Astro Blog

By Lisa Grossman , Science News.  Excerpt: Perched on a high, flat-topped mountain called Cerro Pachón, the Rubin Observatory ...can investigate some of the universe’s slowest, most eternal processes, such as the assembly of galaxies and the expansion of the cosmos. And by mapping the entire southern sky every couple of nights, it can track some of the universe’s fastest and most ephemeral events, including exploding stars and  visits from interstellar comets . ...Rubin data will be made available online to anyone in the world, from professional astronomers to elementary school students. ...the observatory has what’s now the  largest digital camera ever built ...at 1.65 meters wide...It combines 189 individual CCDs...roughly the same number of pixels as 260 smartphone cameras. ...In June, the telescope hit another big milestone:  releasing Rubin’s first images  to the public. ...the Rubin team shared videos made up of hundreds of individual images from...

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Cerro Pachón in Chile ...the giant telescope is built for speed. ...The camera at its heart is fast, too, capable of spitting out a 3200-megapixel image from each exposure in less than 3 seconds. ...10 May, ...commissioning scientist Kevin Fanning prepares to take his 350-ton baby out for a spin. At the press of a button on his laptop, the towering structure begins to move and is soon rotating effortlessly on a thin film of oil. ...Rubin needs to be fast because it must cover a lot of sky—all of it. ...Rubin will march relentlessly across the firmament, capturing swaths in a field of view that covers the equivalent of 45 full Moons. At each stop its 3-ton, car-size camera will record the view with an array of 189 light sensors cooled to –100°C, producing an image so rich it would take a wall of 400 ultrahigh-definition TV screens to display it in full. Each snapshot takes 30 seconds; then the telescope slews in less than 5 seconds to a new vist...

By Phie Jacobs , Science.  Excerpt: Researchers...aren’t quite sure why...the corona, is so much hotter than the Sun’s surface—or why it can violently eject huge volumes of plasma that can mess with Earth’s magnetic field and scramble power grids. ...air turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere blurs our view of it, making it hard to discern fine details. Now, using an adaptive optics system installed at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO), the authors of a new  Nature Astronomy  study have removed this blur—producing  the clearest images and videos to date of the Sun’s atmosphere . In  a statement , BBSO optical engineer and study co-author Nicolas Gorceix likened the new technology to “a pumped-up autofocus and optical image stabilization in your smartphone camera, but correcting for the errors in the atmosphere rather than the user’s shaky hands.” ...researchers also captured a phenomenon known as coronal rain, where city-size droplets of hot plasma in the Sun’s corona...

By Dan Falk , Smithsonian Magazine.  Excerpt: The casual observer may envision the night sky as being static: When we look at Orion ...or the stars that make up the Big Dipper, our view is very similar to what our grandparents, or even  their  grandparents, would have seen.... But ...when astronomers look at the sky more closely, countless “transient” phenomena come to light ...variable stars, ...supernovas...; and thousands of objects too faint to see with the unaided eye, like asteroids, move steadily across the sky. ...The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, nearing completion ...in northern Chile, ...with a primary mirror 28 feet across and a 3.2-gigapixel camera, will sweep across the sky night after night, requiring a mere five seconds to reposition itself after each 15-second exposure. ...its large field of view—encompassing an area equivalent to 40 full moons—and its ability to move swiftly, the telescope will scan the entire visible sky every three days. ...The camera, to...

https://www.science.org/content/article/seeking-clear-skies-and-quiet-astronomers-put-telescopes-u-s-moon-lander By DANIEL CLERY , Science. Excerpt: Small scopes on IM-1 mission would be first optical and radio observatories on the lunar surface. ...Astronomers have long eyed the Moon as  a good spot to do their work . Its far side, protected from Earth’s hectic radio noise, is perfect for picking up faint signals from the distant universe. To see infrared signals ... Put the telescope into one of the deep craters at the lunar poles that never receive any sunlight and its sensors will benefit from the crater’s permanent chill....

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/science/astronomy-webb-telescope.html By  Dennis Overbye , The New York Times.  Excerpt: So far it’s been eye candy from heaven: The black vastness of space teeming with enigmatic, unfathomably distant blobs of light. Ghostly portraits of Neptune, Jupiter and other neighbors we thought we knew already. Nebulas and galaxies made visible by the penetrating infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope. ...For three days in December, some 200 astronomers filled an auditorium at the institute to hear and discuss the first results from the telescope. ...Galaxies that, even in their relative youth, had already spawned supermassive black holes. Atmospheric studies of some of the seven rocky exoplanets orbiting Trappist 1, a red dwarf star that might harbor habitable planets. (Data suggest that at least two of the exoplanets lack the bulky primordial hydrogen atmospheres that would choke off life as we know it, but they may have skimpy atmosph...

https://www.science.org/content/article/all-seeing-telescope-will-snap-exploding-stars-may-spy-hidden-world By Daniel Clery, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Array of 900 instruments will make movies of heavens, revealing short-lived and fast-changing events. ...Argus aims to achieve its unique vision with hundreds of off-the-shelf telescopes, each just 20 centimeters across and watching a different patch of sky. The final array will match the light-gathering power of a telescope with a single 5-meter mirror, which typically costs hundreds of millions of dollars, but cheap components should keep Argus’s cost below $20 million, Law says. The challenge will come in stitching together the array’s 900 images into a single, seamless movie of the night sky.… 

https://webbtelescope.org/news/news-releases By NASA, ESA, Canadian Space Agency.  Excerpt: The first images and spectroscopic data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have revealed unprecedented and detailed views of the universe. Webb’s first images and spectra, including downloadable files, can be found at  https://webbtelescope.org/news/first-images .… See zoomable image of Webb's First Deep Field (very early galaxies); Deepest Image of Universe ; Spectrum of an exoplanet ; Southern Ring Nebula (dying star); Stephan’s Quintet (merging galaxies); star-forming region NGC 3324  in the Carina Nebula; and Science Magazine article  Webb telescope wows with first images .

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/science/space/marcia-rieke-james-webb-telescope.html By Mark A. Stein , The New York Times interview.  Excerpt: When the James Webb Space Telescope sent its first images to Earth, no one was more excited than Marcia J. Rieke, who oversaw the design and construction of its camera. ...We’ve gotten the first images and we’re super happy. The entire Webb team is ecstatic at how well the first steps of taking images and aligning the telescope are proceeding. ... When did the astronomy bug bite you? As a kid, I read astronomy and science fiction books from the public library and became enchanted with the idea of visiting other planets. When I was in junior high, I worked as a babysitter and saved money to buy myself a telescope. ... This was in the late 1960s. How was it to be a woman in your field back then? My entering class was one of the first ones where M.I.T. made a big push to get more women accepted. In my class, there were something like 73 w...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/01/25/berkeley-astronomers-to-put-new-space-telescope-through-its-paces/ By  Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: ...Following the six-month-long commissioning phase, 13 teams chosen by NASA will take the new [James Webb Space] telescope [JWST] for a spin, putting its instruments through their paces by targeting astronomical objects that will be the major focus of scientists during the telescope’s planned 10 years of operation, and probably much longer. “To have two of the 13 led by people at Berkeley was pretty exceptional,” said [Imke] de Pater, a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School and Distinguished Professor Emerita of astronomy and earth and planetary science who wrote her proposal in 2017 before her retirement from teaching last year. Given the JWST’s primary mission to study dim, distant galaxies and faint exoplanets, the observations planned by de Pater and her team of about 50 astronomers may seem out of character...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/01/24/webb-space-telescope-final-destination/ By  Joel Achenbach , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: NASA’s long-delayed, $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble, has been cruising for a month, deploying a vast sun shield and 18 gold-plated mirrors while overcoming a long list of potential snags. It will study the evolution of galaxies and provide new looks at worlds in our own solar system. ...The final course correction, the third engine burn since launch, placed the Webb in a  gravitationally stable position known as L2 , where it will always be roughly 1 million miles from Earth on the opposite side of our planet from the sun. ...the launch itself and two subsequent engine burns were so efficient that the Webb did not expend very much fuel to get where it is going. The extra fuel will prolong the lifetime of the telescope by years, well beyond its official 10-year target. “We doubled the mission life...

https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-s-webb-telescope-takes-flight-christmas-gift-astronomers-everywhere Daniel Clery, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Infrared scope will target alien worlds and the universe’s first galaxies—if it survives a month of nerve-racking maneuvers ...The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, an instrument  expected to revolutionize astronomy  by gathering light from the atmospheres of alien worlds and the universe’s first galaxies, launched at 7:20 a.m. EST on a sultry Christmas morning from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana. Some 30 minutes after launch, the telescope detached from the top of its Ariane 5 rocket and deployed its solar array, which is needed to charge its batteries and support communication with Earth. Webb is now en route to its observing station, a gravitational balance point known as L2 at 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Before it gets there, mission controllers will have a tense month, as they unfurl parts of the ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/us/green-bank-west-virginia-quiet-zone.html Source:   By Dan Levin, The New York Times; Photographs by Annie Flanagan. Excerpt: GREEN BANK, W.Va. ...when a Facebook fad had people all over the globe dumping ice water on their heads a few summers ago, Charity Warder, now a senior at Pocahontas County High School, was late to the game. Sure, Charity has an iPhone, but she uses it mostly as a clock and a calculator. She makes phone calls from a landline, and she rarely texts her friends. Texting and driving? “It’s not a thing here,” she said. When Charity wants to get online at home, she sits at her family’s desktop computer, which has a broadband connection that is so sluggish, it takes minutes to load a YouTube video. ...Welcome to Green Bank, population 143, where Wi-Fi is both unavailable and banned and where cellphone signals are nonexistent. The near radio silence is a requirement for those living close to the town’s most prominent and dem...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/exoplanets-tess-nasa.html Source:   By Dennis Overbye, The New York Times. Excerpt: NASA’s new planet-hunting machine, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is racking up scores of alien worlds. Less than a quarter of the way through a two-year search for nearby Earthlike worlds, TESS has already discovered 203 possible planets, according to George R. Ricker, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the leader of the project. Three of those candidates already have been confirmed as real planets by ground-based telescopes. ...All of these worlds would be located within 300 light years from here, our cosmic backyard, and close enough to be inspected by future telescopes, such as NASA’s ever-upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, for signs of atmospheres, habitability and, perhaps, life. ...In the last three decades, and aided by NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, astronomers have concluded tha...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/cosmic-conundrum-disks-gas-and-dust-supposedly-form-planets-don-t-seem-have-goods Source:   By Adam Mann, Science Magazine. Excerpt: Astronomers have a problem on their hands: How can you make planets if you don’t have enough of the building blocks? A new study finds that protoplanetary disks—the envelopes of dust and gas around young stars that give rise to planets—seem to contain orders of magnitude too little material to produce the planets. “This work is telling us that we really have to rethink our planetary formation theories,” says astronomer Gijs Mulders of the University of Chicago in Illinois, who was not involved in the research. ...The brightness of radio waves emitted by dust in the disk can be used to give a reasonable estimate of its overall mass. ...In the new study, astronomers led by Carlo Manara of the European Southern Observatory in Munich, Germany, used [Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA)] to compare the masses of...

https://eos.org/articles/how-well-can-the-webb-telescope-detect-signs-of-exoplanet-life Source:    By Lucas Joel, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: ...what NASA’s next-generation, space-based telescope will be able to do: “see the first light of the universe, watch galaxies collide, see stars and planets being born, find and study exoplanets.” ...recent research suggests that the [James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)] might have a tricky time detecting at least one telltale sign of life: oxygen in an exoplanet’s atmosphere. ... Noah Planavsky, a biogeochemist at Yale University, and a team of researchers recently found that a planet’s atmosphere with an extremely small amount of oxygen can still support life. This finding means there could be planets that have only minute oxygen levels—but that nonetheless harbor life—that would appear to be dead to JWST. ...JWST was not originally designed to scan distant planets for their oxygen concentrations. ...JWST’s oxygen-spotting prospects may be di...

https://eos.org/features/the-kepler-revolution Source:   By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The Kepler Space Telescope will soon run out of fuel and end its mission. Here are nine fundamental discoveries about planets aided by Kepler in the 9 years since its launch. ...Kepler Space Telescope, a small spacecraft that opened a large window to the many thousands of exoplanets strewn throughout the Milky Way ...was exhibiting the first signs of low fuel and ... would be functional for only a few more months. Its fuel tank hit critically low levels on 2 July, and mission scientists put Kepler into a no-fuel hibernation mode until its latest round of data can be downloaded on 2 August. ...1. Planets Are Everywhere, Equally. ...Through its unblinking gaze, Kepler discovered 4,571 planetary signatures, 2,327 of which have been confirmed as actual exoplanets. . ..2. The Solar System May Not Be Unique. ...With the help of an artificial intelligence algorithm, Kepler discover...

Source:  Lauren Sommer, NASA The new SOFIA observatory [Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy] isn't your average NASA project. Engineers took a 30-year old 747 airplane, cut a hole in the side and installed a 17-ton telescope. Most telescopes are either on the ground or somewhere in orbit, but SOFIA falls somewhere in the middle, flying around at about 40,000 feet. science.kqed.org/quest/audio/up-all-night-on-nasas-flying-telescope/