusters, and the universe as a while.

Dark matter far outweighs the regular matter in the cosmos, but we still don’t know the identity of this mysterious particle. Because of that, it could have a wide variety of masses, anything from a billionth of the mass of the lightest known particles to mass ranges far, far heavier.

Most searches for dark matter have focused on masses roughly in the range of the heavier known particles, because several extensions to known physics predict particles like that. But those searches have thus far come up short, making physicists wonder if the dark matter might be much lighter than expected…or much heavier.

But heavier dark matter runs into some serious issues, according to a new paper appearing on the preprint server arXiv.

The problem is that we expect to dark matter to at least sometimes, rarely, interact with normal matter. In the extremely early universe, dark matter and regular matter talked to each other much more often. But as the cosmos expanded and cooled, the interactions broke down, freezing out dark matter and leaving it behind as a relic background.

Almost all models of dark matter predict that it talks to normal matter through some interaction involving the Higgs boson, the famous particle finally detected by the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. The Higgs boson is responsible for the mass of many particles.

But interactions in physics are two-way streets. Many particles acquire their mass through their interaction with the Higgs, and in turn the mass of the Higgs is modified by its interaction with the other particles. But those particles are so light that the back-reaction isn’t very strong, so usually we don’t have to worry about it.

But if the dark matter is much heavier, somewhere around ten times the mass of the heaviest known particles, then its own interactions will cause the Higgs to balloon up in mass, making it far heavier than measurements suggest.

There are possibilities to get around this restriction. The dark matter might not interact with regular particles at all, or through some exotic mechanism that doesn’t involve the Higgs. But those models are few are far between, and require a lot of fine-tuning and extra steps.

This means that the dark matter, whatever it is, might just be an ultra-light particle, rather than an ultra-heavy one.

The post Dark Matter Can’t Be Too Heavy appeared first on Universe Today.

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

Cosmologists strongly suspect that the extremely early universe underwent a period of exceptionally rapid expansion. Known as inflation, this event expanded the universe by a factor of at least 10^60 in less than a second. Powering this event was a new ingredient in the cosmos known as the inflaton, a strange quantum field that ramped up, drove inflation, and then faded away.

Inflation didn’t just make the universe big. It also laid down the seeds of the first structures. It did so by taking the quantum foam, the subatomic fluctuations in spacetime itself, and expanding that along with everything else. Slowly over time those fluctuations grew, and hundreds of millions of years later they became the first stars and galaxies, ultimately leading to the largest structure in the universe, the cosmic web.

But mysteries remain. We do not know the identity of the inflaton, or what powered it, or why it turned off when it did. And we have no conclusive evidence that inflation actually happened.

So researchers are always looking for alternatives, especially ones that don’t invoke some new and mysterious ingredient. In a recent paper, a team of astrophysicists describe a model where inflation happens, leading to the large-scale structure of the universe, all without an inflaton.

The model described by the researchers is set in the backdrop of an expanding universe that is accelerating in its expansion, just like the modern-day universe is. In that expanding universe, the quantum foam releases gravitational waves. Those ripples in space spread outwards, colliding with each other and amplifying themselves.

Gravitational waves usually can’t create structures on their own, but the researchers found that in certain special cases the gravitational waves can amplify each other in just the right way. When that happens, the imprints they make in space are nearly the same at a wide variety of length scales.

This is precisely what cosmologists observe in the cosmic microwave background, the leftover light from the early universe. This radiation contains a faint impression of the echoes of inflation, and it shows that whatever set the seeds of structure, it had to have that kind of pattern.

There are slight differences between the kinds of structures generated in this inflation-without-inflaton scenario and traditional inflation. In this first paper, the researchers did not yet calculate how strong those differences are, but an important next step is to explore the observational consequences of this model and see if it’s worth investigating further.

The post Space Itself May Have Created Galaxies appeared first on Universe Today.

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.

Metamaterials are a hot topic in engineering. These are materials inspired from biological systems. Many living structures start from simple, repeatable patterns that then grow into large, complex structures. The resulting structures can then have properties that the small subcomponents don’t. For example, individual bone cells or coral polyp skeletons aren’t very strong, but when they work together they can support huge animals or gigantic underwater colonies.

One promising kind of metamaterial is known as a Totimorphic lattice. This lattice starts from a triangular shaped structure. On one side is a fixed beam with a ball joint in the center. An arm attaches to that ball joint, and the other end of the arm is attached to the ends of the fixed beam with two springs. Many of these shapes attached together can morph into a wide variety of shapes and structures, all with very minimal input, giving the Totimorphic lattice incredible flexibility.

In a recent paper, scientists with the European Space Agency’s Advanced Concepts Team found a way to reconfigure Totimorphic lattices without having them tangle up on themselves. They discovered this using a series of computer simulations, creating an optimization problem for the algorithm to solve. With the algorithm in hand, they could then take any configuration of the lattice and change it to another in an optimal, efficient way.

The researchers showed off their technique with two examples. The first was a simple habitat structure that could change its shape and stiffness, which could allow future astronauts to deploy the same kind of metamaterial to build a variety of structures, and reconfigure them as mission needs changed.

The second example was a flexible space telescope that could change its focal length by adapting the curvature of its lens. This would enable a single launch, with a single vehicle, to serve a variety of observing needs.

As of right now, this is all hypothetical. Totimorphic lattices don’t exist in practice, only as curious mathematical objects. But this research is crucial for advancing humanity into space. The cost and difficulty of launching materials into space mean that we need flexible, adaptable structures that are cheap to launch and easy to deploy.

This research is yet another example of how we can draw inspiration from nature, in this case investigating the surprising properties of metamaterials, to bring ourselves into a future in space.

The post A Flexible, Adaptable Space Metamaterial appeared first on Universe Today.

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.”

Today’s test marked the first use of an upper stage that was upgraded with a redesign of the avionics, the propulsion system and the forward control flaps. Ship 33’s heat shield featured next-generation protective tiles as well as a backup layer of heat-resistant material. SpaceX had removed some of the tiles for this flight as a stress test for the heat shield.

During the webcast, an onscreen graphic suggested that Ship experienced engine problems during its ascent. “We saw engines dropping out on telemetry,” launch commentator Dan Huot said.

In a mission recap, SpaceX said initial data indicated that “a fire developed in the aft section of the ship.”

SpaceX founder Elon Musk said preliminary indications were that there was “an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity.”

“Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area,” Musk wrote In a posting to X. “Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.”

After Ship’s breakup, eyewitnesses posted videos showing a glittering hail of debris falling to Earth. Reuters reported that at least 20 commercial aircraft had to divert to different airports or alter their course to dodge the debris.

In response to an emailed inquiry, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was aware of the anomaly that occurred during today’s flight test and would be assessing the operation. “The FAA briefly slowed and diverted aircraft around the area where space vehicle debris was falling,” the agency said via email. “Normal operations have resumed.”

Just saw the most insane #spacedebris #meteorshower right now in Turks and Caicos ?@elonmusk? what is it?? pic.twitter.com/a7f4MbEB8Q

— Dean Olson (@deankolson87) January 16, 2025

A view of Starship as seen from an airplane ?pic.twitter.com/MfmavSCKUa

— Jenny Hautmann (@JennyHPhoto) January 17, 2025

If Ship had made it to space, it would have deployed 10 Starlink simulators that were about the same size and weight as SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellites. This was meant to test the procedure that SpaceX plans to use to put scores of Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit during a single Starship mission.

At the end of the flight test, Ship would have made a controlled re-entry and splashdown into the Indian Ocean.

Starship is the world’s most powerful launch system, with the booster’s 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines providing liftoff thrust of 16.7 million pounds. That’s more than twice the thrust of the Apollo-era Saturn V rocket, and almost twice the thrust of NASA’s Space Launch System, which was first launched in 2022 for the uncrewed Artemis I moon mission.

When fully stacked, Starship stands 403 feet (123 meters) tall. The system is meant to be fully reusable. Flight tests began in 2023, and SpaceX has made gradual progress. The first successful catch of the Super Heavy booster thrilled observers last October — and like that catch, today’s catch drew cheers from SpaceX employees watching the launch.

This year, SpaceX aims to demonstrate full reuse of Super Heavy and Ship, and promises to fly “increasingly ambitious missions.” The Starship system would be used for large-scale satellite deployments — and eventually for missions beyond Earth orbit. A customized version of Starship is slated to serve as a crewed lunar landing system for NASA’s Artemis III mission, which is currently scheduled for no earlier than mid-2027.

Musk envisions sending Starships on missions to Mars, perhaps starting in 2026. “These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars,” he said last September in a posting to X.

“If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years,” Musk said. “Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years.”

Update for Jan. 17: In a statement, the FAA said it was requiring SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation into the loss of the Starship upper stage. The agency must approve SpaceX’s final report, including corrective actions, and will allow a return to flight when it determines that systems and processes related to the mishap won’t affect public safety.

“There are no reports of public injury, and the FAA is working with SpaceX and appropriate authorities to confirm reports of public property damage on Turks and Caicos,” the FAA said. “During the event, the FAA activated a Debris Response Area and briefly slowed aircraft outside the area where space vehicle debris was falling or stopped aircraft at their departure location. Several aircraft requested to divert due to low fuel levels while holding outside impacted areas.”

Meanwhile, Musk argued on X that the problems encountered during the flight were “barely a bump in the road.”

“Doesn’t change the likely date at which Mars becomes self-sufficient,” he wrote.

The post SpaceX Catches Booster But Loses Ship in Starship Test Flight appeared first on Universe Today.

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.

Currently, we’re marking the end of the Gaia mission, our best effort to understand the Milky Way. Gaia is an astrometry mission that’s built an impressive map of the Milky Way by taking three trillion observations of two billion individual objects in the galaxy, most of them stars, over an 11-year period. Measuring the same objects repeatedly means Gaia’s map is 3D and shows the proper motion of stars throughout the galaxy. Rather than a static map, it reveals the galaxy’s kinetic history and some of the changes it’s gone through.

Gaia showed us our galaxy’s turbulent history, including the streams of stars stemming from past disruptive events. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar

We’ve waited a long time for such a detailed look at our galaxy.

Radio astronomy, which gained momentum in the 1950s, helped us understand the structure of the Milky Way. Radio telescopes could see through intervening dust clouds and detect the distribution of hydrogen in the galaxy. In 1952, astronomers began the first major radio survey of the Milky Way. Astronomers theorized that the galaxy had a spiral structure, and finally, they detected the spiral arms, revealing the Milky Way’s basic structure.

In a 1958 paper, the authors wrote that “The distribution of the hydrogen evidently shows great irregularities. Nevertheless, several arms can be followed over considerable lengths.”

This figure shows the hydrogen distribution in the plane of the Milky Way’s disk. Though it appears outdated to our modern eyes and isn’t visually intuitive, it was exciting at the time. Image Credit: From “The galactic system as a spiral nebula” by Oort et al. 1958.

Astronomers also used RR Lyrae and Cepheids, two types of variable stars with known intrinsic brightnesses (standard candles), to calculate their distances. This allowed them to trace the Milky Way’s structure. Globular clusters also helped astronomers map the Milky Way.

In the 1980s, infrared telescopes like NASA’s IRAS peered through cosmic dust to help find features like the Milky Way’s central bar. Then, in 1989, the ESA’s Hipparcos mission was launched. Hipparcos was an astrometry mission and was Gaia’s predecessor. Though not nearly as precise, and though it only measured 100,000 stars, it was finally able to measure their proper motions. It revealed more details of the Milky Way and helped confirm its barred spiral form. It also provided some insights into our galaxy’s history and evolution.

But astronomers craved more detailed knowledge. Gaia was launched in 2013 to meet this need, and it’s been a total success.

Gaia is a tribute to ingenuity. We’re effectively trapped inside the Milky Way, and no spacecraft can get beyond it to capture an external view of the galaxy. Gaia has given us that view without ever leaving L2.

While many prior efforts to trace the Milky Way’s structure depended on sampling select stellar populations, Gaia precisely measured the position and motion of almost two billion stars throughout the galaxy.

Gaia’s map of the Milky Way has become iconic. This image is constructed from Gaia data that’s mapping two billion of the galaxy’s stars. It also mapped stars in the Large and Small Magellanic clouds. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC

Gaia’s work has culminated in artist impressions of the Milky Way based on its voluminous data. These impressions show that the Milky Way has multiple arms and that they’re not as prominent as we thought.

Gaia’s observations have given us a much more detailed and precise look at the Milky Way’s spiral arms. It has identified previously unknown structures in the arms, including fossil arms in the outer disk. These could be remnants of past tidal arms or distortions in the disk, or remnants of ancient interactions with other galaxies. Gaia has also found many previously unknown filamentary structures at the disk’s edge.

The Gaia mission has also allowed us to finally see our galaxy from the side. We’ve learned that the galactic disk has a slight wave to it. Astronomers think this was caused by a smaller galaxy interacting with the Milky Way. The Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal galaxy could be responsible for it.

The Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy has been orbiting the Milky Way for billions of years. According to astronomers, the three known collisions between this dwarf galaxy and the Milky Way have triggered major episodes of star formation, one of which may have given rise to our Solar System. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia

Alongside the compelling science, artists have created illustrations based on Gaia data that really hit home. The stunning side view of our galaxy is one of the most accurate views of the Milky Way we’ve ever seen.

This artist’s reconstruction of Gaia data shows the Milky Way’s central bulge, galactic disk, and outer reaches. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar

Gaia has updated our understanding of the galaxy we live in and brought its history to life. Even if it had no more to offer beyond today, it would still be an outstanding, successful mission. But even though its mission is over, we still don’t have all of its data.

Its final data release, DR5, will be available by the end of 2030.

Who knows what else the mission will show us about our home, the Milky Way galaxy.

The post The Most Accurate View of the Milky Way appeared first on Universe Today.

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.

The galaxy was first identified in July 2022 by the Grism Lens-Amplified Survey from Space (GLASS) observing program using the JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). A month later, follow-up observations by ALMA confirmed that the galaxy had a spectrographic redshift of more than z = 12, making it one of the earliest and most distant galaxies ever observed. The exquisite observations by both observatories have allowed astronomers to gain fresh insights into the nature of the earliest galaxies in the Universe.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Credit: C. Padilla, NRAO/AUI/NSF

Jorge Zavala, an astronomer at the East Asian ALMA Regional Center at the NAOJ, was the lead author of this study. As he explained in an ALMA-NAOJ press release:

“We pointed the more than forty 12-m antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the 6.5-m James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) for several hours at a sky position that would appear totally empty to the naked human eye, aiming to catch a signal from one of the most distant astronomical objects known to date. And [we] successfully detected the emission from excited atoms of different elements such as Hydrogen and Oxygen from an epoch never reached before.”

Confirming and characterizing the physical properties of distant galaxies is vital to testing our current theories of galaxy formation and evolution. However, insight into their internal physics requires detailed and sensitive astronomical observations and spectroscopy – the absorption and emission of light by matter- allowing scientists to detect specific chemical elements and compounds. Naturally, these observations were challenging for the earliest galaxies, given that they are the most distant astronomical objects ever studied.

Nevertheless, the ALMA observations detected the emission line associated with doubly ionized oxygen (O III), confirming that the galaxy existed about 367 million years after the Big Bang. Combined with data obtained by Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) instruments, the team was able to characterize this object effectively. Based on their observations, the team discovered that GHZ2 was experiencing extreme bursts of star formation 13.4 billion years ago under conditions that differ considerably from what astronomers have seen in star-forming galaxies over the past few decades.

For instance, the relative abundance of heavier elements in this galaxy (metallicity) is significantly lower than that of most galaxies studied. This was expected given the dearth of heavier elements during the early Universe when Population III stars existed, which were overwhelmingly composed of hydrogen and helium. These stars were massive, hot, and short-lived, lasting only a few million years before they went supernova. Similarly, the team attributed GHZ2’s high luminosity to its Population III stars, which are absent from more evolved galaxies.

The scattered stars of the globular cluster NGC 6355 are strewn across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, E. Noyola, R. Cohen

This luminosity is amplified by the fact that GHZ2, which is a few hundred million times the mass of the Sun, occupies a region of around 100 parsecs (~325 light-years). This indicates that the galaxy has a high stellar density similar to that of Globular Clusters observed in the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies. Other similarities include low metallicity, the anomalous abundances of certain chemicals, high star formation rates, high stellar mass surface density, and more. As such, studying galaxies like GHZ2 could help astronomers explain the origin of globular clusters, which remains a mystery.

Said Tom Bakx, a researcher at Chalmers University, these observations could pave the way for future studies of ancient galaxies that reveal the earliest phases of galaxy formation:

“This study is a crown on the multi-year endeavor to understand galaxies in the early Universe. The analysis of multiple emission lines enabled several key tests of galaxy properties, and demonstrates the excellent capabilities of ALMA through an exciting, powerful synergy with other telescopes like the JWST.”

Further Reading: ALMA, AJL

The post Webb and ALMA Team Up to Study Primeval Galaxy appeared first on Universe Today.

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.

They examined a star called WOCS 14020 in the star cluster M67, which is about 2,800 light years away from Earth. It is currently orbiting a massive white dwarf star with a mass of about .76 times that of the Sun (about 50% heavier than a typical white dwarf). That pairing hints at a much more interesting past.

Dr. Leiner and her team believe that WOCS 14020 was originally part of a triple star system—specifically, that it orbited a binary pair of much larger stars. Around 500 million years ago, the two stars in the binary merged, briefly creating a much more massive star that pushed some of its material onto its third companion star.

Fraser talks about stellar collisions, which caused WOCS 14020’s current state.

Absorbing that material caused WOCS 14020 to start speeding up its spin. It now rotates once every four days, rather than typically once every thirty days, which is common to other Sun-like stars. This faster rotation feature is key to Dr. Leiner and her team’s classification of the star – a “blue lurker.”

To understand what that classification means, we must first understand another type of star, the blue straggler. Blue stragglers are stars that also have gained mass from another star and appear hotter, brighter, and “bluer” than they would be expected to be given their age. In this case, all three features are directly tied together, as a hotter star is more likely to be brighter and would give off more light in the blue part of the visible spectrum, though it would still appear almost exactly like the Sun to the naked eye.

Blue lurkers are a sub-set of blue stragglers – they also gained mass from a star, but they spin faster instead of being hotter and brighter. This makes this difficult to distinguish in a cluster like M67, as they blend in better with the other surrounding stars, hence the name “lurker.” However, they are relatively rare – out of the 400 main sequence stars in M67, only around 11 are estimated to be “blue lurkers.” That puts the total, even in a space as congested as M67, at only around 3% of stars. Blue lurkers likely make up less than 1% of the general population.

A video explaining blue straggler stars.
Credit – Cosmos:elementary YouTube Channel

Since their evolutionary histories are likely to advance our understanding of the dynamics of the systems that created them, astronomers will spend more time analyzing these blue lurkers when they find them. Unique cases like WOCS 14020, where astronomers have a pretty good idea of the system’s evolutionary history, are instrumental in that regard, and the paper, which was presented at the ongoing 245th American Astronomical Society meeting, was a step towards that greater understanding.

Learn More:
STScI – NASA’s Hubble Tracks Down a ‘Blue Lurker’ Among Stars
Leiner et al – The Blue Lurker WOCS 14020 : A Long-Period Post-Common-Envelope Binary in M67 Originating from a Mergerina Triple System
UT – Blue Straggler Stars are Weird
UT – A Rare Opportunity to Watch a Blue Straggler Forming

The post Colliding Stars, Stellar Siphoning, and a now a “Blue Lurker.” This Star System has Seen it All appeared first on Universe Today.

Black holes are among the most mysterious and powerful objects in the Universe. These behemoths form when sufficiently massive stars reach the end of their life cycle and experience gravitational collapse, shedding their outer layers in a supernova. Their existence was illustrated by the work of German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild and Indian-American physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar as a consequence of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. By the 1970s, astronomers confirmed that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) reside at the center of massive galaxies and play a vital role in their evolution.

However, only in recent years were the first images of black holes acquired by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). These and other observations have revealed things about black holes that have challenged preconceived notions. In a recent study led by a team from MIT, astronomers observed oscillations that suggested an SMBH in a neighboring galaxy was consuming a white dwarf. But instead of pulling it apart, as astronomical models predict, their observations suggest the white dwarf was slowing down as it descended into the black hole – something astronomers have never seen before!

The study was led by Megan Masterson, a PhD student from the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. She was joined by researchers from the Nucleo de Astronomia de la Facultad de Ingenieria, the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA-PU), the Center for Space Science and Technology (CSST), and the Joint Space-Science Institute at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), the Centro de Astrobiologia (CAB), the Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and multiple universities.

From what astronomers have learned about black holes, these gravitational behemoths are surrounded by infalling matter (gas, dust, and even light) that form swirling, bright disks. This material and energy is accelerated to near the speed of light, causing it to release heat and radiation (mostly in the ultraviolet) as it slowly accretes onto the black hole’s “face.” These UV rays interact with a cloud of electrically charged plasma (the corona) surrounding the black hole, which boosts the rays’ into the X-ray wavelength.

Since 2011, NASA’s XMM-Newton has been observing 1ES 1927+654, a galaxy located 236 million light-years away in the constellation Draco with a black hole of 1.4 million Solar masses Suns at its center. In 2018, the X-ray corona mysteriously disappeared, followed by a radio outburst and a rise in its X-ray output—what is known as Quasi-periodic oscillations (QPO). UMBC associate professor Eileen Meyer, a co-author of this latest study, also recently released a paper describing these radio outbursts.

“In 2018, the black hole began changing its properties right before our eyes, with a major optical, ultraviolet, and X-ray outburst,” she said in a NASA press release. “Many teams have been keeping a close eye on it ever since.” Meyer presented her team’s findings at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), which took place from January 12th to 16th, 2025, in National Harbor, Maryland. By 2021, the corona reappeared, and the black hole seemed to return to its normal state for about a year.

However, from February to May 2024, radio data revealed what appeared to be jets of ionized gas extending for about half a light-year from either side of the SMBH. “The launch of a black hole jet has never been observed before in real time,” Meyer noted. “We think the outflow began earlier, when the X-rays increased prior to the radio flare, and the jet was screened from our view by hot gas until it broke out early last year.” A related paper about the jet co-authored by Meyer and Masterson was also presented at the 245th AAS.

Artist’s impression of the ESA’s XMM-Newton mission in space. Credit: ESA-C. Carreau

In addition, observations gathered in April 2023 showed a months-long increase in low-energy X-rays, which indicated a strong and unexpected radio flare was underway. Intense observations were mounted in response by the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and other facilities, including XMM-Newton. Thanks to the XMM-Newton observations, Masterson found that the black hole exhibited extremely rapid X-ray variations of 10% between July 2022 and March 2024. These oscillations are typically very hard to detect around SMBHs, suggesting that a massive object was rapidly orbiting the SMBH and slowly being consumed.

“One way to produce these oscillations is with an object orbiting within the black hole’s accretion disk. In this scenario, each rise and fall of the X-rays represents one orbital cycle,” Masterson said. Additional calculations also showed that the object is probably a white dwarf of about 0.1 solar masses orbiting at a velocity of about 333 million km/h (207 million mph). Ordinarily, astronomers would expect the orbital period to shorten, producing gravitational waves (GWs) that drain the object’s orbital energy and bring it closer to the black hole’s outer boundary (the event horizon).

However, the same observations conducted between 2022 and 2024 showed the fluctuation period dropped from 18 minutes to 7, and the velocity increased to half the speed of light (540 million km/h; 360 million mph). Then, something truly odd and unexpected followed: the oscillations stabilized. As Masterson explained:

“We were shocked by this at first. But we realized that as the object moved closer to the black hole, its strong gravitational pull could begin to strip matter from the companion. This mass loss could offset the energy removed by gravitational waves, halting the companion’s inward motion.”

Artist’s impression of two neutron stars at the point at which they merge and explode as a kilonova. Credit: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick

This theory is consistent with what astronomers have observed with white dwarf binaries spiraling toward each other and destined to merge. As they got closer to each other, instead of remaining intact, one would begin to pull matter off the other, which slowed down the approach of the two objects. While this could be the case here, there is no established theory for explaining what Masterson, Meyer, and their colleagues observed. However, their model makes a key prediction that could be tested when the ESA’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) launches in the 2030s.

“We predict that if there is a white dwarf in orbit around this supermassive black hole, LISA should see it,” says Megan. The preprint of Masterson and her team’s paper recently appeared online and will be published in Nature on February 15th, 2025.

Further Reading: ESA, NASA, arXiv, AJL

The post Recent Observations Challenge our Understanding of Giant Black Holes appeared first on Universe Today.

Strange “right-handed” neutrinos may be responsible for all the matter in the universe, according to new research.

Why is the universe filled with something other than nothing? Almost all fundamental interactions in physics are exactly symmetrical, meaning that they produce just as much matter as they do antimatter. But the universe is filled with only matter, with antimatter only appearing in the occasional high-energy process.

Obviously something happened to tip the balance, but what?

New research suggests that the answer may lie in the ghostly little particles known as neutrinos.

Neutrinos are beyond strange. There are three varieties, and they each have almost no mass. Additionally, they are also all “left-handed”, which means that their internal spins orient in only one direction as they travel. This is unlike all the other particles, which can orient in both directions.

Physicists suspect that there may be other kinds of neutrinos out there, ones that as yet remain undetected. These “right-handed” neutrinos would be much more massive than the more familiar left-handed ones.

Back in the early universe, these two kinds of neutrinos would have mixed together more freely. But as the cosmos expanded and cooled, this even symmetry broke, rendering the heavy right-handed neutrinos invisible. In the process, the symmetry breaking would separate matter from antimatter.

This could be the exact mechanism needed to explain that primordial mystery of the universe. But the right-handed neutrinos have one more trick up their sleeves.

The researchers behind the paper propose that the right-handed neutrinos didn’t completely disappear from the cosmic scene. Instead, they mixed together to form yet another new entity: the Majoran, a hypothetical kind of particle that is its own anti-particle. The Majoran would still inhabit the cosmos, surviving as a relic of those ancient times.

A massive, invisible particle just hanging around the cosmos? That would be an ideal candidate for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up the mass of almost every galaxy.

This means that the interactions between different kinds of neutrinos could explain why all observed neutrinos are left-handed, why there is more matter than antimatter, and why the universe is filled with dark matter.

This is all hypothetical, but definitely worth pursuing. And if we ever discover evidence for right-handed neutrinos, we just might be on the right track to solving a number of cosmological mysteries.

The post An Even Ghostlier Neutrino May Rule the Universe appeared first on Universe Today.

The ESA has announced that Gaia’s primary mission is coming to an end. The spacecraft’s fuel is running low, and the sky-scanning phase of its mission is over. The ground-breaking mission has taken more than three trillion observations of two billion objects, mostly stars.

The ESA launched Gaia in December 2013. It’s an astrometry mission that measures the positions, motions, and distances of stars with extreme accuracy. It created the largest and most accurate 3D map of space ever, including about one billion objects, mostly stars but also quasars, comets, asteroids, and planets.

Gaia’s mission lasted twice as long as expected, and its data has changed astronomy. It serves as the foundation for many new discoveries and insights into the Milky Way. Astronomy and astrophysics would be far behind where they are now if it weren’t for Gaia. Regular Universe Today readers have encountered its data frequently.

“Today marks the end of science observations and we are celebrating this incredible mission that has exceeded all our expectations, lasting for almost twice its originally foreseen lifetime,” says ESA Director of Science Carole Mundell. “The treasure trove of data collected by Gaia has given us unique insights into the origin and evolution of our Milky Way galaxy, and has also transformed astrophysics and Solar System science in ways that we are yet to fully appreciate. Gaia built on unique European excellence in astrometry and will leave a long-lasting legacy for future generations.”

Gaia hasn’t always had it easy at its position at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. In April 2024, a tiny micrometeorite smaller than a grain of sand struck, puncturing a tiny hole in the satellite’s protective cover. The hole allowed a tiny bit of sunlight into the spacecraft, disrupting its sensors. In May 2024, a solar storm struck, and it suffered an electronics malfunction that led to an inordinately high number of false detections. In both cases, Gaia recovered and continued normal operations.

Gaia has three instruments that allow it to be so accurate. Its astrometric instrument (ASTRO) determines the positions of stars in the sky. By measuring the same stars multiple times over different years, Gaia can measure a star’s position and proper motion.

Gaia’s radial velocity spectrometer (RVS) measures the Doppler shift of a star’s absorption lines. This reveals the star’s velocity along Gaia’s line of sight.

The photometric instrument (BP/RP) provides colour information on stars, allowing astronomers to measure critical stellar characteristics like mass, chemical composition, and temperature.

These instruments have worked together to create the largest and most accurate map of the Milky Way ever.

A model image of what our home galaxy, the Milky Way, might look like face-on: as viewed from above the disc of the galaxy, with its spiral arms and bulge in full view. In the centre of the galaxy, the bulge shines as a hazy oval, emitting a faint golden gleam. Starting at the central bulge, several glistening spiral arms coil outwards, creating a perfectly circle-shaped spiral. They give the impression of someone having sprinkled pastel purple glitter on the pitch-black background in the shape of sparkling, curled-up snakes. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar

Among its other achievements, Gaia has captured pinpoint precision orbits of more than 150,000 asteroids, accurate enough to uncover possible moons. It also discovered a new type of black hole revealed only through its gravitational influence on nearby stars.

Though its science operations are at an end, it still has data to deliver.

“After 11 years in space and surviving micrometeorite impacts and solar storms along the way, Gaia has finished collecting science data. Now all eyes turn towards the preparation of the next data releases,” says Gaia Project Scientist Johannes Sahlmann.

“This is the Gaia release the community has been waiting for, and it’s exciting to think this only covers half of the collected data.”

Antonella Vallenari, Deputy Chair of DPAC, Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), Padua, Italy.

Gaia’s Data Release 4 (DR4) is expected in 2026. The volume and quality of data have increased with each DR. DR 4 should contain 500 terabytes of data covering the mission’s first 5.5 years, corresponding to the length of the mission’s originally foreseen duration.

“This is the Gaia release the community has been waiting for, and it’s exciting to think this only covers half of the collected data,” says Antonella Vallenari, Deputy Chair of DPAC based at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF), Astronomical Observatory of Padua, Italy. “Even though the mission has now stopped collecting data, it will be business as usual for us for many years to come as we make these incredible datasets ready for use.”

The data release will feature more binary stars and exoplanets, among other things.

The Milky Way. This image is constructed from data from the ESA’s Gaia mission, which is mapping over one billion of the galaxy’s stars. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC

Gaia’s final data release, DR5, is a few years away. “Over the next months we will continue to downlink every last drop of data from Gaia, and at the same time the processing teams will ramp up their preparations for the fifth and final major data release at the end of this decade, covering the full 10.5 years of mission data,” says Rocio Guerra, Gaia Science Operations Team Leader based at ESA’s European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) near Madrid in Spain.

Though the fuel that allows it to point itself with such accuracy is almost gone, Gaia won’t meet its demise just yet. It still has enough fuel for about 15 days of operations. Instead of using its final 15 days to take more astrometric measurements, it’s going to do some technology testing.

“The Gaia spacecraft has been constructed using a wide range of technologies which have been combined to create a unique machine that operates in a very stable environment,” the ESA explains. “The spacecraft’s stability is essential for the science observations. These technology tests would have disrupted the spacecraft for an extended period and, therefore, could not be performed during the normal science observation campaign.”

These tests will teach engineers more about Gaia’s instruments and will allow engineers to study their behaviour and the behaviour of the spacecraft as a whole. The goal is to improve the calibrations for future Gaia data releases. They will also inform the design of the next mission.

“Some of the Gaia technologies have already been re-used, for example the mirror-drive electronics and cold-gas thrusters on EUCLID,” the ESA writes. Other future missions like LISA will require extreme accuracy, and the results of these tests can help them achieve that.

Once its testing is complete, Gaia will be placed in a heliocentric orbit far away from Earth’s influence. At the end of March 2025, it will be passivated to avoid any potential harm or disruption to other spacecraft.

Though the mission will end, Gaia’s data will be used for decades. So, in that sense, it will live on.

The post The Gaia Mission’s Science Operations are Over appeared first on Universe Today.

Supermassive black holes can have trillions of times more mass than the Sun, only exist in specific locations, and could number in the trillions. How can objects like that be hiding? They’re shielded from our view by thick columns of gas and dust.

However, astronomers are developing a way to find them: by looking for donuts that glow in the infrared.

It seems almost certain that large galaxies like our own Milky Way host supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in their centers. They grow through mergers with other SMBHs and through accretion. When they’re actively accreting material, they’re called Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and become so bright they can outshine all of the stars in their entire galaxy. The most luminous AGN are called quasars.

SMBHs, like all black holes, emit no light themselves. Instead, the light comes from the torus of swirling gas and dust that forms an accretion ring around the SMBH. The gas and dust become superheated and emit electromagnetic radiation. So far, scientists have only imaged two SMBHs, both with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). (To be clear, the EHT doesn’t actually “see” the SMBH. Instead, it sees the light coming from the accretion disk and the shadow the SMBH casts on the disk.)

The first ever actual image of a black hole was taken in 2019. This shows the black hole at the heart of galaxy M87. Image Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

Even without seeing them, astronomers are pretty certain that most large galaxies host an SMBH. How? Stars near the center of galaxies move in unusual ways as if they’re under the influence of an extremely massive object. The intense radiation from AGN is also strong evidence of an SMBH. Galaxy formation and evolution models and gravitational lensing provide additional evidence.

However, astronomers still want to find more of them so they can confirm their models or adapt them to suit observational results. The problem is that many of them are hidden from view by gas and dust. If that gas and dust are thick and dense enough, they act as a veil, blocking even low-energy X-ray light. That means our view of the galaxy centre is obscured, even if it is an AGN.

Whether or not we can see the centre of a galaxy like this depends on our viewing. From a “side” view, the torus blocks it out, while from a “top” or “bottom” view, it doesn’t.

Astronomers want to understand how many SMBHs there are in the Universe, but obviously, there’s no way to find them and count them all. What they hope to do is determine the ratio between hidden and unhidden SMBHs. To do that, they need a large enough sample to extrapolate from. That way, they can get a more accurate idea of how many SMBHs there are.

A new survey using data from multiple NASA telescopes has advanced our understanding of SMBHs. The survey and its results are detailed in a paper titled “The NuSTAR Local AGN NH Distribution Survey (NuLANDS). I. Toward a Truly Representative Column Density Distribution in the Local Universe.” It’s published in The Astrophysical Journal, and the lead author is Peter G. Boorman, an astrophysicist from the Cahill Center for Astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology.

The NuLANDS aims to find the thick dust and gas that obscures AGN. Previous efforts to detect AGN have been hampered by relying on hard X-rays, the highest-energy portion of the X-ray spectrum, often defined as X-rays with energies greater than 10 kiloelectronvolts (keV). Accretion disks around SMBHs can be heated to extremely high temperatures and emit hard X-rays.

However, thick enough gas and dust can block even hard X-rays. If the column density of the gas is too high, no hard X-rays can get through. “Hard X-ray-selected samples of active galactic nuclei (AGN) provide one of the cleanest views of supermassive black hole accretion but are biased against objects obscured by Compton-thick gas column densities of NH > 1024 cm-2,” the authors write in their paper. Compton-thick means thick enough to obscure an AGN.

The thick gas and dust that block hard X-rays absorb them and then re-emit them as lower-energy infrared light. This creates a glowing torus, or donut, of gas and dust. This is where IRAS comes in.

IRAS was the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, launched in January 1983 and operated for 10 months. It performed an infrared survey of the entire sky, and it spotted the infrared emissions from the toruses around SMBHs. Critically, it spotted these toruses whether they were face-on or edge-on.

However, IRAS didn’t discriminate against infrared sources. It also spotted galaxies undergoing rapid star formation, which emit similar infrared light as AGN. In this new research, the authors used ground-based telescopes to differentiate between the two.

At that stage, the researchers had a sample of toruses around SMBHs emitting infrared light. However, they didn’t know if they were seeing them face-on or edge-on. Remember, their goal was to determine how many SMBHs are hidden and how many aren’t. With a large enough sample containing good data, they could extrapolate how many SMBHs there are and whether all large galaxies have one.

This is where another NASA satellite comes in. NuSTAR is an X-ray space telescope that was launched in June 2012 and is still operating. One of its primary goals was to detect SMBHs one billion times more massive than the Sun.

An artist’s illustration of NASA’s NuSTAR X-ray satellite. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NuSTAR can detect high-energy X-rays that pass through thick dust and gas, so it can detect edge-on SMBHs. However, it can use hours of observation time to detect these X-rays, so for it to be effective, it has to know where to look first. That’s what IRAS helped with.

“It amazes me how useful IRAS and NuSTAR were for this project, especially despite IRAS being operational over 40 years ago,” said lead author Boorman. “I think it shows the legacy value of telescope archives and the benefit of using multiple instruments and wavelengths of light together.”

In their NuLANDS survey, the researchers looked at 122 nearby AGN chosen for their warm infrared colours. “To tackle this issue, we present the NuSTAR Local AGN NH Distribution Survey (NuLANDS)—a legacy sample of 122 nearby (z < 0.044) AGN primarily selected to have warm infrared colors from IRAS between 25 and 60 ?m,” the authors write.

Their sample of galaxies is also biased towards those whose AGN is obscured by something close to them rather than by some large-scale feature of the galaxy itself. “By construction, our sample will miss sources affected by severe narrow-line reddening, and thus segregates sources dominated by small-scale nuclear obscuration from large-scale host-galaxy obscuration,” the authors explain.

The researchers found that 35% ± 9% of galaxies have Compton-thick dust, meaning their AGN and SMBH are obscured. So, about one-third of the Universe’s SMBHs are obscured. However, these are only the first results from NuLANDS, and while 122 AGN is a sizeable survey, there’s more to come.

These results support some of the thinking around SMBHs, their masses, and their numbers. SMBHs must consume an enormous amount of material to reach their enormous sizes. That means many of them should be obscured by the very dust they’ll eventually consume. Boorman and his co-authors say their results support this idea.

“If we didn’t have black holes, galaxies would be much larger,” said study co-author Poshak Gandhi, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Southampton in the UK. That’s for two reasons. First, they consume material that would otherwise form more stars. Second, sometimes too much material falls toward the black hole, and they belch up the excess. That ejected material can disperse the clouds of gas where stars form, slowing the galaxy’s star formation.

“So if we didn’t have a supermassive black hole in our Milky Way galaxy, there might be many more stars in the sky. That’s just one example of how black holes can influence a galaxy’s evolution,” said Gandhi.

The post About a Third of Supermassive Black Holes are Hiding appeared first on Universe Today.

Water is the essence of life. Every living thing on Earth contains water within it. The Earth is rich with life because it is rich with water. This fundamental connection between water and life is partly due to water’s extraordinary properties, but part of it is due to the fact that water is one of the most abundant molecules in the Universe. Made from one part oxygen and two parts hydrogen, its structure is simple and strong. The hydrogen comes from the primordial fire of the Big Bang and is by far the most common element. Oxygen is created in the cores of large stars, along with carbon and nitrogen, as part of the CNO fusion cycle.

Because of its origin, we’ve generally thought that oxygen (and correspondingly water) grew in abundance over time. From the first stars to the present day, each generation cast oxygen into space in its dying moments. So, while water was rare in the early Universe, it is relatively common now. But a new study suggests that isn’t the case.

Astronomers categorize stars into populations depending on their age and metallicity, where “metals” are any elements other than hydrogen and helium. The youngest and most metal-rich stars, such as the Sun, are called Population I. Older stars with fewer metals are Population II. The oldest stars, the very first stars to appear in the Universe, are known as Population III. Though we haven’t observed Pop III stars directly, they would have been enormous stars made entirely of hydrogen and helium. The first seeds of everything we see around us, from oceans to trees to beloved friends, formed within these first stars. A new study on the arXiv argues that Pop III stars also flooded the cosmos with water.

In their study, the team modeled the explosions of small (13 solar mass) and large (200 solar mass) early stars. The large stars would have been the very first stars formed from primordial clouds, while the smaller stars would have been the first stars to form in early stellar nurseries. Not quite Pop III stars, but with very low metallicity. When the smaller stars died, they exploded as typical supernovae, but when the large stars died, they exploded as brilliant pair-instability supernovae.

Based on simulations, these stars would have greatly enriched the environment with water. The molecular clouds formed from the remnants of these stars had 10 to 30 times the water fraction of diffuse molecular clouds seen in the Milky Way today. Based on this, the team argues that by 100 to 200 million years after the Big Bang, there was enough water and other elements in molecular clouds for life to form.

Whether life actually did appear in the Universe so early is an unanswered question. There is also the fact that while water formed early, ionization and other astrophysical processes may have broken up many of these molecules. Water might have been plentiful early on, but the Universe entered a dry period before Pop II and Pop I stars generated the water levels we see today. But it’s possible that much of the water around us came from the very first stars.

Reference: Whalen, Daniel J., Muhammad A. Latif, and Christopher Jessop. “Abundant Water from Early Supernovae at Cosmic Dawn.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.02051 (2025).

The post The First Supernovae Flooded the Early Universe With Water appeared first on Universe Today.

There’s plenty of action at the center of the galaxy, where a supermassive black hole (SMBH) known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) literally holds the galaxy together. Part of that action is the creation of gigantic flares from Sgr A*, which can give off energy equivalent to 10 times the Sun’s annual energy output. However, scientists have been missing a key feature of these flares for decades – what they look like in the mid-infrared range. But now, a team led by researchers at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy has published a paper that details what a flare looks like in those frequencies for the first time.

Astronomers have been observing Sgr A* since the 1990s and have known about the flares, which were initially seen as variances in the SMBH’s brightness. It has been observed with all manner of telescopes, including the Chandra X-ray observatory and, perhaps most famously, the Event Horizon Telescope, which was responsible for the famous first image of M87*, another black hole at the center of the Messier galaxy. EHT also released an image from Sgr A* itself in May of 2022.

So far, those observations have been in visible light through infrared and from far infrared up through X-rays. There has always been a gap in the middle of the infrared range. Several factors explain this gap.

Fraser talks about imaging Sgr A*

First, Sgr A* is relatively weak in the mid-infrared range compared to other ranges, so it doesn’t stand out as much against the background noise of the universe. Second, much of the mid-infrared emissions get obscured by the dust cloud surrounding the SMBH at the galaxy’s center, blocking it from detectors at Earth 28,000 light years away. Third, there were technological limitations to infrared sensors themselves. There were ground-based telescopes that could have detected the signal, but the Earth’s atmosphere blocked even more of it.

That required scientists to wait for the long-delayed James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). When it finally launched in late 2021, it was only a matter of time before they would get observational time to watch Sgr A* and hopefully observe a flare with the most powerful infrared detector ever launched into orbit. 

JWST did indeed get observational time with Sgr A* and saw a flare, representing the first-ever recording of a flare in the mid-infrared range. But the research team didn’t stop there – they were also watching with several other telescopes for confirmation of the JWST signal.

Fraser talks about other features of Sgr A*

They didn’t find any in the X-ray range with Chandra, though that was probably because the flare wasn’t strong enough to emit a significant amount of X-rays. But they did see a signal from the Sub-Millimeter Array (SMA) in Hawai’i, which detected radio waves following along about 10 minutes behind the detected mid-infrared signal.

That confirmation was necessary because it allowed the experimentalists to provide even more insight about the same flare to the theoreticians. Their job is then to confirm the models and simulations of what causes the flares in the first place. The current theory is that they occur when magnetic field lines in the SMBH’s accretion disk join up and emit massive amounts of radiation in a process known as synchrotron emission. In synchrotron emission, a bunch of charged particles – typically electrons – get pushed down the magnetic field lines like they were part of a massive particle accelerator.

The data from JWST fits nicely into that theory. However, there appear to be additional unanswered questions about whether that feature was specific to Sgr A* or whether it could be observed for other SMBHs such as M87*. For now, that remains to be seen, though given the interest in this particular black hole in this specific wavelength, while this might have been the first study published on the topic, it probably won’t be the last.

Learn More:
CfA – Scientists Make First-Ever Detection of Mid-IR Flares in Sgr A*
von Fellenberg et al – First mid-infrared detection and modeling of a flare from Sgr A*
UT – Echoes of Flares from the Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole
UT – A Black Hole Emitted a Flare Away From us, but its Intense Gravity Redirected the Blast Back in our Direction

Lead Image:
This artist’s conception of the mid-IR flare in Sgr A* captures the variability, or changing intensity, of the flare as the black hole’s magnetic field lines approach each other. The byproduct of this magnetic reconnection is synchrotron emission. The emission seen in the flare intensifies as energized electrons travel along the SMBH’s magnetic field lines at close to the speed of light. The labels mark how the flare’s spectral index changes from the beginning to the end of the flare.
Credit: CfA/Mel Weiss

The post Astronomers See Flares Coming from the Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole appeared first on Universe Today.

A tiny asteroid loitering in a near-Earth orbit for a few months last year may have an intriguing origin on our Moon. Its characteristics led scientists to ask: is it a chip off the old lunar block, making a pass by Earth for a visit?

The object is known as Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) 2024 PT5 (or PT5, for short) and its orbit is very similar to Earth’s. Oddly enough, that region often gets littered with rocket bodies. Interestingly, it’s also a region where debris blasted off the Moon during impacts tends to collect. So, could PT5 have come from the Moon? There’s a good chance that it did but how do we know this?

An artist’s impression of a lunar explosion, caused by the impact of a meteorite on the surface of the Moon. Such an impact could have created asteroid PT5. Credit: NASA/Jennifer Harbaugh

Planetary scientists have long studied Near-Earth objects (NEOs) and NEAs to understand their origins. One way to do that is to determine a relationship between their current orbits, properties, and sources, One such origin is the Main Asteroid Belt, but it’s not the only place where asteroids emerge. Each object is a special case, and scientists compare them with known meteorites. Of course, you need some data about the object’s physical characteristics—including its reflectance and albedo. Those two properties can often tell you what part of an asteroid population the object came from. They’re particularly important if there are no physical samples available for analysis.

Looking at Spectra of the Suspected Moon Chunk

A team of observers used the Lowell Discovery Telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona, to take reflectance spectra of PT5. This 10-meter-wide chunk of space rock was first discovered in August of 2024 by a survey project in South Africa. Its orbit made it a perfect target for another survey called MANOS (Mission Accessible Near-Earth Object Survey). The Lowell observations took place a week later to determine reflectance properties. Those are useful to figure out its origin—either natural or artificial. Subsequent observations of the object characterized its rotation and revealed it has a rocky, silicate-rich composition. That ruled out an artificial origin.

The reflectance spectrum from the Lowell telescope does give a match to known lunar samples. PT5 does not match any known asteroid types, however. For example, it looks to be pyroxene-rich, which indicates the rock came from an igneous or possibly metamorphic environment. Other asteroids aren’t the same—they tend to be richer in olivine. Based on that data and its tumbling motion, scientists conclude that it is ejecta from an impact on the Moon. If that’s the case, it’s only the second time a NEA has been found that came from the Moon.

Reflectance data from a MANOS survey of NEA 2024 PT5 made on January 7, 2025. Courtesy MANOS/Lowell Observatory.

If only one existed, we could say it’s a space oddity. However, the presence of two such objects changes the story. It also suggests that there’s a whole population out there waiting to be observed.

What PT5 Means

So, let’s say there is this collection of lunar chunks floating around out there. They can give insight into how impacts affect the Moon or other bodies such as Earth and Mars. They would also help identify the sources of other asteroids and meteorites from this under-studied population of near-Earth objects. In a paper discussing PT5, authors Theodore Kareta of Lowell Observatory, Oscar Fuentes-Munoz from NASA JPL, and others, describe their study of this rock, its orbit, and physical characteristics. They write, “If there really is a population of Moon Rocks out there waiting to be discovered on near-Earth orbits, they almost certainly are rare members of the NEO population.”

There may well be only about 16 currently known NEOs that could have come from the Moon, but there could be more. Now, the challenge is to separate them from the general population of near-Earth objects and subject them to further study. Since the orbits of lunar ejecta pieces tend to evolve into Aten- or Apollo-type orbits, the authors point out there could be between 5 and 10 times more of these lunar chips off the old block in the neighborhood. (Aten asteroids are a group known as “Earth-crossing” asteroids because their orbits cross our planet’s orbit. Apollo asteroids also follow orbits that cross ours.)

Three classes of asteroids that pass near Earth or cross its orbit are Apollo, Aten and Amor. Apollo asteroids like 2014 SC324 routinely cross Earth’s orbit, Atens also cross but have different orbital characteristics and Amors cross Mars’ orbit but miss Earth’s. Credit: ESA Future Observations of Suspected Moon Pieces

If there is a larger population of lunar-sourced asteroids in near-Earth-type orbits, then the next step is to figure out ways to find them. Certainly, asteroid surveys will help, along with further observations of their reflectance and charts of their orbits. Since these asteroids are generally thought to be relatively small, it will take a new generation of larger telescopes and observational techniques to find them.

Probably one of the greatest results of the search for these objects is what they can tell us about impact histories in the inner solar systems. The paper’s authors point this out. “First at Mars and now at the Earth, the impact histories of the terrestrial planets appear to be partially encoded in the asteroids that orbit nearby to them. Future work to discover more of and measure the properties of this population of near-Earth objects which are sourced by the Moon will be critical to link asteroid and lunar science in the era of Artemis and the Vera Rubin Observatory’s LSST.”

The next chance to observe PT5 is coming up this month when it lingers near Earth again. NASA has plans to track it with radar and undoubtedly others will be studying it to understand more about this “mini-Moon”.

For More Information

On The Lunar Origin of Near-Earth Asteroid 2024 PT5
NASA to Track Asteroid 2024 PT5 on Next Close Pass, January 2025

The post Earth’s Temporary Moon Might Have Come from THE Moon appeared first on Universe Today.

A fuzzy form of dark matter may clump up to become the cores of galaxies, according to new research.

The traditional dark matter hypothesis, that it’s some form of cold, massive particle that hardly ever interacts with itself or with normal matter, has some difficulties. In particular, it can’t quite explain the dense cores of galaxies. Cold, heavy dark matter tends to produce extremely dense cores, far denser than what we observe.

But dark matter might be something else. Recently astronomers have hypothesized that dark matter might instead be incredibly light, far lighter than any known particle. This “fuzzy” dark matter would allow the quantum wave nature of the particles to manifest on macroscopic – even galactic – scales, allowing them to form large, diffuse clumps known as “dark stars.”

Dark stars can be incredibly huge, stretching for thousands of light-years, while still having relatively low density. This would match observations of galaxy cores, which makes this an intriguing hypothesis to follow.

In a recent letter appearing in the preprint server arXiv in December, an international collaboration of astrophysicists explored how galaxies might evolve in response to fuzzy dark matter. For this first step, they did not attempt to fully recreate an entire complex galaxy. Instead they built a simple toy model containing only two components: a large fraction of fuzzy dark matter and a smaller fraction of a simple, ideal gas.

They then simulated how these two components would interact with each other and evolve. They found that no matter how they start off, normal matter and fuzzy dark matter quickly find an equilibrium, with the two kinds of matter mixing together to make a large, stable core, surrounded by a cloud of dark matter.

The researchers pointed out that this would serve as the ideal representation of a galactic core, which contains higher – but not too high – densities of normal matter. This is the first step to confirming a key prediction of the fuzzy dark matter model. However, there is still a lot of work to be done. The next step is to build even more realistic simulations of the growth and evolution of galaxies, tracking how fuzzy dark matter, and the dark stars they create, influences their local environments. Then we can take those results and compare to observations to see if this idea is worth investigating even more.

The post Galaxy Cores May be Giant Fuzzy Dark Stars appeared first on Universe Today.