Excerpt from The Boy Who Reached for the Stars: A Memoir by Elio Morillo. Published by HarperOne. Copyright © 2022 HarperCollins.

On September 20, 2017, Category 5 Hurricane María hit my beloved Puerto Rico, hovering over the island for the next 48 hours, uprooting trees, causing power and phone outages, and inflicting catastrophic devastation throughout the land. It was a terrifying stretch of time when those of us with loved ones in the path of this

destruction could only hope and pray they were okay. As we waited to get any type of news, my fix-it mentality kicked in—I needed to do something to channel my helplessness into action. I joined forces with a Puerto Rican who worked in another team at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory to begin collecting donations, so we would be ready to ship them out as soon as it was possible. Relief washed over us both when the worry laden silence was finally broken and we heard from our respective families and friends. More than anything, they had suffered material damage to their homes and surrounding streets, but everyone within our circles was okay otherwise. Rosa and Sonia described the experience as a powered-on jet engine sucking everything up into the air.

As more news was released of the extent of the damage people had suffered, my friend and I continued to organize donation efforts in Los Angeles. It was all we could do at the time. I had to carry my worry while I continued to work. I was assigned to avionics and thermal functions testing. In simple terms, the rover has two brains: its main day-to-day brain and what I call its lizard brain. The lizard brain is always running in the background, ready for fight or flight. It checks to make sure that the main computer, or main brain, is working well. If something goes south with the main brain, then the lizard brain can go through particular states to keep the system at a basic level of safety, putting the rover in a partially autonomous configuration that allows us time to figure out what to input to safely reconfigure its hardware.

The rover’s thermal behaviors are what helps keep it alive overnight, when Mars temperatures can drop to −100°F or lower, depending on the season. There are particular instruments and mechanisms that can only operate within a specific range of temperatures.

If they become too cold, we must be able to heat them up. If they’re too warm, we have to stop using them or actively cool them down to the range we want them to operate in. As we gradually entered an all-hands-on-deck phase ahead of our July 2020 launch date, I knew that if I was going to be an effective and successful member of the team, I needed to make the conscious decision to put my work first, but not before making my all-important pit stop to spend Christmas with my family.

This time we met up in Florida. My grandparents, who didn’t travel often, joined us from New York. And I got to reunite with Sonia and Robert, who were temporarily living in the area while they sorted through Hurricane María’s damage back home. While my abuelo made sure the TV and music were set up and ready for our gathering, my abuela got busy in the kitchen, whipping up her famous casuela or caldo de bola together with extra sides to keep us all fed, full, and happy. My tías and tíos would give them a hand while making fun of each other and roasting my cousins. And a round of Telefunken (a game similar to rummy) was always in order, with bets of up to two dollars per person per round.

The highlight of this break wasn’t just spending quality time with my relatives and chosen family; it was also getting the chance to take my 91-year-old grandfather and my brother to the Kennedy Space Center—a first for the three of us. Walking into the center and suddenly being in the presence of all this antiquated hardware took my breath away. The exhibit featuring the Saturn V launch vehicle made me feel so small. I was mesmerized by how the 1950s team was able to design the stunning hardware displayed before me with the limited technology they had access to in comparison to what we have now. Sure, they had a relatively bigger budget and thousands of people working on one problem, which is not a luxury we enjoy, but they didn’t have our software and automated procedures, and they were doing it all for the first time. As if taking all of this in wasn’t enough, being there as a NASA engineer, walking the entire center by my grandfather’s side, with me as our tour guide, explaining each piece before us, was an unparalleled full-circle moment for me. I stopped several times, glanced at my grandfather, and quietly asked, “Abuelo, are you okay? Would you like us to sit down for a little while to rest?” but he outright refused any break, likely pushed forward by a sense of pride for his walking abilities as well as the sense of wonder that had taken hold of us all as we witnessed this history-making equipment. It was an unequivocal reminder of the legacy I was now helping build with the Mars 2020 mission.

Inspired by the history I had witnessed at the Kennedy Center, and with a renewed sense of purpose, I was more eager than ever to dive even deeper into the mission at stake. February 2018 found me interacting with the Ingenuity helicopter for the first time, more specifically its base station, a component of the helicopter system that would live on the rover. This is the piece of hardware that would communicate with the helicopter on Mars. We were developing the capabilities, the hardware, all of it, to fulfill a technology demonstration to test the first powered flight on Mars, but NASA HQ still hadn’t given the okay to add it to the Mars 2020 mission. So we were operating with the hope this green light would eventually be given, and we kept plowing ahead on the rover side, considering how we’d carry the helicopter, how we’d communicate with it, how we’d operate it from this base station. Initially, many of the people on the integration side of the rover were against the idea of integrating the helicopter as a separate system, because that meant it would also have its own separate battery. What if its battery caught fire while cruising through space or on the Mars surface? How would that damage the rover itself? “There’s no way the helicopter will work” was one line of thought. The other: “There’s no way you’ll be able to get all of this work done in time.” And the third: “This helicopter will be a distraction from the rest of the science the rover has to accomplish.” Was it a risk to do this tremendous amount of work for a helicopter that might never launch? Yes, but it was one some of us were willing to take.

As the summer neared, I set my mind on Puerto Rico and the risks and sacrifices they had been forced to take when Hurricane María hit their shores. The island had far from recovered from the damage sustained a little less than a year earlier, and my colleague (turned girlfriend) and I were still eager to help in any way we could. I decided to use my social media to reach out to teachers in Puerto Rico to see how we could help that summer. I quickly received a reply from a University of Michigan friend whose mom had a colleague, Marisa, in need of some help. With the community’s blessing, she and her husband had decided to take over an abandoned school in Los Naranjos, a neighborhood in Vega Baja, located near Dorado, and turn it into a community center. The local residents had lost so much during the hurricane that she was hell-bent on making a difference. Now they were looking for volunteer to get the center off the ground. My girlfriend and I created a three-day STEM program for kids between the ages of eight and 15, called Ingenieros del Futuro (Engineers of the Future). The activities we planned introduced the kids to basic engineering concepts and revolved around three themes: robotics, electricity, and rockets. I set up a GoFundMe to help pay for some of the materials, while we paid for everything else out of pocket.

When we arrived, seeing the devastation firsthand threw me off my orbit and momentarily pushed me into an impotent void. As I painstakingly drove through intersections where the traffic lights had gone dark due to the lack of power, I slowly took in the trees scattered around the area like giant twigs, displaced rooftops, cut-down electricity cables, and attempted to store this harrowing data in a corner of my mind so I could find my way back to our main focus: the kids. I’d give myself time to process this emotional oscillation later, when I returned home.

We immediately got the kids working and building several projects—a basic robot, an electric car that used a solar panel to power it, a satellite model, and a wind turbine—to illustrate robotics, sustainable energy, and space exploration. We also scheduled outdoor time to give their brains a break and burn some energy playing soccer with us. For the last project of their three-day journey, I taught them how to build a rocket with a two-liter plastic bottle and a few other readily available components. I had also purchased a bottle launch system that pumped up the rockets and had a trigger that allowed each kid to send their own rocket into the air.

Once it reached a certain height, a parachute they had built into their system with their own hands deployed, safely landing their creation. Their excitement during each launch, descent, and landing, about further engaging with technology and pursuing opportunities in STEM, gave me hope for the people of Puerto Rico. The island currently has to import most of its food, despite once being fully reliant on its own agriculture sector. With agritech becoming more accessible, combined with the development of hydroponics, vertical farming, and more, I see this as a potentially booming sector for Puerto Rico in the future. But they will need dedicated STEM workers to make it happen. The same goes for the ever-controversial power grid. As energy storage and solar, hydro, and wind power become more accessible, microgrids will thrive, and so will the jobs related to those renewable systems.

Sinergia Los Naranjos is still active in the community. Marisa successfully launched a kitchen for folks to run catering businesses, and her husband, Ricardo, runs a reef restoration effort where many of the kids participate and get scuba training. Workshops occur in partnership with local student groups from nearby universities, mostly through grassroots funding and efforts. These kids have the power to build a better future, and I hope to continue to be able to come alongside them and encourage these developments through outreach, philanthropy, and policy influence.

By the spring of 2019, I was working with a few team members to test the capability of our rover to charge the helicopter battery through its base station while traversing space. Batteries, including those in computers and cell phones, left uncharged for a long period of time lose their properties and can’t regain their full charging potential.

Similarly, overcharging a battery and leaving it stored for a long period of time will degrade its lifetime. We had to figure out the sweet spot for the helicopter battery, then find how to measure that charge and, based on that, how to charge it from the rover battery.

Once we figured this out through tests and failures and finally verified what worked, we had to come up with the sequence of steps that needed to be taken to charge the helicopter while flying through space. It was a complicated set of tests that took up a lot of our time but was essential to the helicopter’s functionality and safety.

That summer I began to write and execute integration procedures for the helicopter deployment system, which is the assembly at the bottom of the rover that would hold the helicopter and deploy it. The system consisted of a tiny robotic arm with a motor that would keep the helicopter upright so that it could be successfully dropped onto the Martian surface. After testing this capability and gathering the necessary parameters, we determined that we could indeed deploy it on Mars. A short while after this, JPL finally approved the addition of the helicopter to the Mars 2020 mission. We got the green light. Like most times in my life, the risk proved to be worth taking.

Buy The Boy Who Reached for the Stars by Elio Morillo here.

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NASA’s upcoming Psyche mission will send a small probe to a unique metal asteroid—a curious object that may be the exposed heart of a former planet. But to prepare for the 280-million-mile journey, engineers have had to attend to a million little details over the course of years of planning and construction. Working those out took more time than anticipated: NASA delayed Psyche’s launch last year, prompting concerns about the mission’s future and triggering an investigation into what caused the set back. On Monday, NASA announced that Psyche is thriving and on track for a new launch date in October 2023.

“The 2023 launch date is credible, and the probability of mission success is high,” said A. Thomas Young, chair of the independent review board that assessed Psyche’s missteps, at a news conference. NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) Director Laurie Leshin confirmed the fall blast-off: Psyche is “green across the board, and on track for October launch.” Of the 18 weeks to go until launch, seven are buffer time—a pretty impressive margin for such an intense engineering project.

Psyche, announced in 2017, was first delayed in June 2022 when issues with its flight software arose during testing. NASA commissioned the review board soon after, which delivered its findings last fall. The review cited issues across the entire laboratory—understaffing, a lack of experienced managerial oversight, budget strain, and the COVID-19 pandemic—as factors contributing to the mission’s woes. JPL’s reckoning with this review had ripple effects, including the controversial indefinite pause of the VERITAS mission to Venus.

[Related: 5 ways we know DART crushed that asteroid (but not literally)]

Now, in May 2023, the review board has reassessed JPL’s readiness. The Psyche debacle may have raised questions about the ability of JPL to juggle building more than a dozen spacecraft, but NASA officials emphasized the concerns plaguing the center’s operations has been addressed. The progress made at JPL is “not only outstanding, but world-class as determined by our review board,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

JPL’s changes include hiring more experienced staff (including luring back talent that left JPL for commercial spaceflight companies), reorganizing the engineering teams to focus on high-priority work, and updating their hybrid work policy to bring more people back in-person to the lab. “We’ve overcome our workforce issues, our missions are staffed,” said Leshin.

[Related: The asteroid that created Earth’s largest crater may have been way bigger than we thought]

If Psyche leaves Earth as scheduled in the fall, it will arrive at the asteroid 16 Psyche in 2029. The mission will hopefully reveal information about how planets form, and will confirm if 16 Psyche is the leftover metal core of a failed planet as hypothesized. Some companies even see the Psyche mission as a potential first step toward mining asteroids for precious metals, as the space rock contains approximately 10 quintillion dollars worth of materials. 

And things are looking up for other missions, too—especially since JPL recently delivered the NISAR Earth-radar satellite on schedule and is making good progress for next year’s launch of Europa Clipper. The laboratory’s strong progress is a good sign for the hopeful restart of VERITAS, which would be a huge win for planetary scientists and a monumental return to our sister planet.

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Million of years ago, before land connected Earth’s North and South American continents, about 21 million light years away an aged and bloated star gave up the ghost in dramatic fashion, dying in a cataclysmic supernova explosion.

On Friday, May 19, the light from that massive explosion finally reached the telescope of Japanese amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki, who alerted the larger astronomical community: The supernova is now officially named SN2023ixf. 

”Those photons that left that exploding star 20 million years ago have just now washed upon our shores from this long, long voyage through the cosmos,” says Grant Tremblay, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Institute Center for Astrophysics, who has been actively spreading the word of the supernova on social media. “It’s happening now, in that we’re watching this thing finally explode, but the star has been dead for 20 million years.”

SN2023ixf is the closest supernova of its kind to Earth to pop off in five years, and the second closest in the past decade, according to NASA. That makes SN2023ixf a rare opportunity for astronomers to study the fiery death of a star. While too faint to be seen by the naked eye, the supernova should be visible to modest hobbyist telescopes, according to Tremblay. 

Because the supernova will fade rapidly, stargazers have to seize the opportunity to observe it, including at multiple wavelengths.“The whole global community has rallied, from community astronomers to big multibillion-dollar space telescopes,” Tremblay says. 

How to spot supernova SN2023ixf 

SN2023ixf exploded in M101, also known as the Pinwheel galaxy, which is located in the night sky near the constellation Ursa Major. M101 is a bright spiral galaxy that lies face-on from the perspective of Earth and is a member of the Messier catalog of celestial objects, making it a common target for backyard astronomers. A 4.5-inch telescope should be sufficient to view the supernova, which will appear as a bright point of light, according to Sky and Telescope. You can find M101 by first finding Mizar, the star at the bend in Ursa Major’s tail, and following the five stars that lead away from it. Or, to be more precise, you want to point your telescope at a right ascension of 14:03:38.580 and a declination of +54:18:42.10. 

[Related: Astronomers just confirmed a new type of supernova]

Alternatively, the Virtual Telescope Project, a worldwide network of quality amateur telescopes, will livestream an observation of the supernova beginning at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on May 26. 

“M101 is imaged by human beings every single night, all around the world, from hobbyists to all sky observatories like [The Sloan Digital Sky Survey], and so it was inevitable that this thing would be found eventually. But I just loved that Itagaki found yet another supernova,” Tremblay says. Itagaki is not a professional scientist, but he is the co-author of more than a dozen scientific papers based on his supernova observations. Tremblay says Itagaki has a “legendary” ability to spot supernovas, and he’s collecting these “discoveries like Thanos and infinity stones.” Itagaki’s findings include the 2018 supernova SN 2018zd, which proved to be an entirely new type of supernova in the universe. 

Catching the bright burst of SN2023ixf on May 19, Itagki submitted his discovery to the International Astronomical Union’s transient name server website. From there, professional astronomers picked up the call, and within a few days, researchers began pointing major ground and space telescopes at the supernova, including the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-ray observatory.

All those telescopes will be measuring SN2023ixf’s light curve, “meaning the brightening and fading of this target in multiple wavelengths,” Tremblay says, on the spectrum from X-rays to optical light to infrared.

Lessons from an exploded sun

Those observations will help scientists characterize the star that exploded to create SN2023ixf, and more precisely define the type of supernova it is. Astronomers can already tell that SN2023ixf is a Type II, or “core collapse” supernova. This occurs when a massive star exhausts its nuclear fuel. The nuclear fusion reactions in its core can no longer push outward against the force of the star’s own gravity. The star’s core collapses in on itself, and then explodes outward in less than a second. 

“This shock wave propagates outward, and it plows up gas in the ambient surroundings that can light up in all different wavelengths,” Tremblay says. Studying how that afterglow evolves over time will tell scientists about the mass and make up of the late star.

And the makeup of the star is connected to life on Earth—and life anywhere else in the cosmos, if it exists. Stars increase chemical complexity throughout their life cycles: They formed from primordial hydrogen after the Big Bang, fusing it first into helium and then into heavier elements right up to iron. When those stars die in supernovas, the intense heat and pressure form all of the known elements heavier than iron, and seed them throughout the cosmos, providing the raw material for rocky planets and life itself. “The story of life in the universe can be reduced, in many ways, to the story of increasing complexity,” Tremblay says.

The explosion of SN2023ixf is literally shedding light on the process that brought human beings into existence. Though the supernova will rapidly fade, it will remain an object of study for years to come, according to Tremblay. In the meantime, he says, the worldwide excitement around the supernova “is a beautiful illustration of the fact that the global public so effortlessly shares in our wonderment of the cosmos. An exploding star in a distant galaxy just lights up people’s hearts.”

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Our solar system has a suite of eight planets—rocky Mars and Earth, the ice giants, and massive gas planets—but other stars often have a much smaller group. Some suns have just one exoplanet orbiting around them. These loner worlds are often one specific type: A huge gas giant that orbits very close to its star, known as a hot Jupiter.

A newly discovered exoplanet, however, has challenged this view, showing that maybe not all hot Jupiters go solo. Last week, astronomers announced that a hot Jupiter orbiting a star 400 light years away has a pal: It shares its solar system with WASP-84c, a rocky planet so large it’s known as a super-Earth. This discovery was made public as a preprint, a research paper that has yet to undergo peer review, and submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society for official publication.

Hot Jupiters are a weird kind of planet. We don’t have any in our own solar system. Until the first was spotted, astronomers never expected them to exist. Gas giants like Jupiter usually only form far away from their stars, where things are cool enough for gas to stay safe from blazing solar heat. If a Jupiter-like planet has to be born at a distance, then, how can it get so close to its star? 

Astronomers have three main theories for how this happens. Two are gentle, and one is catastrophic. First, a hot Jupiter could move inward from its birthplace due to little gravitational nudges from the protoplanetary disk, a collection of dust and gas used to form planets in a star’s youth. Second, maybe we’re wrong about the theory that Jupiter-like planets must form far from stars. Instead, these planets are simply born where we see them. Both of these scenarios would allow hot Jupiters to have smaller friend planets hanging out nearby.

[Related: Ridiculously hot gas giant exoplanet is about to be swallowed by its dying sun]

But the third option is the most dynamic. Jupiters could form far out, but then encounter other planets that change the gas giants’ orbits. The gravity of the other planets would force a hot Jupiter into a stretched out, elliptical path, and then the gravity of the star would pull the gas giant in close, resulting in a circular, super-short orbit. In this violent dance, any low mass planets would be destroyed—creating the lonely hot Jupiter.

The best theory for the origin of this particular hot Jupiter, named WASP-84b, is the first—that a disk helped shepherd the planet through the solar system. Previous observations showed that the gas giant’s spin is aligned with the star’s, a sign that the large planet migrated within the protoplanetary disk instead of pinballing around with other planets. The discovery of super-Earth WASP-84c now adds more evidence to the case that this hot Jupiter formed with a nudge, not a planet-destroying bang—and that scenario may be more common than previously thought.

WASP-84c joins a growing list of smaller planetary buddies to hot Jupiters: WASP-47 b, Kepler 730 b, and WASP-132 b, to name a few. “The discovery of low-mass planetary companions like WASP-84c suggests that not all hot Jupiter systems formed under violent scenarios, as previously thought,” says lead author Gracjan Maciejewski from the Institute of Astronomy of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland.

Maciejewski and his colleagues used NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to spot WASP-84c. TESS hunts for exoplanets using the transit method, where a telescope watches a star for teensy dips in its brightness, caused by a dark planet passing in front. 

[Related: A deep-space telescope spied an exoplanet so hot it can vaporize iron]

WASP-84c “was too small in radius to have been discovered by the original WASP survey, who discovered the hot Jupiter,” according to Caltech astronomer Juliette Becker, who is not affiliated with the new discovery. “It’s a great example of what TESS can do,” she adds.

With the transit method, astronomers can figure out a planet’s dimensions. However, to find out how much it weighs, they need different data, from another exoplanet-detecting technique known as the radial velocity method. When WASP-84c’s discoverers gathered this extra data, they determined that the planet has about 15 times the mass of Earth. Like our Blue Marble, it’s probably made of iron and rocks, too.

Jonathan Brande, a University of Kansas astronomer not involved in the discovery, thinks such discoveries will become even more common as the James Webb Space Telescope brings in new exoplanet data, deepening our understanding of how these planet pairs came to be. “I would not be surprised if we see further results on this system in the near future,” he says.

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High altitude balloons have drawn a lot of fire lately. In February, the US military shot down a spy balloon potentially operated by the Chinese government and an “unidentified aerial phenomenon” that was later revealed to likely be a hobbyist balloon.

So, when people caught sight of another large balloon in the southern hemisphere in early May, there was concern it could be another spy device. Instead, it represents the future of astronomy: balloon-borne telescopes that peer deep into space without leaving the stratosphere.

“We’re looking up, not down,” says William Jones, a professor of physics at Princeton University and head of NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) team. Launched from Wānaka, New Zealand, on April 15, the nearly 10-foot-tall telescope has already circled the southern hemisphere four times on a football stadium-sized balloon made from polyethylene film. Its three onboard cameras also took stunning images of the Tarantula Nebula and Antennae galaxies to rival those of the Hubble Space Telescope. The findings from SuperBIT could help scientists unravel one of the greatest mysteries of the universe: the nature of dark matter, a theoretically invisible material only known from its gravitational effects on visible objects.

[Related: $130,000 could buy you a Michelin-star meal with a view of the stars]

Scientists can use next-level observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope to investigate dark matter, relying on their large mirrors and positions outside Earth’s turbulent atmosphere to obtain pristine views of extremely distant celestial objects. But developing a space telescope and launching it on a powerful rocket is expensive. Lofting Hubble into orbit cost around $1.5 billion, for instance, and sending JWST to Lagrange point 2 cost nearly $10 billion.

SuperBIT took just $5 million to launch—a price cut stemming from the relative cheapness of balloons versus rockets and the lower barrier of entry for skilled workers to build the system.

“The whole thing is run by students. That’s what makes projects such as these so nimble and able to do so much with limited resources,” Jones says, referring to the SuperBIT collaborative between Princeton, the University of Durham in the UK, and the University of Toronto in Canada. “We have no professional engineers or technicians working on this full time—only the grad students have the luxury of being able to devote their full-time attention to the project.”

SuperBIT is not the first telescope carried aloft with a balloon: That honor goes to Stratoscope I, which was built in 1957 by another astronomy group at Princeton. But SuperBIT is one of a handful of new observatories made possible by 20 years of NASA research into so-called super pressure balloons. That work finally culminated in tests flights beginning in 2015 and the groundbreaking launch of SuperBIT.

Traditional balloons contain a lifting gas that expands as the sun heats it and as atmospheric pressure changes with altitude. That changes the volume of the envelope and, in turn, the balloon’s buoyancy, making it impossible to maintain a constant altitude over time.

Superpressure balloons keep the lifting gas, typically helium, pressurized inside a main envelope so that volume and buoyancy remain constant across day and night. The balloon then uses a smaller balloon—a ballonet—inside or beneath the main envelope as a ballast, filling or emptying the pocket of compressed air to change altitude and effectively steer the ship.

The super pressure balloon carrying SuperBIT can maintain an altitude of 108,000 feet (higher than 99.2 percent of Earth’s atmosphere) while carrying the 3,500-pound payload of scientific instruments. Unlike JWST and other missions, the purpose of the SuperBIT telescope isn’t to see farther or wider swaths of the universe or to detect exoplanets. Instead, it’s hunting for signs of a more ubiquitous and enigmatic entity.  

“Dark matter is not made of any of the elements or particles that we are familiar with through everyday observations,” Jones says. That said, there’s a lot of it around us: It might make up about 27 percent of the universe. “We know this through the gravitational influence that it has on the usual matter—stars and gas, and the like—that we can see,” which make up around 5 percent of the universe, Jones explains.

Scientists estimate that the remaining 67 percent of the cosmos is made of dark energy, another largely mysterious material not to be confused with dark matter. Whereas the gravity of dark matter may help pull galaxies together and structure the way they populate the cosmos, dark energy may be responsible for the accelerating expansion of the entire universe.

Researchers probe extreme forces where dark matter might exist and calculate its presence by observing galactic clusters so massive their gravity bends the light that passes by them from more distant objects—a technique known as gravitational lensing. Astronomers can use this approach to turn galaxies into a sort of magnifying lens to see more distant objects than they normally could (something JWST excels at). It can also reveal the mass of the galactic clusters that make up the “lens,” including the amount of dark matter around them.

“After measuring how much dark matter there is, and where it is, we’re trying to figure out what dark matter is,” says Richard Massey, a member of the SuperBIT science team and a professor of physics at Durham University. “We do this by looking at the few special places in the universe where lumps of dark matter happen to be smashing into each other.”

Those places include the two large Antennae galaxies, which are in the process of colliding about 60 million light-years from Earth. Massey and others have studied the Antennae galaxies using Hubble, but it “gives it a field of view too small to see the titanic collisions of dark matter,” Massey says. “So, we had to build SuperBIT.”

Like Hubble, SuperBIT sees light in the visible to ultraviolet range, or 300- to 1,000-nanometer wavelengths. But while Hubble’s widest field of view is less than a tenth of degree, SuperBIT’s field of view is wider at half a degree, allowing it to image wider swaths of the sky at once. That’s despite it having a smaller mirror (half a meter in diameter compared to Hubble’s 1.5 meters).

SuperBIT has another advantage over space telescopes. With less time from development to deployment and without complex accessories needed to protect it from radiation, extreme temperatures, and space debris, the SuperBIT team was able to use far more advanced camera sensors than those on existing space telescopes. Where Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 contains a pair of 8-megapixel sensors, Jones says, SuperBIT contains a 60-megapixel sensor. The balloon-carried telescope is also designed to float down on a parachute after the end of each flight, which means scientists can update the technology regularly from the ground.

“We’re currently communicating with SuperBIT live, 24 hours a day, for the next 100 days,” Massey says. “It has just finished its fourth trip around the world, experiencing the southern lights, turbulence over the Andes, and the quiet cold above the middle of the Pacific Ocean.” The team expects to retrieve the system sometime in late August, likely in southern Argentina, according to Jones.

[Related on PopSci+: Alien-looking balloons might be the next weapon in the fight against wildfires]

SuperBIT may just be the beginning. NASA has already funded the development of a Gigapixel class Balloon Imaging Telescope (GigaBIT), which will sport a mirror as wide as Hubble’s. Not only is it expected to be cheaper than any space telescope sensing the same spectrum of light, GigaBIT would also be “much more powerful than anything likely to be put into space in the near term,” Jones says.

As to whether SuperBIT will crack the mystery of just what dark matter is, it’s too early to tell. After a few flights, the grad students will have to pore over the project’s findings.

“What will the [data] tell us? Who knows! That’s the excitement of it—and also the guilty secret,” Massey says. “After 2,000 years of science, we still have absolutely no idea what the two most common types of stuff in the universe are, or how they behave.”

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Humans might fear the nuclear bomb, but it is not even a blip against what the cosmos can unleash. Take, for example, the gamma ray burst: a stark flash of light and radiation erupting from a colossal star in its death throes. Earlier this year, astronomers spotted a gamma ray burst that they’ve labeled “the brightest of all time.”

Yet a gamma ray burst is only a single exploding star. When far more mass is involved, the universe can set off even larger bangs. In a paper published May 11 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers announced what, in their words, is the most energetic astronomical event ever seen.

Still ongoing, this event isn’t as bright as a gamma ray burst—but, lasting far longer, it has unleashed far more energy into the universe. Although this explosion, an event named AT2021lwx, defies easy explanation, the astronomers who found it have an idea involving lucky black holes. If they’re right, their observatories may have sighted something like this event more than once before.

In a bit of irony, this “largest explosion ever seen” evaded astronomers’ detection for nearly a year. The Samuel Oschin Telescope, nestled at Palomar Observatory in the mountains northeast of San Diego, California, first picked up a brightening blip in June 2020. But as often happens in astronomy, a field inundated with data from a sky constantly bursting with activity, the event remained unnoticed.

Only in April 2021 did an automated system called Lasair bring AT2021lwx to human astronomers’ attention. By then, the blip in the sky had been steadily brightening for more than 300 days. While the blip was peculiar, astronomers thought little of it, until they estimated the object’s brightness by calculating how far away the event was: 8 billion light-years.

“That’s, suddenly, when we realized: ‘Hang on, this is something very, very unusual,’” says study author Philip Wiseman, an astronomer at the University of Southampton in the UK.

[Related: Astronomers now know how supermassive black holes blast us with energy]

“I haven’t seen anything changing brightness and becoming this bright on such a short timescale,” says Tonima Ananna, a black hole astrophysicist at Dartmouth College, who wasn’t an author.

At first, the authors didn’t know what to make of AT2021lwx. They asked their colleagues. Some thought it was a tidal disruption event, where a black hole violently tears apart a captured star. But this event was far, far brighter than any known star-eating episode. Others thought it was a quasar, a young galaxy with an active nucleus: a supermassive black hole churning out bright jets of radiation. But this event’s hundredfold surge in brightness was far greater than anything astronomers had seen in quasars.

“You have the tidal disruption people saying, ‘No, I don’t think it’s one of ours.’ You’ve got the quasar people saying, ‘No, I don’t think it’s one of ours.’ That’s where you have to start coming up with a new scenario,” Wiseman says.

Their new scenario also involves a black hole: a supermassive one, more than a million times the mass of the sun, at the heart of a galaxy. Normally, a supermassive black hole is surrounded by a gas accretion disc, drawn in by the immense gravity. Some supermassive black holes, like those in quasars, actively devour that gas; as they do, they glow in response. Others, like the one in the center of the Milky Way, are dormant, quiet, and dark.

Wiseman and his colleagues believe that, abruptly, a dormant black hole might suddenly find itself inundated by a very large quantity of gas—potentially thousands of times the mass of the sun. The black hole would respond to its newfound banquet by brilliantly awakening, bursting far more brightly than even an active counterpart.. 

Wiseman and his colleagues believe that such a windfall triggered AT2021lwx, causing a dormant supermassive black hole to light up the night.

“I think they make a compelling case that this is a supermassive black hole … suddenly being ‘switched on,’” says Ananna.

Astronomers might have seen accretion events like AT2021lwx before. Wiseman and his colleagues pored through past observations and found multiple needles in the haystack of astronomical data that resembled the record event. None of them were even close to this one’s brightness, but they also increased in luminosity along a similar pattern. These events occurred in galaxies known to have black holes at their centers, showering in streams of gas that fall inward.

[Related: Astronomers just caught a ‘micronova’—a small but mighty star explosion]

“There’s a chance that [the record event] is the same, but just the amount of gas that has been dumped on is much, much, much, much larger,” says Wiseman.

Wiseman and his colleagues plan to put their ideas to the test in the form of computer simulations. By doing this, they can learn if accretion events could have caused this record explosion and the other bright patterns they’d found.

Meanwhile, they’re planning to follow the trail they’ve found. AT2021lwx’s brightness has peaked and begun to steadily decline. They’ve begun watching the object’s X-ray emissions and plan to follow up with radio waves. Once the object has faded to black, they plan to zoom in with something like the Hubble Space Telescope, which can see if there’s a galaxy behind the burst—and what it looks like.

The need for more observations underscores that astronomers still have many unanswered questions about some of the universe’s most extreme events.

“There may be things out there already that have been larger and brighter, but because they are so slow, our detection algorithms never actually flagged them as being an explosion themselves—and they kind of just got lost,” Wiseman says.

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A team of more than 1,000 astronomers and college students just took a step closer to solving one of the long-lasting mysteries of astronomy: Why is the sun’s outer layer, known as the corona, so ridiculously hot? The solar surface is 10,000°F, but a thousand miles up, the sun’s corona flares hundreds of times hotter. It’s like walking across the room to escape an overzealous space heater, but you feel warmer far away from the source instead of cooler, totally contrary to expectations.

The research team used hundreds of observations of solar flares—huge ejections of hot plasma from our star’s surface—to determine what’s heating up the sun’s corona, in results published May 9 in The Astrophysical Journal. What’s really striking about this result, though, is how they did it: with the help of hundreds of undergrads taking physics classes at the University of Colorado, totaling a whopping 56,000 hours of work over multiple years.

Lead author James Paul Mason, research scientist and engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, calls this a “win-win-win scenario.” He adds, “We were able to harness a ton of brainpower and apply it to a real scientific challenge, the students got to learn firsthand what the scientific process looks like.”

[Related: Volunteer astronomers bring wonders of the universe into prisons]

The classroom project began in 2020, when University of Colorado physics professor Heather Lewandowski found herself teaching a class on experimental physics, which suddenly had to pivot online due to the COVID-19 pandemic—quite the challenge, especially for a hands-on science course. Luckily, Mason had an idea for a solar flare project that needed a lot of hands, and Lewandowski, who usually researches a totally different topic in quantum mechanics, saw that as an opportunity for her students. 

“The question of why the sun’s corona is so much hotter than the ‘surface’ of the sun is one of the main outstanding questions in solar physics,” says Lewandowski. There are two leading explanations for this dilemma, known as the coronal heating problem. One theory suggests that waves in the sun’s mega-sized magnetic field push heat into the corona. The other claims that small, unseen solar flares called nanoflares heat it up, like using a thousand matches instead of one big blow torch. 

Nanoflares are too small for our telescopes to spot, but by studying the sizes of other larger flares, scientists can estimate the prevalence of these little radiation bursts. And, although artificial intelligence is improving every day, automated programs can’t yet do the kind of analysis that Mason and Lewandowski needed. Groups of students in Lewandowski’s class each used data on a different solar flare, getting into nitty-gritty detail to measure how much energy each one dumped into the corona. Together, their results suggest nanoflares might not be powerful enough to heat up the corona to the wild temperatures we see.

[Related: Small ‘sparks’ on the sun could be key to forecasting dramatic solar weather]

The scientific result is only half of the news, though. Lewandowski and Mason pioneered a new way to bring real research into the classroom, giving students a way to not only learn about science, but do it themselves. This type of large-scale student research effort is more common in biology and chemistry, but was pretty much unheard of in physics—until now. “The students participated in all aspects of the research from literature review, meetings with the principal investigator, a proposal phase, data analysis, and peer review of their analysis,” says Lewandowski. The involvement of many students, and their work in groups, is also a reminder that “science is inherently a collaborative endeavor,” she adds.

“I hope that we inspire some professors out there to try this with their classes,” says Mason. “I’m excited to see what kinds of results they’re able to achieve.”

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Our asteroid belt is home to more than a million space rocks, varying in size from a dwarf planet to dust particles, which float between Jupiter and Mars. Astronomers have just discovered another such belt—but this one circles a different star, not our sun.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) detected this asteroid belt around the star Fomalhaut, only 25 light-years away. For years, scientists have studied Fomalhaut’s debris disk, a collection of rocky, icy, dusty bits from all the collisions that happen while planets are being created. This new data, published today in Nature Astronomy, shows the system in unprecedented detail, uncovering fingerprints of hidden worlds and evidence for planets smashing together.

Many telescopes have pointed to Fomalhaut over the years: the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in the high desert of Chile, and even the Hubble Space Telescope. Fomalhaut, which is much younger than our sun, may be a good likeness of our solar system near birth; since astronomers can’t time travel back to our sun’s formation, they instead observe other young stars, using these still-forming planetary systems as examples of what the process of making planets can look like.

Fomalhaut is an appealing choice to astronomers because it’s nearby, meaning it’s easier for astronomers to notice fine details. “This system was definitely one of the first we wanted to observe with JWST,” says co-author Marie Ygouf, research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

Before JWST, other observations revealed that Fomalhaut is surrounded by a ring of dust analogous to our own solar system’s Kuiper Belt, which contains all the little bits of ice and rock beyond Neptune. The new data from NASA’s superlative space telescope spot not only this outer ring, but also an inner ring more analogous to the asteroid belt. There’s a third feature, too—a giant clump of dust, lovingly referred to as the Great Dust Cloud. 

[Related: These 6 galaxies are so huge, they’ve been nicknamed ‘universe breakers’]

Between Fomalhaut’s outer Kuiper-Belt-like ring and its inner asteroid-belt-like ring is a gap. “The new gap that we see hints at the presence of an ice-giant mass planet, which would be an analog of what we see in the solar system,” like Neptune or Uranus, says lead author András Gáspár, astronomer at the University of Arizona. This unseen planet could be “carving out the gaps” via gravity, explains fellow Arizona astronomer and co-author Schuyler Wolff.

Fomalhaut’s asteroid belt has a curious tilt, appearing at a different angle from the outer ring, as though something knocked it off kilter. A knock, in fact, might explain the misalignment, the researchers say—a major collision could have tilted the asteroid belt, creating the massive dust cloud, too. 

All signs in Fomalhaut “point to a solar system that is alive and active, full of rocky bodies smashing into each other,” says co-author Jonathan Aguilar, staff scientist at Space Telescope Science Institute, home of JWST’s mission control.

JWST was uniquely suited to take these photos of Fomalhaut’s dust. The dust glows brightest in the mid-infrared, at long wavelengths unreachable by most other observatories. A particularly powerful telescope is necessary, too, to resolve enough details—and JWST is the only scope with both these features. The space telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) also has a coronagraph, a small dot to block out a bright star and reveal the surrounding dust.

“Mid-infrared wavelengths are so important for debris disk observations because that’s where you observe dust emission, and the distribution of dust tells you a lot about what’s going on,” says Aguilar. The new view of Fomalhaut “showcases the scientific power of JWST and MIRI even just a year into operations,” he adds.

[Related: NASA sampled a ‘fluffy’ asteroid that could hold clues to our existence]

It’s certainly interesting to see what our solar system may have looked like in its infancy—but Fomalhaut isn’t an exact clone. Fomalhaut’s Kuiper Belt and asteroid belt doppelgangers are more spread out and contain more material than those features in our solar system. Although Fomalhaut has more movement and smashing than our solar system does now, our planets had a similar phase in the distant past, known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. Astronomers hope debris disks seen by JWST will help them figure out the details of how solar systems are born, and how they grow up to look like our own set of planets.

“We are at this frontier of unexplored territory, and I’m especially excited to see what JWST finds towards planet-forming disks,” says University of Michigan astronomer Jenny Calahan, who was not involved in the new findings. “Looking at these JWST images I was reminded of the moment that I got glasses for the first time,” adds Calahan. “It just changes your whole perspective when the world (or a debris disk) comes into focus at a level that you aren’t used to.”

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Our Earth has siblings—the seven other planets in our solar system—but it doesn’t have a twin with which to share its ring of space. Earth sails through its orbit all alone. Other solar systems, though, might have zanier families that chase each other around a sun: twins, triplets, or even quattuorvigintuplets (that’s 24 Earth-sized planets in a single orbit!). 

Computer simulations by an international team of astronomers illustrated how two dozen planets can share the same orbit, in research published this spring in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. These wacky configurations can be stable for billions of years, even outliving the stars they’re around. It’s pretty unlikely that nature would create packed planetary orbits, though, which is why researchers suggest a detection of such a system could be a sign of intelligent alien life—possibly even an interstellar message that could exist for eons.

“Our paper explores one additional branch of possible planetary systems that could potentially exist,” says lead author Sean Raymond, CNRS Researcher at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux. “I love that it’s so unexpected and weird, and that so many planets can end up sharing the same orbit.”

Multiple planet systems, like our solar system, are often referred to as peas in a pod. But these co-orbiting planets could be “pearls on a necklace,” says University of Kansas astronomer Jonathan Brande, who was not affiliated with the new research.

Nobody had proposed observing two planets in the same orbit, though, until an article posted to the preprint server arXiv last week—but most exoplanet astronomers are skeptical, especially since the signal wasn’t seen in data from other major exoplanet-hunting telescopes like TESS. This paper was written by a group of amateur astronomers who captured observations with small, commercially-available telescopes. “I don’t think it’s the sort of thing you’d be able to pull off in your backyard,” says Brande, regarding the supposed detection. 

[Related: These 6 exoplanets somehow orbit their star in perfect rhythm]

There are a few known examples of co-orbits that involve smaller objects. Our solar system actually has a few such strange orbits, known as horseshoe or tadpole orbits, depending on their shapes. Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids—soon to be visited for the first time by the spacecraft Lucy—share the gas giant’s orbital path as tadpoles, oscillating around points before and after Jupiter in its track around the sun. Two of Saturn’s moons, Janus and Epimethus, orbit the ringed planet together in a horseshoe, periodically swapping places. 

Since objects in our solar system share orbits, it seems reasonable that there might be exoplanets out there that share paths as well. “There are plenty of exoplanet systems in which the planets seem to fill every available niche of stable real estate,” says Raymond. This new research pushes this concept to the extreme, seeing how many planets can cram into the same orbit and remain stable. 

The research team’s simulations also reveal that such co-orbiting planets would have distinct signals for astronomers here on Earth to observe. The Kepler Space Telescope and other space observatories can reveal so-called transit timing variations (TTVs), where the gravitational tug between nearby planets ever-so-slightly changes when a planet passes in front of its star. The TTVs from a system of 24 planets with the mass of Earth sharing an orbit would be large enough for astronomers to see, but it would take months to years of regular monitoring to notice the effect, according to NASA Jet Propulsion Lab astronomer Rob Zellem.

Although academics haven’t been persuaded by the latest observation of supposed co-orbiting planets, there is certainly an important role for amateur astronomers in exoplanet science, Zellem adds.“Given the capability of the observers..we could definitely use their expertise,” he says, especially through citizen science projects such as NASA’s Exoplanet Watch. 

[Related: This alien world could help us find Planet Nine in our own solar system]

A robust detection of co-orbiting planets could be truly exciting, though—not only an observation of nature’s extreme diversity, but possibly even a sign of alien life. “Something like an engineered co-orbiting planetary might not be unambiguously artificial, but would be weird enough to prompt intensive further study,” says Brande.

The study authors think these odd orbits would actually be a perfect technosignature, or sign of intelligent life beyond Earth. Co-author David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University, explains that once an advanced civilization constructs an unnatural ring of co-orbiting planets, it wouldn’t require any power to maintain and would be visible for billions of years—a perfect combo for an interstellar message. “The likelihood of this happening really comes down to whether anyone is out there with the capability and will to do this,” he says. “We have no idea. But if we don’t look, we’ll never know.”

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Black holes remain among the most enigmatic objects in the universe, but the past few years have seen astronomers develop techniques to directly image these powerful vacuums. And they keep getting better at it.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, the international team that took the first picture of a black hole in 2017, followed up that work with observations highlighting the black hole’s magnetic field. And just this month, another team of astronomers created an AI-sharpened version of the same image.

Now a new study published today in the journal Nature describes how images of that black hole, named after its galaxy, Messier 87 (M87), has a much larger circle of debris around it than the 2017 observations would suggest. 

Though long hypothesized to exist in theory, for many decades astronomers could only find indirect evidence of black holes in the sky. For instance, they would look for signs of the immense gravity of a black hole influencing other objects, such as when stars follow especially tight or fast orbits that imply the presence of another massive, but invisible partner.

But that all changed in 2017, when the EHT’s global network of radio telescopes captured the first visible evidence of a black hole, the supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy 57 million light-years away from Earth. When the image was released in 2019, the orange ring of fire around a central black void drew comparisons to “The Eye of Sauron” from Lord of the Rings.

EHT would go on to directly image Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, releasing another image of a fiery orange doughnut around a black center in May 2022.

Such supermassive black holes, which are often billions of times more massive than our sun—M87 is estimated to be 6.5 billion times bigger and Sagittarius A*  4 million times bigger—are thought to exist at the centers of most galaxies. The intense gravity of all that mass pulls on any gas, dust, and other excess material that comes too close, accelerating it to incredible speeds as it falls toward the lip of the black hole, known as the event horizon.

[Related: What would happen if you fell into a black hole?]

Like water circling a drain, the falling material spirals and is condensed into a flat ring known as an accretion disk. But unlike water around a drain, the incredible speed and pressures in the accretion disk heat the inflating material to the point where it emits powerful X-ray radiation. The disk propels jets of radiation and gas out and away from the black hole at nearly the speed of light.  

The EHT team already figured that M87 produced forcible jets. But the second set of results show that the ring-like structure of collapsing material around the black hole is 50 percent larger than they originally estimated.

“This is the first image where we are able to pin down where the ring is, relative to the powerful jet escaping out of the central black hole,” Kazunori Akiyama, an MIT Haystack Observatory research scientist and EHT collaboration member, said in a statement. “Now we can start to address questions such as how particles are accelerated and heated, and many other mysteries around the black hole, more deeply.”

The new observations were made in 2018 using the Global Millimeter VLBI Array, a network of a dozen radio telescopes running east to west across Europe and the US. To get the resolution necessary for more accurate measurements, however, the researchers also included observatories in the North and South: the Greenland Telescope along with the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array, which consists of 66 radio telescopes in the Chilean high desert.

“Having these two telescopes [as part of] the global array resulted in a boost in angular resolution by a factor of four in the north-south direction,” Lynn Matthews, an EHT collaboration member at the MIT Haystack Observatory, said in a media statement. “This greatly improves the level of detail we can see. And in this case, a consequence was a dramatic leap in our understanding of the physics operating near the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy.”

[Related: Construction starts on the world’s biggest radio telescope]

The more recent study focused on radio waves around 3 millimeters long, as opposed to 1.3 millimeters like the original 2017 one. That may have brought the larger, more distant ring structure into focus in a way the 2017 observations could not.

“That longer wavelength is usually associated with lower energies of the emitting electrons,” says Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who was not involved with the new study. “It’s possible that you get brighter emission at longer wavelengths farther out from the black hole.”

Going forward, astronomers plan to observe the black hole at other wavelengths to highlight different parts and layers of its structure, and better understand how such cosmic behemoths form at the hearts of galaxies and contribute to galactic evolution.

Just how supermassive black holes generate jets is “not a well-understood process,” Loeb says. “This is the first time we have observations of what may be the base of the jet. It can be used by theoretical physicists to model how the M87 jet is being launched.” 

He adds that he would like to see future observations capture the sequence of events in the accretion disk. That is, to essentially make a movie out of what’s happening at M87.

“There might be a hotspot that we can track that is moving either around or moving towards the jet,” Loeb says, which in turn, could explain how a beast like a black hole gets fed.

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Even the tallest trees, biggest blue whales, and even giant gleaming stars were once babies. Protostars are the hot core of energy that will one day become stars and galaxies. The formative years of our universe’s history, when billions of stars and galaxies formed and assembled after the Big Bang, have so far been beyond our understanding.

[Related: These 6 galaxies are so huge, they’ve been nicknamed ‘universe breakers’]

Now, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed the distance of a protocluster of seven galaxies that formed only 650 million years after the Big Bang, or what astronomers call redshift 7.9. The findings were published April 24 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and are the “earliest galaxies yet to be spectroscopically confirmed as part of a developing cluster.”

Based on the data collected, a team of astronomers calculated the nascent cluster’s future development. It will likely grow in size and mass to resemble the Coma Cluster, one of the densest galaxies of the modern universe. 

“This is a very special, unique site of accelerated galaxy evolution, and Webb gave us the unprecedented ability to measure the velocities of these seven galaxies and confidently confirm that they are bound together in a protocluster,” co-author and IPAC-California Institute of Technology astronomer Takahiro Morishita said in a statement.

JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) captured the key measurements to confirm both the galaxies’ collective distance and the high velocities at which they are moving within a halo of dark matter. They’re moving through space at more than two million miles per hour, or over 600 miles per second. 

Having this spectral data in hand allowed the astronomers to model and map the future development of the gathering group all the way up to the modern universe. If it does follow the prediction and eventually resemble the Coma Cluster, it could eventually be among the densest known galaxy collections.

“We can see these distant galaxies like small drops of water in different rivers, and we can see that eventually they will all become part of one big, mighty river,” co-author and National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy astronomer Benedetta Vulcani said in a statement.

According to NASA, galaxy clusters are the greatest concentrations of mass in the known universe. They can dramatically warp the fabric of spacetime itself. This warping is called gravitational lensing and can have a magnifying effect for the objects located beyond the cluster. This allows astronomers to see through the cluster as if it were a giant cosmic magnifying glass.  The team in this study was able to utilize this enlarging effect and look through Pandora’s Cluster to view the protocluster.

[Related: JWST’s latest new galaxy discoveries mirror the Milky Way.]

Exploring how big clusters like Pandora and Coma first came together has historically been difficult because the expansion of the universe stretches light beyond visible wavelengths into the infrared. JWST’s sophisticated infrared instruments were developed to fill in these gaps at the beginning of the universe’s story. 

The team anticipates that future collaboration between JWST and a high-resolution, wide-field survey mission from NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will allow for even  more results on early galaxy clusters. Roman will be able to identify more protocluster galaxy candidates, while JWST can follow up to confirm these findings with its spectroscopic instruments. Currently, the Roman mission is targeted to launch by May 2027.

“It is amazing the science we can now dream of doing, now that we have Webb,” co-author and University of California, Los Angeles astronomer Tommaso Treu said in a statement. “With this small protocluster of seven galaxies, at this great distance, we had a one hundred percent spectroscopic confirmation rate, demonstrating the future potential for mapping dark matter and filling in the timeline of the universe’s early development.”

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In 1989, Chuck Berry and Carl Sagan partied it up at one of the biggest bashes of the summer—a celebration honoring the two Voyager spacecrafts, who were about to make a dramatic exit from our solar system. 

The twin probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched back in 1977, with only a five-year mission to take a gander at Jupiter and Saturn’s rings and moons, hauling the Golden Record containing messages and cultural snapshots from Earth (including Chuck Berry’s music). 

Obviously, the Voyager spacecrafts have persisted a lot longer than five years: 46 years, to be exact. They’re still careening through space at a distance between 12 and 14 billion miles from Earth. So how have they lasted four decades longer than expected? Much of it has to do with a bit of vintage hardware and a handful of software updates. You can find out more (and when the crafts’ expected death dates) by subscribing to PopSci+ and reading the full story by Tatyana Woodall, and by listening to our new episode of Ask Us Anything. 

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Humans have used radio waves to communicate across Earth for more than 100 years. Those waves also leak out into space, a fingerprint of our presence propagating through the cosmos. In more recent years, humans have also sent out a stronger signal beyond our planet: communications with our most distant probes, like the famous Voyager spacecraft.

Scientists recently traced the paths of these powerful radio transmissions from Earth to multiple far-away spacecraft and determined which stars—along with any planets with possible alien life around them—are best positioned to intercept those messages. 

The research team created a list of stars that will encounter Earth’s signals within the next century and found that alien civilizations (if they’re out there) could send a return message as soon as 2029. Their results were published on March 20 in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

“This is a famous idea from Carl Sagan, who used it as a plot theme in the movie Contact,” explains Howard Isaacson, a University of California, Berkeley astronomer and co-author of the new work. 

[Related: UFO research is stigmatized. NASA wants to change that.]

However, it’s worth taking any study involving extraterrestrial life with a grain of salt. Kaitlin Rasmussen, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington not affiliated with the paper, calls this study “an interesting exercise, but unlikely to yield results.” The results, in this case, would be aliens contacting Earth within a certain timeframe.

As radio signals travel through space, they spread out and become weaker and harder to detect. Aliens parked around a nearby star probably won’t notice the faint leakage from TVs and other small devices. However, the commands we send to trailblazing probes at the edge of the solar system—Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and New Horizons—require a much more focused and powerful broadcast from NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), a global array of radio dishes designed for space communications.

The DSN signals don’t magically stop at the spacecraft they’re targeting: They continue into interstellar space where they eventually reach other stars. But electromagnetic waves like radio transmissions and light can only travel so fast—that’s why we use light-years to measure distances across the universe. The researchers used this law of physics to estimate how long it will take for DSN signals to reach nearby stars, and for alien life to return the message. 

The process revealed several insights. For example, according to their calculations, a signal sent to Pioneer 10 reached a dead star known as a white dwarf around 27 light-years away in 2002. The study team estimates a return message from any alien life near this dead star could reach us as soon as 2029, but no earlier. 

[Related: Nothing can break the speed of light]

More opportunities for return messages will pop up in the next decade. Signals sent to Voyager 2 around 1980 and 1983 reached two stars in 2007: one that’s 26 light-years away and a brown dwarf that’s 24 light-years away, respectively. If aliens sent a message right back from either, it could reach Earth in the early 2030s.

This work “gives Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence researchers a more narrow group of stars to focus on,” says lead author Reilly Derrick, a University of California, Los Angeles engineering student.  

Derrick and Isaacson propose that radio astronomers could use their star lists to listen for return messages at predetermined times. For example, in 2029 they may want to point some of Earth’s major radio telescopes towards the white dwarf that received Pioneer 10’s message.

But other astronomers are skeptical. “If a response were to be sent, our ability to detect it would depend on many factors,” says Macy Huston, an astronomer at Penn State not involved in the new study. These factors include “how long or often we monitor the star for a response, and how long or often the return signal is transmitted.”

There are still many unknowns when considering alien life. In particular, astronomers aren’t certain the stars in this study even have planets—although based on other exoplanet studies, it’s likely that at least a fraction of them do. The signals from the DSN are also still incredibly weak at such large distances, so it’s unclear how plausible it is for other stars to detect our transmissions.

“Our puny and infrequent transmissions are unlikely to yield a detection of humanity by extraterrestrials,” says Jean-Luc Margot, a University of California, Los Angeles radio astronomer who was not involved in the recent paper. He explains that our radio transmissions have only reached one-millionth of the volume of the Milky Way. 

“The probability that another civilization resides in this tiny bubble is extraordinarily small unless there are millions of civilizations in the Milky Way,” he says. But if they’re out there, there might be a time and place to capture the evidence.

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Since 1995 scientists have found more than 5,000 exoplanets—other worlds beyond our solar system. But while space researchers have gotten very good at discovering big planets, smaller ones have evaded detection.

However, a novel astronomy detection technique known as microlensing is starting to fill in the gaps. Experts who are a part of the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet) recently used this method to locate three new exoplanets about the same sizes as Jupiter and Saturn. They announced these findings in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on April 11. 

How does microlensing work?

Most exoplanets have been found through the transit method. This is when scientists use observatories like the Kepler Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope to look at dips in the amount of light coming from a star. 

Meanwhile, gravitational microlensing (usually just called microlensing) involves searching for increases in brightness in deep space. These brilliant flashes are from a planet and its star bending the light of a more distant star, magnifying it according to Einstein’s rules for relativity. You may have heard of gravitational lensing for galaxies, which pretty much relies on the same physics, but on a much bigger scale.

The new discoveries were particularly unique because they were found in partial data, where astronomers only observed half the event.

“Microlensing events are sort of like supernovae in that we only get one chance to observe them,” says Samson Johnson, an astronomer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab who was not affiliated with the study. 

Because astronomers only have one chance and don’t always know when events will happen, they sometimes miss parts of the show. “This is sort of like making a cake with only half of the recipe,” adds Johnson.

[Related: Sorry, Star Trek fans, the real planet Vulcan doesn’t exist]

The three new planets have long serial-number-like strings of letters and numbers for names: KMT-2021-BLG-2010Lb, KMT-2022-BLG-0371Lb, and KMT-2022-BLG-1013Lb. Each of these worlds revolves around a different star. They weigh as much as Jupiter, Saturn, and a little less than Saturn, respectively. 

Even though the researchers only observed part of the microlensing events for each of these planets, they were able to rule out other scenarios that could confidently explain the signals. This work “does show that even with incomplete data, we can learn interesting things about these planets,” says Scott Gaudi, an Ohio State University astronomer who was not involved in the published paper.

The exoplanet search continues

Microlensing is “highly complementary” to other exoplanet-hunting techniques, says Jennifer Yee, a co-author of the new study and researcher at The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. It can scope out planets that current technologies can’t, including worlds as small as Jupiter’s moon Ganymede or even a few times the mass of Earth’s moon, according to Gaudi.

The strength of microlensing is that “it’s a demographics machine, so you can detect lots of planets,” says Gaudi. This ability to detect planets of all sizes is crucial for astronomers as they complete their sweeping exoplanet census to determine the most common type of planet and the uniqueness of our own solar system. 

Astronomers are honing their microlensing skills with new exoplanet discoveries like those from KTMNet, ensuring that they know how to handle this kind of data before new space telescopes come online in the next few years. For example, microlensing will be a large part of the Roman Space Telescope’s planned mission when it launches mid-decade. 

“We’ll increase the number of planets we know by several thousand with Roman, maybe even more,” says Gaudi. “We went from Kepler being the star of the show to TESS [NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite] being the star of the show … For its time period, Roman [and microlensing] will be the star of the show.”

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It’s time for JUICE to get to work. The European Space Agency’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer blasted off on an Ariane 5 rocket yesterday to begin its eight-year journey to the Jovian system to study Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, three of the largest moons in the entire solar system.

Together with NASA’s Europa Clipper, which will launch in October 2024 but arrive at its destination a year earlier than JUICE, the missions will get the first close-ups of Jupiter’s icy moons since NASA’s Galileo probe visited the gas giant from 1995 and 2003.

“We learned about Europa having a subsurface ocean as a result of the Galileo mission,” says Emily Martin, a research geologist in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian’s National Air And Space Museum. The Galileo finding ignited interest in so-called  “ocean worlds” that have liquid water under their thick surface ice and might be the best place to look for alien life in our solar system. Ganymede and Callisto are likely ocean worlds too.

[Related: Astronomers find 12 more moons orbiting Jupiter]

While Galileo captured some images of the lesser-known siblings, it couldn’t analyze their surfaces as well as originally plannedspacecraft was hamstrung from the beginning, when its high-gain antenna, necessary for sending back large amounts of data, failed to fully deploy. Consequently, when JUICE arrives at Jupiter in 2031, it will begin providing the first truly high-resolution studies of Ganymede and Callisto, and add to the data on Europa collected by the Europa Clipper. JUICE will use its laser altimeter to build detailed topographic maps of all three moons and use measurements of their magnetic and gravitational fields, along with radar, to probe their internal structures.

“Galileo did the reconnaissance,” Martin says, “and now JUICE gets to go back and really dig deep.”

Is there water on Jupiter’s moons?

If people know one Jovian moon, it’s likely Europa: The icy moon’s subsurface ocean has been the focus of science fiction books and movies. But Martin is particularly excited about what JUICE might find at Callisto. Jupiter’s second largest moon, it orbits farther out than Europa or Ganymede. It appears to be geologically inactive and may not be differentiated, meaning Callisto’s insides haven’t separated into the crust-mantle-core layers seen in other planets and moons.

Despite the low-key profile, data from the Galileo mission suggests Callisto could contain a liquid ocean like Europa and Ganymede. Understanding just how that could be possible, and getting a look at what Callisto’s interior really looks like, could help space researchers better understand how all of Jupiter’s moons evolved.

“In some ways, Callisto is a proto-Ganymede,” Martin says.

What comes after Mars?

It’s not just Callisto’s interior that is interesting, according to Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science. It’s the only large moon that orbits outside the belts of intense radiation trapped in Jupiter’s colossal magnetic field—radiation that can fry spacecraft electrics and human explorers alike. “If humanity is to build a base on one of the Jupiter moons, Callisto would be by far the first choice,” Sheppard says. “It could be the gateway moon to the outer solar system.”      

JUICE will fly by Europa, then Callisto, and then enter orbit around Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system. With a diameter of around 3,270 miles, it’s larger than the planet Mercury, which comes in at 2,578 miles in diameter.

Geoffrey Collins, a professor of geology, physics and astronomy at Wheaton College, says he’s most excited about the Ganymede leg of the mission. “It will be the first time we’ve orbited a world like this, and I know we will be surprised by what we find.” 

If Ganymede hosts a liquid water ocean beneath its frozen shell how deep its crust is, and whether its suspected subsurface ocean is one vast cistern or consists of liquid layered with an icy or rocky mantle. JUICE will be the first mission to give scientists some real answers about to those questions.

“Even if JUICE just lets us reach a level of understanding of Ganymede like we had for Mars 20 or 30 years ago, it would be a massive leap forward from what we know now,” Collins says. “This will be the kind of thing that rewrites textbooks.”

[Related: A mysterious magma ocean could fuel our solar system’s most volcanic world]

Any clues that JUICE gathers from Ganymede and Callisto could apply to more than just Jupiter and its icy moons. They can tell us more about what to expect when we look further out from our own solar system, according to Martin.

“It contextualizes different kinds of ocean world systems and that has even broader implications to exoplanet systems,” she says. “The more we can understand the differences and the similarities between the ocean world systems that we have here in our solar system, the more prepared we’re going to be for understanding the planetary systems that we’re continuing to discover in other solar systems.”

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Astronomy sheds light on the far-off, intangible phenomena that shape our universe and everything outside it. Artificial intelligence sifts through tiny, mundane details to help us process important patterns. Put the two together, and you can tackle almost any scientific conundrum—like determining  the relative shape of a black hole. 

The Event Horizon Telescope (a network of eight radio observatories placed strategically around the globe) originally captured the first image of a black hole in 2017 in the Messier 87 galaxy. After processing and compressing more than five terabytes of data, the team released a hazy shot in 2019, prompting people to joke that it was actually a fiery donut or a screenshot from Lord of the Rings. At the time, researchers conceded that the image could be improved with more fine-tuned observations or algorithms. 

[Related: How AI can make galactic telescope images ‘sharper’]

In a study published on April 13 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, physicists from four US institutions used AI to sharpen the iconic image. This group fed the observatories’ raw interferometry data into an algorithm to produce a sharper, more accurate depiction of the black hole. The AI they used, called PRIMO, is an automated analysis tool that reconstructs visual data at higher resolutions to study gravity, the human genome, and more. In this case, the authors trained the neural network with simulations of accreting black holes—a mass-sucking process that produces thermal energy and radiation. They also relied on a mathematical technique called Fourier transform to turn energy frequencies, signals, and other artifacts into information the eye can see.

Their edited image shows a thinner “event horizon,” the glowing circle formed when light and accreted gas crosses into the gravitational sink. This could have “important implications for measuring the mass of the central black hole in M87 based on the EHT images,” the paper states.

One thing’s for sure: The subject at the center of the shot is extremely dark, potent, and powerful. It’s even more clearly defined in the AI-enhanced version, backing up the claim that the supermassive black hole is up to 6.5 billion times heftier than our sun. Compare that to Sagittarius A*—the black hole that was recently captured in the Milky Way—which is estimated at 4 million times the sun’s mass.

Sagittarius A* could be another PRIMO target, Lia Medeiros, lead study author and astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, told the Associated Press. But the group is not in a rush to move on from the more distant black hole located 55 million light-years away in Messier 87. “It feels like we’re really seeing it for the first time,” she added in the AP interview. The image was a feat of astronomy, and now, people can gaze on it with more clarity.

Watch an interview where the researchers discuss their AI methods more in-depth below:

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Few places in the solar system get hotter than the surface of the sun. But contrary to expectations, the tenuous tendrils of plasma in the outermost layer of its atmosphere—known as the corona—are way more searing than its surface.

“It is very confusing why the solar corona is farther away from the sun’s core, but is so much hotter,” says University of California, Berkeley space sciences researcher Jia Huang. 

The solar surface lingers around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while the thin corona can get as hot as 2 million degrees. This conundrum is known as the coronal heating problem, and astronomers have been working on solving it since the mid-1800s.

“Simply speaking, solving this problem could help us understand our sun better,” says Huang. A better understanding of solar physics is also “crucial for predicting space weather to protect humans,” he adds. Plus, the sun is the only star we can send probes to—the others are simply too far away. “Thus, knowing our sun could help understand other stars in the universe.”

A brief history of the coronal heating problem

During the 1869 total solar eclipse—an alignment of the sun, moon, and Earth that blocks out the bulk of the sun’s light—scientists were able to observe the faint corona. Their observations revealed a feature in the corona that they took as evidence of presence of a new element: coronium. Improved theories of quantum mechanics over 60 years later revealed the “new element” to be plain old iron, but heated to a temperature that was higher than the sun’s surface.

[Related: We still don’t really know what’s inside the sun—but that could change very soon]

This new explanation for the puzzling 1869 measurement was the first evidence of the corona’s extreme temperature, and kicked off decades of study to understand just how the plasma got so hot. Another way of phrasing this question is, where is the energy in the corona coming from, and how is it getting there? 

“We know for sure that this problem hasn’t yet been resolved, though we have many theories, and the whole [astronomy] community is still enthusiastically working on it,” says Huang. There are currently two main hypotheses for how energy from the sun heats the corona: the motion of waves and an explosive phenomenon called nanoflares.

Theory 1: Alfvén waves

The surface of the sun roils and bubbles like a pot of boiling water. As the plasma convects—with hotter material rising and cooler material sinking down—it generates the sun’s immense magnetic field. This magnetic field can move and wiggle in a specific kind of wave, known as Alfvén waves, which then push around protons and electrons above the sun’s surface. Alfvén waves are a known phenomenon—plasma physicists have even seen them in experiments on Earth. Astronomers think the charged particles stirred up by the phenomenon might carry energy into the corona, heating it up to shocking temperatures.

Theory 2: Nanoflares

The other possible explanation is a bit more dramatic, and is kind of like the sun snapping a giant rubber-band. As the sun’s plasma tumbles and circulates in its upper layer, it twists the star’s magnetic field lines into knotted, messy shapes. Eventually, the lines can’t take that stress anymore; once they’ve been twisted too far, they snap in an explosive event called magnetic reconnection. This sends charged particles flying around and heats them up, a happening referred to as a nanoflare, carrying energy to the corona. Astronomers have observed a few examples of nanoflares with modern space telescopes and satellites.

The coronal heating mystery continues

As is usually the case with nature, it seems that the sun isn’t simply launching Alfvén waves or creating nanoflares—it’s more than likely doing both. Astronomers just don’t know how often either of these events happen.

[Related: Hold onto your satellites: The sun is about to get a lot stormier]

But they might get some straightforward answers soon. The Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018, is on a mission to touch the sun, dipping closer to our star than ever before. It’s currently flying through some outer parts of the corona, providing the first up-close look at the movements of particles that may be responsible for the extreme temperatures. The mission has already passed through the solar atmosphere once, and will keep swinging around for a few more years—providing key information to help scientists settle the coronal heating problem once and for all.

“I would be very confident that we could make big progress in the upcoming decade,” says Huang.

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It took years of design and engineering toil to successfully get the largest-ever telescope mirror into space. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope’s trademark, 6.5-meter-in-diameter, gold-coated array orbits the sun 1.5 million kilometers above Earth, routinely providing stunning, previously inaccessible views of the universe. As incredible as its results are, however, a new, promising “mirror membrane” breakthrough is already in the works that could one day show scientists space in a new way.

According to a recent announcement from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, researcher Sebastian Rabien has reportedly designed a lighter, thinner, more cost-efficient reflective material that is hypothetically capable of producing telescope mirrors 15-20 meters wide. Detailed in a paper published with the journal Applied Optics, Rabien first evaporated a currently unspecified liquid within a vacuum chamber, which slowly deposits on interior surfaces before combining to form a polymer that eventually forms the mirror’s base.

[Related: Ice giant Uranus shows off its many rings in new JWST image.]

Telescope mirrors require a parabola shape to concentrate light towards a single spot. To achieve this, Rabien and his team positioned a rotating container containing additional liquid inside the vacuum chamber. That newly introduced liquid forms a “perfect parabolic shape,” which the polymer then grows upon to form the mirror’s base. As Space.com notes, “a reflective metal layer is applied to the top via evaporation and the liquid is washed away.”

“Utilizing this basic physics phenomenon, we deposited a polymer onto this perfect optical surface, which formed a parabolic thin membrane that can be used as the primary mirror of a telescope once coated with a reflecting surface such as aluminum,” explained Rabien in the announcement. 

At this stage, although the material in the study could be easily folded or rolled up to pack away for delivery to space, that optimal parabolic shape would be “nearly impossible” to reform. To solve this issue, researchers developed a new thermal method utilizing localized, light-derived temperature changes to gain an adaptive shape control which could bring the membrane back into its necessary optical shape.

[Related: NASA reveals James Webb Space Telescope first finds.]

In addition to its telescopic applications, the new mirror membranes could be used for adaptive optic systems. These systems rely upon deformable mirrors to compensate for incoming light distortion. Given the new material’s extreme malleability, the mirrors could be shaped via electrostatic actuators in a way that is less expensive than existing methods.

Looking ahead, Rabien’s team hopes to conduct further experiments to improve the membrane’s malleability, as well as improve how much initial distortion it can handle. There are also plans for even larger final products—a goal that could be integral to getting the new advancement into space.

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In a sequel to its image of the planet Neptune’s rings in September 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has taken a new image of the ice giant Uranus. The new view of the seventh planet from the sun was taken on February 6 and released to the public on April 6. It shows off Uranus’ rings and some of the bright features in its atmosphere.

[Related: Expect NASA to probe Uranus within the next 10 years.]

The image was taken with NIRCam as a short 12-minute exposure and combines data from two filters, one shown in blue and one in orange. Uranus typically displays a blue hue naturally. 

Of the planet’s 13 known rings, 11 are visible in the image. According to NASA, some of these rings are so bright that they appear to merge into a larger ring when close together while observed with JWST. Nine are classed as the main rings of the planet, and two are the fainter dusty rings. These dusty rings have only ever been imaged by the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it flew past the planet in 1986 and with the Keck Observatory’s advanced adaptive optics in the early 2000s. Scientists expect that future images will also reveal the two even more faint outer rings that the Hubble Space Telescope discovered in 2007.

The new image also captured many of Uranus’ 27 known moons. Many of the moons are too small and faint to be seen in this image, but six can be seen in the wide-view. Uranus is categorized as an ice giant due to the chemical make-up of its interior. The majority of Uranus’ mass is believed to be a hot, dense, fluid of water, methane, and ammonia above a small and rocky core.

Among the planets in our solar system, Uranus has a unique rotation. It rotates on its side at a roughly 90-degree angle, which causes extreme seasons. The planet’s poles experience multiple years of constant sunlight, and then an equal number of years in total darkness. It takes the planet 84 years to orbit the sun and its northern pole is currently in its late spring. Uranus’ next northern summer isn’t until 2028. 

[Related: Uranus’s quirks and hidden features have astronomers jazzed about a direct mission.]

Uranus also has a unique polar cap on the right side of the planet. It’s visible as a brightening at the pole facing the sun, and seems to appear when the pole enters direct sunlight during the summer and vanishes in the autumn. JWST’s data is expected to help scientists understand what’s behind this mechanism and has already noticed a subtle brightening at the cap’s center. NASA believes that JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera NIRCam’s sensitivity to longer wavelengths may be why they can see this enhanced Uranus polar feature, since it has not been seen as clearly with other powerful telescopes.

Additionally, a bright cloud lies at the edge of the polar cap and another can be seen on the planet’s left limb. The JWST team believes that these clouds are likely connected to storm activity. 

More imaging and additional studies of the planet are currently in the works by multiple space agencies, after the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine identified Uranus science as a priority in its 2023-2033 Planetary Science and Astrobiology decadal survey. This 10 year-long study will likely include a study of Saturn’s moons and sending a probe to Uranus. 

“Sending a flagship to Uranus makes a lot of sense,” because Uranus and Neptune “are fairly unexplored worlds,” Mark Marley, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, told PopSci last year. Marley also called the future study it “clear-eyed,” and said that learning more about Uranus will help scientists understand both the formation of our solar system and even some exoplanets. 

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Last November, a group of physicists claimed they’d simulated a wormhole for the first time inside Google’s Sycamore quantum computer. The researchers tossed information into one batch of simulated particles and said they watched that information emerge in a second, separated batch of circuits. 

It was a bold claim. Wormholes—tunnels through space-time—are a very theoretical product of gravity that Albert Einstein helped popularize. It would be a remarkable feat to create even a wormhole facsimile with quantum mechanics, an entirely different branch of physics that has long been at odds with gravity. 

And indeed, three months later, a different group of physicists argued that the results could be explained through alternative, more mundane means. In response, the team behind the Sycamore project doubled down on their results.

Their case highlights a tantalizing dilemma. Successfully simulating a wormhole in a quantum computer could be a boon for solving an old physics conundrum, but so far, quantum hardware hasn’t been powerful or reliable enough to do the complex math. They’re getting there very quickly, though.

[Related: Journey to the center of a quantum computer]

The root of the challenge lies in the difference of mathematical systems. “Classical” computers, such as the device you’re using to read this article, store their data and do their computations with “bits,” typically made from silicon. These bits are binary: They can be either zero or one, nothing else. 

For the vast majority of human tasks, that’s no problem. But binary isn’t ideal for crunching the arcana of quantum mechanics—the bizarre rules that guide the universe at the smallest scales—because the system essentially operates in a completely different form of math.

Enter a quantum computer, which swaps out the silicon bits for “qubits” that adhere to quantum mechanics. A qubit can be zero, one—or, due to quantum trickery, some combination of zero and one. Qubits can make certain calculations far more manageable. In 2019, Google operators used Sycamore’s qubits to complete a task in minutes that they said would have taken a classical computer 10,000 years.

There are several ways of simulating wormholes with equations that a computer can solve. The 2022 paper’s researchers used something called the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev (SYK) model. A classical computer can crunch the SYK model, but very ineffectively. Not only does the model involve particles interacting at a distance, it also features a good deal of randomness, both of which are tricky for classical computers to process.

Even the wormhole researchers greatly simplified the SYK model for their experiment. “The simulation they did, actually, is very easy to do classically,” says Hrant Gharibyan, a physicist at Caltech, who wasn’t involved in the project. “I can do it in my laptop.”

But simplifying the model opens up new questions. If physicists want to show that they’ve created a wormhole through quantum math, it makes it harder for them to confirm that they’ve actually done it. Furthermore, if physicists want to learn how quantum mechanics interact with gravity, it gives them less information to work with.

Critics have pointed out that the Sycamore experiment didn’t use enough qubits. While the chips in your phone or computer might have billions or trillions of bits, quantum computers are far, far smaller. The wormhole simulation, in particular, used nine.

While the team certainly didn’t need billions of qubits, according to experts, they should have used more than nine. “With a nine-qubit experiment, you’re not going to learn anything whatsoever that you didn’t already know from classically simulating the experiment,” says Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, who wasn’t an author on the paper.

If size is the problem, then current trends give physicists reason to be optimistic that they can simulate a proper wormhole in a quantum computer. Only a decade ago, even getting one qubit to function was an impressive feat. In 2016, the first quantum computer with cloud access had five. Now, quantum computers are in the dozens of qubits. Google Sycamore has a maximum of 53. IBM is planning a line of quantum computers that will surpass 1,000 qubits by the mid-2020s.

Additionally, today’s qubits are extremely fragile. Even small blips of noise or tiny temperature fluctuations—qubits need to be kept at frigid temperatures, just barely above absolute zero—may cause the medium to decohere, snapping the computer out of the quantum world and back into a mundane classical bit. (Newer quantum computers focus on trying to make qubits “cleaner.”)

Some quantum computers use individual particles; others use atomic nuclei. Google’s Sycamore, meanwhile, uses loops of superconducting wire. It all shows that qubits are in their VHS-versus-Betamax era: There are multiple competitors, and it isn’t clear which qubit—if any—will become the equivalent to the ubiquitous classical silicon chip.

“You need to make bigger quantum computers with cleaner qubits,” says Gharibyan, “and that’s when real quantum computing power will come.”

[Related: Scientists eye lab-grown brains to replace silicon-based computer chips]

For many physicists, that’s when great intangible rewards come in. Quantum physics, which guides the universe at its smallest scales, doesn’t have a complete explanation for gravity, which guides the universe at its largest. Showing a quantum wormhole—with qubits effectively teleporting—could bridge that gap.

So, the Google users aren’t the only physicists poring over this problem. Earlier in 2022, a third group of researchers published a paper, listing signs of teleportation they’d detected in quantum computers. They didn’t send a qubit through a simulated wormhole—they only sent a classical bit—but it was still a promising step. Better quantum gravity experiments, such as simulating the full SYK model, are about “purely extending our ability to build processors,” Gharibyan explains.

Aaronson is skeptical that a wormhole will ever be modeled in a meaningful form, even in the event that quantum computers do reach thousands of qubits. “There’s at least a chance of learning something relevant to quantum gravity that we didn’t know how to calculate otherwise,” he says. “Even then, I’ve struggled to get the experts to tell me what that thing is.”

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Astronomers recently detected an explosion so large they dubbed it the BOAT—the brightest of all time. This explosion—known now as GRB 221009A—was a gamma-ray burst (GRB), a flash of extremely high-energy light that resulted from the death of a colossal star.

This detonation is the brightest burst at X-ray and gamma-ray energies since human civilization began. It is 70 times brighter than any observed before. Papers describing this result and others related to the burst were published in a focus issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters in March.

“A burst this bright arrives at Earth only once every 10,000 years,” says Eric Burns, a Louisiana State assistant professor and astronomer involved in the detection. 

[Related: Black hole collisions could possibly send waves cresting through space-time]

So-called long GRBs—gamma-ray bursts that last longer than two seconds—materialize when a massive star runs out of fuel and collapses into a black hole. This catastrophic collapse causes powerful jets of material to stream out, collide with gas around the former star, and produce high-energy gamma rays. We can see this explosion from Earth if the jet is pointed directly at our planet. 

Astronomers are constantly monitoring the sky for GRBs and other bright, short-lived bursts of light—and that’s how they found the BOAT. The research team that works with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, is notified each time a certain camera, known as the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT), spots a new GRB.

“This one was bright enough to trigger BAT twice,” says Maia Williams, a Penn State astronomer and lead author of one of the GRB 221009A papers. 

The initial detection of the burst was based on data gathered from the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope onboard SWIFT and NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. After “it was seen by instruments on more than two dozen satellites,” explains Burns. These include the NICER x-ray telescope on the International Space Station, NASA’s NuSTAR x-ray telescope, NASA’s new Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) satellite, and even one of the Voyager spacecraft.

With this vast trove of information on the BOAT, astronomers realized it was a “more-complicated-than-usual GRB,” says Huei Sears, a Northwestern University astronomer and graduate student not involved in the discovery.

Why was the BOAT so bright? First, it’s nearby (in cosmic terms, about 1.9 billion light-years away), which adds to its extreme shine—just like a light bulb appears brighter to your eyes closer up than across a room. But its brightness isn’t just a quirk of its proximity. It’s also “intrinsically the most energetic burst ever seen,” says Burns. 

Astronomers suspect the jets blasted out of the black hole that created the BOAT were narrower  than usual. Imagine the jet setting on a garden hose—and by lucky coincidence this particular hose was aimed directly at Earth. However, why these jets behaved like this is not understood. 

“Scientifically, the BOAT has proven most of our existing models for these events to be incomplete,” says Burns.

[Related: Astronomers now know how supermassive black holes blast us with energy]

Gamma-ray bursts are at their brightest in their first moments but continue with an afterglow for much longer—possibly several years in the case of the BOAT. Williams and her team plan to continue observing the BOAT once a week with SWIFT as long as they can. They’ll also use NASA’s powerhouse James Webb and Hubble space telescopes to get a look at other wavelengths, capturing as much as they can from this rare happening.

“The BOAT is so important because it is one of those events that breaks what we know,” says Sarah Dalessi, a University of Alabama astrophysicist and graduate student involved in the detection. “This is truly a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

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Years after Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan returned from NASA’s last crewed mission to the moon, he still felt the massive weight of the milestone. “I realize that other people look at me differently than I look at myself, for I am one of only 12 human beings to have stood on the moon,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I have come to accept that and the enormous responsibility it carries, but as for finding a suitable encore, nothing has ever come close.”

Cernan, who died in 2017, and his crewmates will soon be joined in their lonely chapter of history by four new astronauts, bringing the grand total of people who’ve flown to the moon to 28. Today, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency announced the crew for Artemis II, the first mission to take humans beyond low-Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. The 10-day mission will take the team on a gravity-assisted trip around the moon and back.

The big reveal occurred at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, in front of an audience of NASA partners, politicians, local students, international astronauts, and Apollo alums. NASA Director of Flight Operations Norman Knight, NASA Chief Astronaut Joe Acaba, and Johnson Space Center Director Vanessa White selected the crew. They were joined on stage during the announcement by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science, and Industry Francois-Philippe Champagne. 

“You are the Artemis generation,” Knight said after revealing the final lineup. “We are the Artemis generation.” These are the four American and Canadian astronauts representing humanity in the next lunar launch.

Christina Koch – Mission Specialist, NASA

Koch has completed three missions to the International Space Station (ISS) and set the record for the longest spaceflight for a female astronaut in 2020. Before that, the Michigan native conducted research at the South Pole and tinkered on instruments at the Goddard Flight Space Center. She will be the only professional engineer on the Artemis II crew. “I know who mission control will be calling when it’s time to fix something on board,” Knight joked during her introduction.

Koch relayed her anticipation of riding NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) on a lunar flyby and back to those watching from home: “It will be a four-day journey [around the moon], testing every aspect of Orion, going to the far side of the moon, and splashing down in the Atlantic. So, am I excited? Absolutely. But one thing I’m excited about is that we’re going to be carrying your excitement, your dreams, and your aspirations on your mission.”

[Related: ‘Phantom’ mannequins will help us understand how cosmic radiation affects female bodies in space]

After the Artemis II mission, Koch will officially be the first woman to travel beyond Earth’s orbit. Koch and her team will circle the moon for 6,400 miles before returning home.

Jeremy Hansen – Mission Specialist, Canada

Hansen’s training experience has brought him to the ocean floor off Key Largo, Florida, the rocky caves of Sardinia, Italy, and the frigid atmosphere above the Arctic Circle. The Canadian fighter pilot led ISS communications from mission control in 2011, but this will mark his first time in space. Hansen is also the only Canadian who’s ever flown on a lunar mission.

“It’s not lost on any of us that the US could go back to the moon by themselves. Canada is grateful for that global mindset and leadership,” he said during the press conference. He also highlighted Canada’s can-do attitude in science and technology: “All of those have added up to this step where a Canadian is going to the moon with an international partnership. Let’s go.”

Victor Glover – Pilot, NASA

Glover is a seasoned pilot both on and off Earth. Hailing from California, he’s steered or ridden more than 40 different types of craft, including the SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule in 2020 during the first commercial space flight ever to the ISS. His outsized leadership presence in his astronaut class was mentioned multiple times during the event. “In the last few years, he has become a mentor to me,” Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman said.

[Related on PopSci+: Victor J. Glover on the cosmic ‘relay race’ of the new lunar missions]

In his speech, Glover looked into the lofty future of human spaceflight. “Artemis II is more than a mission to the moon and back,” he said. “It’s the next step on the journey that gets humanity to Mars. We have a lot of work to do to get there, and we understand that.” Glover will be the first Black astronaut to travel to the moon.

G. Reid Wiseman – Commander, NASA

Wiseman got a lot done in his single foray into space. During a 2014 ISS expedition, he contributed to upwards of 300 scientific experiments and conducted two lengthy spacewalks. The Maryland native served as NASA’s chief astronaut from 2020 to 2022 and led diplomatic efforts with Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency. 

“This was always you,” Knight said while talking about Wiseman’s decorated military background. “It’s what you were meant to be.”

Flight commanders are largely responsible for safety during space missions. As the first astronauts to travel on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, the Artemis II crew will test the longevity and stability of NASA and SpaceX’s new flight technology as they exit Earth’s atmosphere, slingshot into the moon’s gravitational field, circumnavigate it, and attempt a safe reentry. Wiseman will be in charge of all that with the support of his three fellow astronauts and guidance from mission control.

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Even the most advanced ground-based telescopes struggle with nearsighted vision issues. Often this isn’t through any fault of their own, but a dilemma of having to see through the Earth’s constantly varying atmospheric interferences. As undesirable as that is to the casual viewer, it can dramatically frustrate researchers’ abilities to construct accurate images of the universe—both literally and figuratively. By applying an existing, open-source computer vision AI algorithm to telescope tech, however, researchers have found they are able to hone our cosmic observations.

As detailed in a paper published this month with the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of scientists from Northwestern University and Beijing’s Tsinghua University recently trained an AI on data simulated to match imaging parameters for the soon-to-be opened Vera C. Rubin Observatory in north-central Chile. As Northwestern’s announcement explains, while similar technology already exists, the new algorithm produces blur-free, high resolution glimpses of the universe both faster and more realistically.

“Photography’s goal is often to get a pretty, nice-looking image. But astronomical images are used for science,” said Emma Alexander, an assistant professor of computer science at Northwestern and the study’s senior author. Alexander explained that cleaning up image data correctly helps astronomers obtain far more accurate data. Because the AI algorithm does so computationally, physicists can glean better measurements.

[Related: The most awesome aerospace innovations of 2022.]

The results aren’t just prettier galactic portraits, but more reliable sources of study. For example, analyzing galaxies’ shapes can help determine gravitational effects on some of the universe’s largest bodies. Blurring that image—be it through low-resolution tech or atmospheric interference—makes scientists’ less reliable and accurate. According to the team’s work, the optimized tool generated images with roughly 38 percent less error than compared to classic blur-removal methods, and around 7 percent less error compared to existing modern methods.

What’s more, the team’s AI tool, coding, and tutorial guidelines are already available online for free. Going forward, any interested astronomers can download and utilize the algorithm to improve their own observatories’ telescopes, and thus obtain better and more accurate data.

“Now we pass off this tool, putting it into the hands of astronomy experts,” continued Alexander. “We think this could be a valuable resource for sky surveys to obtain the most realistic data possible.” Until then, astronomy fans can expect far more detailed results from the Rubin Observatory when it officially opens in 2024 to begin its deep survey of the stars.

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When NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope takes an image of a star field, it usually looks more like an abstract painting than a real piece of the universe. In the case of globular cluster M14, those drops of white, blue, and orange paint are more than 150,000 stars packed at the periphery of a spiral galaxy 29,000 light-years away from Earth.

Of course, NASA has shared many stunning views of the universe since Hubble was launched in 1990, but this newly processed image has another claim to fame—it’s known as Messier 14, one of the dozens of celestial objects cataloged by French astronomer and comet hunter Charles Messier beginning in 1758. The objects are bright and relatively easy to see with small ground telescopes, and so are popular with the amateur astronomy community.

But five years ago, the NASA Hubble team decided to begin posting the legendary space telescope’s observations of the vintage catalog online “to give people a chance to view the Messier objects in a way that they might not otherwise be able to do, especially since in many cases we can see colors of light that don’t get through the atmosphere,” says Hubble Operations Project Scientist Kenneth Carpenter. “People can’t see the ultraviolet, for instance, when they look with their ground telescopes.”

Messier was born in 1730 and developed a fascination with comets, ultimately discovering the “Great Comet” of 1769, which exhibited an extremely long tail as it passed near Earth. His catalog grew out of his notes on sightings from the Northern Hemisphere that could be confused as streaking balls of ice and dust to keep other comet seekers from wasting their time. The series includes globular star clusters like M14, nebulae such as the Eagle Nebula (M16) and Crab Nebula (M1), and even the Andromeda galaxy (M31). The numbers indicate the order in which Messier discovered the objects, though he only found 103 of the current 110—additions were made by other astronomers in the mid-20th century.

[Related: Your guide to the types of stars, from their dusty births to violent deaths]

The Hubble Messier Catalog is much newer, according to James Jeletic, NASA’s deputy project manager for Hubble. In 2017, his team was brainstorming ways to get the amateur astronomy community involved and feeling more connected with Hubble science. ”So we said, ‘Well, let’s go back to that Messier catalog,” he recalls. “That way, amateur astronomers can look at an object in their telescope, and then compare it to what Hubble sees.”

The scavenger hunt is not yet complete—the Hubble Messier Catalog currently exhibits images of 84 of the 110 Messier objects and plots them on an interactive map—but that’s partly because of the way in which the Hubble team has gone about building out the collection. They don’t purposefully take new images of Messier objects to add to the catalog; rather they wait for a scientific proposal that overlaps with the targets. That, or they comb through the Hubble archive looking for suitable scenes that haven’t been published yet and process them (as was the case with M14). “We think we found all the ones, for the most part, that are worthy of creating an image out of,” Jelectic explains. “We’re going to search one more time, you know, just to make sure.”

The Hubble team shared the image of M14 on March 19 as part of what’s called a Messier Marathon, an attempt by amateur astronomers to observe all 110 objects in a short time frame; the skygazing conditions in March and early April are considered particularly conducive to Messier Marathons because all of the objects can be seen in a single night around the spring equinox. “If you can view all 110, no matter how long it takes, you become a member of the [official Messier club] and get a certificate and pin,” Jelectic says.

For those in the Southern Hemisphere, the NASA Hubble website also includes images from the Caldwell Catalog, a collection of 109 objects visible compiled in the 1980s by English amateur astronomer Patrick Moore as a counterweight to the Messier Catalog.

[Related: Researchers found what they believe is a 2,000-year-old map of the stars]

Reflecting on the fact that astronomers, both professional and amateur, and the general public are still fascinated by objects first cataloged more than 200 years ago, Carpenter says it illustrates how science progresses over time.

“Every time you build a new telescope, whether it be on the ground or in space, that’s either larger in size so it’s more sensitive, or sensitive to a different color of light than we’ve had previously, you make wonderful new discoveries,” he says. Even after years in the field it still astonishes him what telescopes can seek. “It is just absolutely incredible, both in terms of the science and just in terms of the sheer beauty. I think a telescope is really as much a tool of art, of the creation of art, as it is of the creation and interpretation of science.”

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Since its discovery in 2017, the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua has been a point of fascination—and sometimes obsession—for astronomy fans. As the first object we’ve seen from another solar system, it’s naturally drawn a lot of interest, with its strange tube-like shape and surprisingly small size. It even accelerated at one point in its orbit, which happens regularly with comets—but ‘Oumuamua didn’t have the usual gassy tail, leading some to even propose it may be an alien ship.

A new hypothesis, published on March 22 in the journal Nature, proposes a different explanation for ‘Oumuamua’s anomalous orbit. Astronomers Jennifer Bergner and Darryl Seligman say the half-mile-long object is just a comet after all, but that its time in interstellar space changed its chemistry. Instead of water causing the extra propulsion, ‘Oumuamua released nearly invisible hydrogen.

“It’s exciting that we can explain the strange behavior of ‘Oumuamua without needing to resort to any exotic physics,” says Bergner, an astrochemist at the University of California, Berkeley and lead author on the new paper.

“Hopefully this discovery will put to rest any outlandish ideas about ‘Oumuamua being an alien probe,” adds University of Washington astrobiologist Kaitlin Rasmussen, author of the upcoming book Life in Seven Numbers: The Drake Equation Revealed.

Comets are chunks of ice and debris left over from the process of planet formation, lurking at the edge of our solar system. On their extremely long and stretched out orbits, they occasionally dive in towards the sun. There, the sun’s bright rays vaporize some of the comet’s ice and dust to make the fuzzy coma and the sweeping tails we see. 

[Related: Scientists finally solve the mystery of why comets glow green]

‘Oumuamua may have begun its life as a typical comet around another star—rich with water ice—before being thrust out into open space by the chaos of a young solar system. (Our solar system likely spewed out similar chunks of detritus in its early days.) On its voyage between the stars, Bergner and Seligman propose that ‘Oumuamua was bombarded with energetic particles known as cosmic rays. These high-energy particles broke the bonds between hydrogen and oxygen in water molecules, creating molecular hydrogen (H₂) trapped in the crystalline structure of the ice.

Once ‘Oumuamua swung by the sun, the heat rearranged the crystals of its ice, releasing the molecular hydrogen to propel the interstellar interloper and cause its observed acceleration, almost like a rocket booster. “It’s more plausible than the other ideas,” says UCLA astronomer David Jewitt, “including those relying on carbon monoxide (which was not detected), nitrogen ice (which is relatively hard to find), and, of course, the spaceship idea.”

“I think the authors have a very interesting hypothesis,” agrees Caltech planetary scientist Qicheng Zhang, who is not affiliated with the research team. The real significance of this result, though, will come with further observations, he adds. 

‘Oumuamua was only invisible for a short time when it passed within 15 million miles of Earth in 2017; now on Pluto’s fringes, it’s far beyond the reach of even our largest telescopes. As an alternative to direct data, Bergner and Seligman suggest studying a similar effect on ‘Oumuamua-sized comets from our own solar system. But there’s one catch—we haven’t spotted any solar system comets that small yet. Astronomers hope the next generation of telescopes, including NASA’s recently launched James Webb Space Telescope, will spot the first of those objects.

[Related: The Milky Way could have dozens of alien civilizations capable of contacting us]

Casey Lisse, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, also suggests that a comet’s H₂ may be observable if it splits apart into two hydrogen atoms under the influence of the sun’s ultraviolet rays. The signal on a ‘Oumuamua look-alike could be picked up by certain satellites like SOHO, NASA’s long-running solar space telescope, “which are known to measure bright comets,” he says.

Astronomers also expect to root out many more interstellar objects in the coming years; they recorded the second one, known as comet 2I/Borisov, in 2019. “There’s approximately one similar object in the inner solar system at any given time,” says Seligman, Cornell astronomer and co-author on the Nature study. “When we get the Rubin Observatory and the NEO [Near-Earth Object] Surveyor going, we’ll be discovering way more.”

Astronomers think of these interstellar objects as a window into other solar systems: the closest peek we’ll get at the building blocks of other planets. “Any object of interstellar origin is incredibly valuable to us because it’s bringing clues about the processes going on beyond our solar system,” says Bergner.

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If you’ve ever been to the beach on a windy day, you’ve likely been treated to the not so fun feeling grains of sand hitting your face. That unpleasant experience would a walk in the park compared to what scientists have now discovered is happening in the atmosphere of the exoplanet VHS 1256 b.

A team of researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) found that the planet’s clouds are made up of silicate particles that range in size from tiny specks to small grains.  The silicates in the clouds are swirling in nearly constant cloud cover. Silicates are common in our solar system and make up about 95 percent of Earth’s crust and upper mantle.

[Related: These 6 galaxies are so huge, they’ve been nicknamed ‘universe breakers.’]

During VHS 1256 b’s 22-hour day, the atmosphere is continuously rising, mixing, and moving. This motion brings hotter material up and pushes colder material down, the way hot air rises  and cool air sinks on Earth. The brightness that results from this air shifting is so dramatic that the team on the study say it is the most variable planetary-mass object known to date. 

The findings were published March 22 in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The team also found very clear detections of carbon monoxide, methane, and water using JWST’s data and even evidence of carbon dioxide. According to NASA, it is the largest number of molecules ever identified all at once on a planet outside our solar system.

VHS 1256 b is about 40 light-years away from Earth and orbits two stars over a 10,000-year period. “VHS 1256 b is about four times farther from its stars than Pluto is from our Sun, which makes it a great target for Webb,” said study co-author and University of Arizona astronomer Brittany Miles, in a statement. “That means the planet’s light is not mixed with light from its stars.” 

The temperature in the higher parts of its atmosphere where the silicate clouds churn daily reach about 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. JWST detected both larger and smaller silicate dust grains within these clouds that are shown on a spectrum. 

“The finer silicate grains in its atmosphere may be more like tiny particles in smoke,” said astronomer and co-author Beth Biller of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, in a statement. “The larger grains might be more like very hot, very small sand particles.”

[Related: JWST has changed the speed of discovery, for better or for worse.]

Compared to more massive brown dwarfs, VHS 1256 b has low gravity, so its silicate clouds can appear and remain higher up in its atmosphere where JWST can detect them. It is also quite young as far as planets are concerned, at only 150 million years old. As with most young humans, it’s going through some turbulent times as it ages. 

The team says that these findings are similar to the first “coins” pulled out of a treasure chest of data that they are only beginning to rummage through. “We’ve identified silicates, but better understanding which grain sizes and shapes match specific types of clouds is going to take a lot of additional work,” said Miles. “This is not the final word on this planet – it is the beginning of a large-scale modeling effort to fit Webb’s complex data.”

While these features have been spotted on other planets in the Milky Way by other telescopes, only one at a time was typically identified, according to the team. They used JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) to collect the data and says that there will be much more to learn about VHS 1256 b as scientists sift through the data.

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IN 1989, rock-and-roll legend Chuck Berry attended one of the biggest parties of the summer. The bash wasn’t a concert, but a celebration of two space probes about to breach the edge of our solar system: NASA’s Voyager mission. 

Launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 1977, identical twins Voyager 1 and 2 embarked on a five-year expedition to observe the moons and rings of Jupiter and Saturn, carrying with them Golden Records preserving messages from Earth, including Berry’s smash single “Johnny B. Goode.” But 12 years later, out on the grassy “Mall” of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, scientists celebrated as Voyager 2 made a previously unscheduled flyby of Neptune. Planetary scientist Linda Spilker remembers the bittersweet moment: the sight of the eighth planet’s azure-colored atmosphere signaled the end of the mission’s solar system grand tour.

“We kind of thought of it as a farewell party, because we’d flown by all the planets,” says Spilker. “Both of them were well past their initial lifetimes.”

Many in the scientific community expected the spacecrafts to go dark soon after. But surprisingly, the pair continued whizzing beyond the heliopause into interstellar space, where they’ve been wandering ever since, for more than three decades. Spilker, now the Voyager mission project scientist, says the probes’ journeys have shed light on the universe we live in—and ourselves. “It’s really helped shape and change the way we think about our solar system,” she says. 

Currently traveling at a distance between 12 and 14 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 and 2 are the oldest, farthest-flung objects ever forged by humanity. Nearly five decades on, the secret to Voyager’s apparent immortality is most likely the spacecrafts’ robust design—and their straightforward, redundant technology. By today’s standards, each machine’s three separate computer systems are primitive, but that simplicity, as well as their construction from the best available materials at the time, has played a large part in allowing the twins to survive. 

For example, the spacecrafts’ short list of commands proved versatile as they hopped from one planet to the next, says Candice Hansen-Koharcheck, a planetary scientist who worked with the mission’s camera team. This flexibility of its operations allowed engineers to turn the Voyagers into scientific chameleons, adapting to one new objective after another.

As the machines puttered far from home, new discoveries, like active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io and a possible subsurface ocean on neighboring Europa, helped us realize that “we weren’t in Kansas anymore,” says Hansen-Koharcheck. Since then, many of the tools that have contributed to Voyagers’ success, such as optics and multiple fail-safes, have been translated to other long-term space missions, like the Saturn Cassini space probe and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. 

Both Voyagers are expected to transmit data back to Earth until about 2025—or until the spacecrafts’ plutonium “batteries” are unable to power critical functions. But even if they do cease contact, it’s unlikely they will crash into anything or ever be destroyed in the cosmic void. 

Instead, the Voyagers may travel the Milky Way eternally, both alone and together in humanity’s most spectacular odyssey. 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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On a clear, moonless night, you might be able to see thousands of stars sparkling like jewels above. But a keen eye will notice that they don’t all look alike. Some glow brighter than others, and some display warm red hues.

In the beginning…

All stars form from a cloud of dust and gas when turbulence pushes enough of that material together, pressed into one body by gravity. As that clump collapses in on itself, it starts to spin. The material in the middle heats up, forming a dense core known as a protostar. Gravity draws even more material toward the developing star as it spins, making it bigger and bigger. Some of that stuff may eventually form planets, asteroids, and comets in orbit around the new star.

The stellar body remains in the protostar phase as long as material still collapses inward and the object can grow. This process can take hundreds of thousands of years.

The amount of mass that is gathered during that stellar formation process determines the ultimate trajectory of the star’s life—and what types of stars it will become throughout its existence.

Protostars, baby stars—and failures

As a protostar amasses more and more gas and dust, its spinning core gets hotter and hotter. Once it accumulates enough mass and reaches millions of degrees, nuclear fusion begins in the core. A star is born.

For this to occur, a protostar has to accumulate more than 0.08 times the mass of our sun. Anything less and there won’t be enough gravitational pressure on the protostar to trigger nuclear fusion. 

Those failed stars are called brown dwarfs, and they remain in that state for their lifetime, progressively cooling down without nuclear fusion to help release new energy. Despite their name, brown dwarfs can be orange, red, or black due to their cool temperatures. They tend to be slightly larger than Jupiter, but are much more dense.

Protostars that do acquire enough mass to become a star sometimes go through an interim phase. During a roughly 10 million-year period, these young stars collapse under the pressure of gravity, which heats up their cores and sets off nuclear fusion. 

In this stage, a star can fall into two categories: If it has a mass two times that of our sun, it is considered a T Tauri star. If it has two to eight solar masses, it’s a Herbig Ae/Be star. The most massive stars skip this early stage, because they contract too quickly. 

Once a sufficiently massive star begins to undergo nuclear fusion, a balancing act begins. Gravity still exerts an inward force on the newborn star, but nuclear fusion releases outward energy. For as long as those forces balance each other out, the star exists in its main sequence stage. 

Fueling main sequence stars

Main sequence stars, which can last for millions to billions of years, are the vast majority of stars in the universe—and what we can see unaided on dark, clear nights. These stars burn hydrogen gas as fuel for nuclear fusion. Under the super-hot conditions in the core of a star, colliding hydrogen fuses, generating energy. This process produces the chemical ingredients for a reaction that makes helium. 

Mass dictates what type of star an object will be during the main sequence stage. The more mass a star has, the stronger the force of gravity pushing inward on the core and therefore the hotter the star gets. With more heat, there is faster fusion and that generates more outward pressure against the inward gravitational force. That makes the star appear brighter, bigger, hotter, and bluer.

[Related: The Milky Way’s oldest star is a white-hot pyre of dead planets]

Many main sequence stars are also often referred to as “dwarf” stars. They can range greatly in luminosity, color, and size, from a tenth to 200 times the sun’s mass. The biggest stars are blue stars, and they are particularly hot and bright. In the middle are yellow stars, which includes our sun. Somewhat smaller are orange stars, and the smallest, coolest stars are red stars. 

The hottest stars are O stars, with surface temperatures over 25,000 Kelvin. Then there are B stars (10,000 to 25,000K), A stars (7,500 to 10,000K), F stars (6,000 to 7,500K), G stars (5,000 to 6,000K—our sun, with a surface temperature around 5,800K is one of these), K stars (3,500 to 5,000K), and M stars (less than 3,500K). 

Upsetting the balance to grow a giant star

As a star runs out of fuel, its core contracts and heats up even more. This makes the remaining hydrogen fuse even faster: It produces extra energy, which radiates outward and pushes more forcefully against the inward force of gravity, causing the outer layers of the star to expand.

As those layers spread out, they cool down, and that makes the star appear redder. The result is either a red giant or a red supergiant, depending on if it’s a low mass star (less than 8 solar masses) or a high mass star (greater than 8 solar masses). This phase typically lasts up to around a billion years.

Appearing more orange than red, some red giants are visible to the naked eye, such as Gamma Crucis in the southern constellation Crux (aka the Southern Cross).

The death and afterlife of a low-mass star

Stars die in remarkably different ways, depending on their masses. For a low-mass star, once all the hydrogen is nearly gone, the core contracts even more, getting even hotter. It becomes so scorching that the star can even fuse helium—which, because it’s an element heavier than hydrogen, requires more heat and pressure for nuclear fusion. 

As a red giant burns through its helium, producing carbon and other elements, it becomes unstable and begins to pulsate. Its outer layers are ejected and blow away into the interstellar medium. Eventually, when all of these layers have been shed, all that remains is the small, hot, dense core. That bare remnant is called a white dwarf.

[Related: Wiggly space waves show neutron stars on the edge of becoming black holes]

About the size of Earth, though hundreds of thousands of times more massive, a white dwarf no longer produces new heat of its own. It gradually cools over billions of years, emitting light that appears anywhere from blue white to red. These dense stellar remnants are too dim to see with a naked eye, but some are visible with a telescope in the southern constellation Musca. Van Maanen’s star, in the northern constellation Pisces, is also a white dwarf. 

The explosive stellar death of a high-mass star

Stars with mass eight times that of our sun typically follow a similar pattern, at least in the beginning of this phase. As the star runs low on helium, it contracts and heats up, which allows it to convert the resulting carbon into oxygen. That process repeats itself with the oxygen, converting it to neon, then the neon into silicon, and finally into iron. When no fuel remains for this fusion sequence, and energy is no longer being released outward from those reactions, the inward force of gravity quickly wins. 

Within a second, the outer layers of the star collapse inward. The core collapses and then rebounds, sending a shock wave through the rest of the star: a supernova. 

Life after a supernova for a star takes one of two paths. If the star had between eight and 20 times the sun’s mass during its main sequence stage, it will leave behind a superdense core called a neutron star. Neutron stars are even smaller in diameter than white dwarfs, at about the size of New York City’s length, and contain more mass than our sun.

But for the most massive stars, that remnant core will continue collapsing under the pressure of its own gravity. The result is a black hole, which can be as small as an atom but contain the mass of a supermassive star.

One such example is a star in a binary or multi-star system that accretes mass from a companion. With all that extra mass to burn, it can seem younger than its true age, appearing bluer and brighter. That, Gosnell says, is called a blue straggler star, because it seems to be “straggling behind its expected evolution.” 

Another odd type of star is sub-subgiant, Gosnell says. These stars also are found in binary systems, and are transitioning from the main sequence to the red giant branch, though they stay dimmer. This kind of subgiant star has “really active magnetic fields with lots of star spots on the surface,” she says. “And so you have these really magnetically active, visually dynamic stars as the star spots rotate in and out of view.” 

The ongoing ESA mission, she adds, is reviewing stars with a “much finer-toothed comb”—which may reveal the true variety and complexity of stars that have existed all along. As such missions “peel back the layers,” Gosnell says, “We start to see really interesting stories come out that challenge the edges of these categories.”

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A new JWST infrared image, captured last summer but shared publicly this week, exposes some of the explosive details scientists have been looking for. The telescope used a spectrograph and two of its advanced cameras to record the halo of dust emanating from WR 124. The star is currently in the “Wolf-Rayet phase,” in which it loses much of its mass to surrounding space. The bright white spot at the center shows the burning stellar core; the pink and purple ripples represent a nebula of hydrogen and other ejecta.

Stars of a certain magnitude will go through the Wolf-Rayet transformation as their lifespan winds down. WR 124 is one of the mightiest stars in the Milky Way, with 3,000 percent more mass than our sun. But its end is nye—it will collapse into a supernova in a few hundred thousand years

[Related: This could be a brand new type of supernova]

In the meantime, astronomers will use images and other data from JWST to measure WR 124’s contribution to the universe’s “dust budget.” Dust is essential to the universe’s workings, as NASA explains. The stuff protects young stars and forms a foundation for essential molecules—and planets. But much more of it exists than we can account for, the space agency notes: “The universe is operating with a dust budget surplus.”

The spectacular cloud around WR 124 might explain why that is. “Before Webb, dust-loving astronomers simply did not have enough detailed information to explore questions of dust production in environments like WR 124, and whether the dust grains were large and bountiful enough to survive the supernova and become a significant contribution to the overall dust budget. Now those questions can be investigated with real data,” NASA shared.

As JWST enters its second year of exploration, the observatory will take a sweeping look at galaxies far and near to reconstruct a timeline of the early universe. But individual stars can add to that cosmological understanding, too, even if they aren’t all on a glorious death march like WR 124.

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What happens when a dart hits the bullseye? In a game among amateurs, it sends everybody home. But professional players will want to analyze the shot in preparation to fire again. 

In this case, that dart is NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the spacecraft that crashed last November into the asteroid Dimorphos in hopes of redirecting its course. On March 2, a quintet of papers in the journal Nature confirmed what DART’s controllers had already guessed: The mission’s impact was a smashing success.

But DART won’t be the last human mission to visit Dimorphos or the larger asteroid which it orbits, Didymos. The European Space Agency’s Hera will soon follow in DART’s trail to appraise its aftermath—in far more detail than scientists, with their combination of instruments from Earth and the DART mission’s own sensors, have managed so far.

Now scheduled for an October 2024 departure, Hera is slated to lift off from Cape Canaveral on the wings of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. According to the mission’s current itinerary, it will arrive at Dimorphos and Didymos in late 2026 for around six months of sightseeing. Then, if conditions allow, Hera—a car–sized probe outfitted with a large radio antenna and a pair of solar panels—will try to make a full landing on Didymos.

Hera will also carry two passengers: a pair of CubeSats named Milani and Juventas. Milani will study the asteroids’ exteriors; Juventas will probe the asteroids’ interiors. With three spacecraft, scientists can get three different views of the crash site on Dimorphos. The mission’s chief purpose is to follow in DART’s shadow and understand what damage humanity’s first asteroid strike actually left on its target.

[Related: NASA has major plans for asteroids. Could Psyche’s delay change them?]

Between DART’s now-destroyed cameras, its companion LICIACube, and telescopes watching from Earth’s ground and orbit, we already know quite a bit about the planetary defense test. We can see Dimorphos’ orbit, both before and after DART’s impact; we know that DART altered it, cutting Dimorphos closer to Didymos and shortening its orbital period; and we can home in on where on the asteroid’s surface that DART struck, down to a patch the size of a vending machine.

But there’s still a lot we don’t know—most critically, Dimorphos’s mass before and after it was infiltrated. Scientists can’t calculate the measurement from Earth, but Hera’s instruments will have that ability. Without knowing the mass, we have no way of knowing why, precisely, DART’s impact pushed Dimorphos into its new orbit.

“We want to determine, accurately, how much momentum was transferred to Dimorphos,” says Patrick Michel, astronomer at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France and Hera’s mission principal investigator.

Hera might also tell us what cosmetic scars DART left from the crash. It’s possible that the impactor simply left a crater, or that it violently shook up the asteroid, rearranging a large chunk of its exterior. “A lot of us are wondering how much of the surface we’ll even be able to recognize,” says Andy Cheng, an astronomer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory who worked on DART.

The problem is that, until humans send an observer to the asteroid, we don’t know what the surface holds in wait for us, Michel says. What the asteroid’s exterior looks like now depends on what Dimorphos’s interior looked like when DART struck it. If the spacecraft dramatically reshaped the asteroid, it’s a sign that the target’s insides were weakly held together. And right now, “we have no clue, really, what’s happening inside,” says Terik Daly, an astronomer at the Johns Hopkins Advanced Physics Laboratory and DART team member. Hera, along with the radar-packing Juventas, will try to scan below the rocky surface.

Of course, Hera won’t be able to observe everything. Many astronomers have focused on Dimorphos’s ejecta—the material kicked up from the asteroid upon DART’s impact—to understand how exactly the strike nudged the asteroid. By the time of Hera’s arrival, at least four years after the crash, most of that ejecta will have long dissipated.

Still, knowing more about the asteroid’s innards can help astronomers understand where that ejecta came from—and what would happen if we crossed paths with a space rock again. “For example, in the future, if we had to use this technique to divert some asteroid, then we could do a more precise prediction [to hit it],” says Jian-Yang Li, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University who worked on DART.

There are also other reasons why Dimorphos might not look the same way in 2026. Just as the moon pulls and pushes the tides around Earth’s oceans, Didymos’ gravity might play with its smaller companion. Scientists think it’s possible that those forces might cause Dimorphos to wobble in its orbit. But again, they won’t be able to observe any of this until Hera actually gets up close.

As the mission progresses, they might at least be able to set a baseline. Michel says that astronomers on Earth can simulate many of Dimorphos’s possible future orbits on their computers. “It’s not really a problem that we arrive four years later,” says Michel. “We have the tools to understand if something evolved.”

[Related: This speedy space rock is the fastest asteroid in our solar system]

The data from DART’s impact and Hera’s eyes certainly will help astronomers understand asteroids in their pre- and post-collision states. But they’ll also help us prevent the specter of death from above. Humans have long feared destruction from space in line with the dinosaurs, and with DART, planetary defense—the science of stemming that fear—made its first step into real-world strategies. 

It’s hard to say when we’ll need the ability to deflect a space rock; astronomers’ projections show that no object larger than a kilometer is set to pass Earth in the next century. But, according to Michel, space agencies haven’t identified 60 percent of the objects flying by that are at least 40 meters long—large enough to devastate a region or a small country.

“We know that, eventually, such an impact [with Earth] will happen again,” Michel says, “and we cannot improvise.”

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Water is an essential ingredient for life as we know it, but its origins on Earth, or any other planet, have been a long-standing puzzle. Was most of our planet’s water incorporated in the early Earth as it coalesced out of the material orbiting the young sun? Or was water brought to the surface only later by comet and asteroid bombardments? And where did that water come from originally? 

A study published on March 7 in the journal Nature provides new evidence to bolster a theory about the ultimate origins of water—namely, that it predates the sun and solar system, forming slowly over time in vast clouds of gas and dust between stars.

”We now have a clear link in the evolution of water. It actually seems to be directly inherited, all the way back from the cold interstellar medium before a star ever formed,” says John Tobin, an astronomer studying star formation at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and lead author of the paper. The water, unchanged, was incorporated from the protoplanetary disk, a dense, round layer of dust and gas that forms in orbit around newborn stars and from which planets and small space bodies like comets emerge. Tobin says the water gets drawn into comets “relatively unchanged as well.”

Astronomers have proposed different origins story for water in solar systems. In the hot nebular theory, Tobin says, the heat in a protoplanetary disk around a natal star will break down water and other molecules, which form afresh as things start to cool.  

The problem with that theory, according to Tobin, is that when water emerges at relatively warm temperatures in a protoplanetary disk, it won’t look like the water found on comets and asteroids. We know what those molecules look like: Space rocks, such as asteroids and comets act as time capsules, preserving the state of matter in the early solar system. Specifically, water made in the disk wouldn’t have enough deuterium—the hydrogen isotope that contains one neutron and one proton in its nucleus, rather than a single proton as in typical hydrogen. 

[Related: Meteorites older than the solar system contain key ingredients for life]

An alternative to the hot nebular theory is that water forms at cold temperatures on the surface of dust grains in vast clouds in the interstellar medium. This deep chill changes the dynamics of water formation, so that more deuterium is incorporated in place of typical hydrogen atoms in H₂O molecules, more closely resembling the hydrogen-to-deuterium ratio seen in asteroids and comets.  

“The surface of dust grains is the only place where you can efficiently form large amounts of water with deuterium in it,” Tobin says. “The other routes of forming water with deuterium and gas just don’t work.” 

While this explanation worked in theory, the new paper is the first time scientists have found evidence that water from the interstellar medium can survive the intense heat during the formation of a protoplanetary disk. 

The researchers used the European Southern Observatory’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, a radio telescope in Chile, to observe the protoplanetary disk around the young star V883 Orionis, about 1,300 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Orion. 

Radio telescopes such as this one can detect the signal of water molecules in the gas phase. But dense dust found in  protoplanetary disks very close to young stars often turns water into ice, which sticks to grains in ways telescopes cannot observe. 

But V883 Orionis is not a typical young star—it’s been shining brighter than normal due to material from the protoplanetary disk falling onto the star. This increased intensity warmed ice on dust grains farther out than usual, allowing Tobin and his colleagues to detect the signal of deuterium-enriched water in the disk. 

“That’s why it was unique to be able to observe this particular system, and get a direct confirmation of the water composition,” Tobin explains. ”That signature of that level of deuterium gives you your smoking gun.” This suggests Earth’s oceans and rivers are, at a molecular level, older than the sun itself. 

[Related: Here’s how life on Earth might have formed out of thin air and water]

“We obviously will want to do this for more systems to make sure this wasn’t just that wasn’t just a fluke,” Tobin adds. It’s possible, for instance, that water chemistry is somehow altered later in the development of planets, comets, and asteroids, as they smash together in a protoplanetary disk. 

But as an astronomer studying star formation, Tobin already has some follow up candidates in mind. “There are several other good candidates that are in the Orion star-forming region,” he says. “You just need to find something that has a disk around it.”

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Star Trek fans knew they would lose the planet Vulcan someday in a fiery implosion at the hands of the Romulans—but they probably didn’t expect it to lose the planet in real life, too. Now reality is once again following fiction: The exoplanet once considered to be the real Vulcan has been erased, based on a new analysis of old data.

The 2018 discovery of the exoplanet known as 40 Eri b, which is located around the real-life star canonically orbited by Spock’s fictional homeworld, has turned out to be a false alarm. In a new research paper accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal, astronomers used years of observations to re-analyze many previous exoplanet detections, including that of 40 Eri b. Unfortunately, astronomers hadn’t actually found Vulcan after all.

“As we continue to study objects with better and more precise instruments, reevaluating things we thought we already knew can lead to new conclusions about what’s really going on,” says Ohio State University astronomer Katherine Laliotis, lead author on the new work. In the case of 40 Eri b, the signal previously thought to be a planet turned out to be activity on the star’s surface. This work, she adds, is “a reminder that re-studying and reproducing already published results is a very valuable use of time.”

40 Eri b was originally detected using the radial velocity method, in which astronomers analyze the different wavelengths of light coming from a star. As a planet orbits a star, it’ll tug on its sun ever so slightly. When this tug pushes the star away from Earth, the star appears redder—thanks to the Doppler effect—and if it moves toward us, it appears bluer. With this method, astronomers believed they found 40 Eri b: A Neptune-sized planet 16 light-years away, so close to its star that a year would last only 42 days. This wouldn’t have been a particularly pleasant or habitable planet, but it made waves thanks to its sci-fi ties.

[Related: Newly discovered exoplanet may be a ‘Super Earth’ covered in water]

Some astronomers, such as NASA astronomer Eric Mamajek, immediately expressed doubts about the supposed detection. That’s because the time it took for this planet to complete one orbit was suspiciously close to the time the star takes to rotate. His suspicions were right. By tracing a feature of the light spectrum known to be part of the star, Laliotis and collaborators confirmed the star’s rotation rate, marking the end of the possible planet 40 Eri b. 

They didn’t specifically set out on a mission to kill Vulcan, though. This work was part of a bigger analysis, looking into all of NASA’s top picks for future exoplanet exploration—and 40 Eridani just happened to be on the list. Astronomers are always collecting new data, observing different stars, but “​​many planetary systems haven’t been officially updated since they were published in the early 2000s,” according to Laliotis.

Astronomers are already starting preparation for the next big space telescope, known as the Habitable Worlds Observatory. This future NASA mission aims to take photos of Earth-like planets around sun-like stars, allowing scientists to directly look into these exoplanets’ atmospheres for oxygen and other signs of life. Laliotis’s work fits right into this plan—she says this study aimed to figure out “what [planetary] systems we already understand well, what systems we have a misunderstanding of, and what systems need to be observed a lot more in the coming years.” This review will help make sure the future telescope’s precious observing time is used wisely.

“NASA is planning to spend billions of dollars on future missions to fly telescopes to study planets,” says Jessie Christiansen, project scientist at NASA’s Exoplanet Archive. “Imagine if this had been one of the targets! It’s not real!”

Although astronomers are, of course, glad to see rigorous scientific work being done, they’ll also admit that they are a bit sad about losing an exoplanet with such a cool sci-fi crossover. “I’m sad whenever any planet gets disproven, but this one hit especially hard because I’ve been using it for a few years now as a provocative, intriguing tie between the real worlds we’re discovering and the fictional worlds we know and love,” says Christiansen, who also started a lively Twitter conversation on the topic.

[Related: In a first, James Webb Space Telescope reveals distant gassy atmosphere is filled with carbon dioxide]

This doesn’t completely rule out a real-world equivalent of Vulcan, though. The Neptune-sized planet discovered in 2018 isn’t there, but it’s possible a smaller planet—one we haven’t seen yet—still exists around the star 40 Eridani. With current technology and observations, astronomers simply can’t detect any planet smaller than 12 times Earth’s mass on an orbit similar to Earth’s. “This means there’s still a chance that Vulcan exists. In fact, there’s even a chance that Vulcan could be in the habitable zone for the star,” says Laliotis.

Even if Vulcan is gone for now, Trekkie astronomers will still find ways to have fun with sci-fi and outer space. “There are still many other planets in the Star Trek universe that haven’t been disproven,” adds Louisiana State University astronomer Alison Crisp. One potential planet orbiting Wolf 359, for example, could still exist—the site of a major Star Trek battle. 

UCLA astronomer Isabella Trierweiler actually sees a way this saga fits into Star Trek canon. “Until 2063, Vulcans are just observing Earth and waiting for us to develop warp capabilities,” Trierweiler says. “Maybe they were able to adjust our observations to hide the planet, maybe they found super strong cloaking devices, or maybe Vulcan was briefly one of those planets that phases in and out of dimensions!” Whatever Vulcan’s fate, humanity has a few more years of technological development ahead of us until we reach these sci-fi dreams. And perhaps those lofty goals will help us find a real planet around 40 Eridani.

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On September 26, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft slammed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos at 13,000 miles per hour, altering the extraterrestrial rock’s orbit around its larger companion asteroid, Didymos. A triumphant success of planning, targeting and autonomous flight that covered 7 million miles, the impact served as the first proof of concept for kinetic impactors—spacecraft that could be used to redirect any future asteroids on a collision course with Earth.

But to understand how a DART-like mission would work in a real apocalyptic scenario, astronomers and national security experts need lots of data and detailed analysis. Data they had almost immediately, as just about every telescope and sensor that could be trained on Dimorphos, was, prior to impact. And now, detailed analyses of what happened are going public, starting with five papers published in the journal Nature on March 1.

1. Kinetic impactors like DART can make a real splash

In a study of Dimophos’s orbit led by Northern Arizona University Astronomer Cristina Thomas, an international team calculated just how much DART’s crash landing changed the asteroid’s orbital period. Using radar and light curves, measured from changes in Dimorphos’s brightness over time, they showed the space rock slowed down in its orbit by 33 minutes, give or take about three minutes.

“To serve as a proof-of-concept for the kinetic impactor technique of planetary defense, DART needed to demonstrate that an asteroid could be targeted during a high-speed encounter and that the target’s orbit could be changed,” Thomas and her colleagues write in the paper. “DART has successfully done both.”

The researchers note, however, that there were probably several reasons why DART was able to slow Dimorphos down by a full half hour. If the only factor were the spacecraft’s mass, the asteroid’s orbit should have changed by no more than seven minutes. Any other explanations would “require modeling beyond the scope of this paper,” they explained.

2. DART got a big assist from the asteroid itself

A second paper led by Andy Cheng, chief scientist for planetary defense and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, dug into why Dimorphos’s orbit shifted so dramatically.

His team’s research found that the “ejecta,” the material shaken loose from Dimorphos by the force of DART’s impact, amplified the transfer of kinetic energy from the spacecraft and the change in the asteroid’s orbit by 2.2 to 4.9 times. In fact, the authors write in the paper, “significantly more momentum was transferred to Dimorphos” from the escaping ejecta than DART itself.

[Related: NASA sampled a ‘fluffy’ asteroid that could hold clues to our existence]

Determining how much momentum a spacecraft can transfer to an asteroid and how that affects the asteroid’s orbit were key questions the DART mission sought to answer, and this study gives scientists the parameters they were waiting for. It illustrates the range of effectiveness kinetic impactors might have on hazardous asteroids given their makeup. Asteroids that respond to a strike with more ejecta may allow a DART-type spacecraft to deflect larger asteroids than it could otherwise, or to deflect an asteroid with less warning time.

3. Planning ahead is key to saving the planet

The key takeaway of the third paper, led by Terik Daly, Carolyn Ernst, and Olivier Barnouin of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, is that despite DART’s successful strike and the helpful amplification by the impact ejecta, planetary protection remains a game of observation and early warning. “Kinetic impactor technology for asteroid deflection requires having sufficient warning time—at least several years but preferably decades—to prevent an asteroid impact with the Earth,” the researchers write in the paper.

Early warning, thankfully, is something NASA has been investing in since long before the DART mission. The NASA Authorization Act of 2005 directed the space agency to catalog 90 percent of all near-Earth asteroids of 460 feet in diameter or greater, a task that is now complete. NASA is now building an infrared space telescope scheduled for launch in 2028 that will help scan the skies for unseen asteroids.

“NEO Surveyor represents the next generation for NASA’s ability to quickly detect, track, and characterize potentially hazardous near-Earth objects,” Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary protection officer, said in a statement.

4. DART was also secretly a planetary-science mission

Dimorphos’s ejecta not only affected the orbit of the asteroid, they gave it a dust tail that strutted more than 900 miles from the asteroid within three hours of the impact, according to a fourth study led Jian-Yang Li, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute.

Thought comets are better known for their brilliant tails, asteroids can also become “active,” as scientists put it, and form a little train on their backsides. It’s thought that this happens after some kind of impact, though the idea has never been put to the test. 

The September mission gave scientists a “detailed characterization” of the ejecta-to-tail-making process serving double duty as a planetary-protection and a planetary-science mission. “DART will continue to be the model for studies of newly discovered asteroids that show activity caused by natural impacts,” the researchers write.

5. DART really lit Dimorphos up

The last paper also falls into the planetary-science bucket with a close look at Dimorphos in its post-DART hangover. A study with ground-based telescopes in Africa and an Indian Ocean island led by SETI Institute astronomer Ariel Graykowski found it took the asteroid more than 23 days to return to its pre-impact levels of brightness in the night sky.

The analysis also found that ejecta appeared reddish at the time of impact, which is somewhat mysterious. “Typically, active bodies appear bluer in color on average than their inactive counterparts,” the researchers write in the paper, giving the examples of active comets versus inactive Kuiper Belt objects. “Some of these redder observed surface colors may be due to irradiation of organics,” they add, noting that lab experiments have shown space radiation can cause redden some of the same minerals probably found in asteroids like Dimorphos.

[Related: ‘Phantom’ mannequins will help us understand how cosmic radiation affects female bodies in space]

The five studies are just the first wave of an ongoing campaign to analyze the DART mission from different angles. The European Space Agency’s HERA mission, for instance, will rendezvous with Dimorphos sometime in 2026 to better assess the aftermath of DART’s impact in detail. Until then, NASA and other collaborators can continue to celebrate a major milestone in humanity’s relationship with the space around us.

“I cheered when DART slammed head on into the asteroid for the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration, and that was just the start,” NASA administrator for its Science Mission Directorate, Nicola Fox, said in a statement on March 1. ”These findings add to our fundamental understanding of asteroids and build a foundation for how humanity can defend Earth.”

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The fabric of space and time is wrinkly and warped. Gravity tugs on this fabric, causing indents and wiggles—some of which are observable to humans as gravitational waves. When two black holes, neutron stars, or other extremely massive objects smash into each other, they emit these waves, which were first heard by the revolutionary LIGO experiment in 2016.

After that first detection seven years ago, physicists thought their mathematical models described the data well enough. Now, physicists have just determined that gravitational waves released from collisions between two black holes are more complex than previously thought. Two new studies from Caltech and Johns Hopkins—concurrently published on February 22 in Physical Review Letters with matching results—use computer models to reveal so-called nonlinear effects in black hole collisions, in which gravitational ripples influence each other like waves on a shore.

“Nonlinear effects are what happens when waves on the beach crest and crash,” said Keefe Mitman, Caltech astronomer and lead author on one of the studies, in a press release. “The waves interact and influence each other rather than ride along by themselves. With something as violent as a black hole merger, we expected these effects but had not seen them in our models until now.”

[Related: ‘Rogue black holes’ might be neither ‘rogue’ nor ‘black holes’]

These new studies investigate a particular part of the black hole-black hole merger, known as ringdown because it resembles the vibrations of a struck bell. When black holes collide, they temporarily form one lumpy and unstable large black hole that needs to settle down into a simple, round shape. This settling and shifting releases the gravitational waves that make up the ringdown. Since the mathematics describing this process is unwieldy, prior work assumed gravitational waves don’t interact with each other. 

But this new work tackles those complicated events and discovered the waves in fact influence each other. In computer simulations, the Caltech group modeled what happens when two black holes collide in orbits that aren’t perfect circles, and the Johns Hopkins team smashed two black holes together head-on at almost the speed of light. Both these scenarios are particularly energetic, leading to the nonlinearities they expect to see. 

To explain why energetic collisions have this result, Mitman likens this to two people on a trampoline. Two jumpers who gently hop up and down shouldn’t affect each other that much, as he points out in the press release. “But if one person starts bouncing with more energy, then the trampoline will distort, and the other person will start to feel their influence,” Mitman said. “This is what we mean by nonlinear: the two people on the trampoline experience new oscillations because of the presence and influence of the other person.”

Without accounting for nonlinear effects, physicists may be wrong about the size and other properties of the black holes they detect—of which there have been many with LIGO over the past few years. Plus, these details are key for making sure our understanding of the laws of physics are fully correct, such as checking the intricacies of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

[Related: We’re still in the dark about a key black hole paradox]

“Black hole ringdowns offer a great playground to test Einstein’s theory of relativity,” says Sumeet Kulkarni, a University of Mississippi astronomer not affiliated with the study. “But to use ringdowns as a test, one must understand them completely. This study takes us a step closer to this understanding.”

For now, however, nonlinearities are only seen in the realm of supercomputers. Humanity’s best black hole detectors aren’t sensitive enough to spot these small effects. Future detector projects are already in the works, though, and researchers are already starting to plan for the future. 

“An obvious next step is to gauge whether these effects will be detectable in LIGO or next generation detectors,” says Mark Ho-Yeuk Cheung, physicist and lead author of the Johns Hopkins study. The Cosmic Explorer and the Einstein Telescopes are two upcoming gravitational wave experiments that may be able to do the job. “While the prospects are promising,” Cheung adds, “we still need to quantify more precisely how and when they will be detected.”

Not only do the pair of simulations shed new light on the mysteries of black holes, they also illustrate the beauty of the scientific process: two teams of scientists producing independent results, complementing and supporting the others’ findings. As Mitman tells Popular Science, “I’m just charmed that we have yet another beautiful example of theorists and numerical relativists coming together to discover something fascinating about the way black holes work.”

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Using the first dataset released by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of scientists have discovered something surprising– evidence of six massive galaxies that existed during the early days of our universe. 

“These objects are way more massive​ than anyone expected,” said Joel Leja, an astronomer and astrophysicist at Penn State University, in a statement. “We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.”

[Related: Astronomers are already using James Webb Space Telescope data to hunt down cryptic galaxies.]

Leja is co-author of a study published February 22 in the journal Nature that could change some of our preconceived notions of how galaxies form. These newly discovered galaxies themselves date back to about 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang. JWST has infrared-sensing instruments on board that can detect light that was emitted by the most ancient stars and galaxies, allowing astronomers to see roughly 13.5 billion years back in time. 

“This is our first glimpse back this far, so it’s important that we keep an open mind about what we are seeing,” Leja said. “While the data indicates they are likely galaxies, I think there is a real possibility that a few of these objects turn out to be obscured supermassive black holes. Regardless, the amount of mass we discovered means that the known mass in stars at this period of our universe is up to 100 times greater than we had previously thought. Even if we cut the sample in half, this is still an astounding change.”

Since these six galaxies were far more massive than anyone on the team expected them to be, they could upend previous notions about the galaxy formation at the very beginning of the universe.

“The revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science,” said Leja. “We’ve been informally calling these objects ‘universe breakers’ — and they have been living up to their name so far.”

The authors argue that the “universe breakers” are so large, that almost all modern cosmological models fail to explain how these star systems could have formed.

[Related: Our universe mastered the art of making galaxies while it was still young.]

“We looked into the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find,” Leja said. “It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.”

One way that the team can confirm their new findings is with a spectrum image that could  provide data on the true distances between us and the mysterious galaxies, as well as  the gasses and other elements present. It would also paint a more clear picture of what these galaxies looked like billions of years ago.

“A spectrum will immediately tell us whether or not these things are real,” Leja said. “It will show us how big they are, how far away they are. What’s funny is we have all these things we hope to learn from James Webb and this was nowhere near the top of the list. We’ve found something we never thought to ask the universe — and it happened way faster than I thought, but here we are.”

NASA released JWST’s first full-color images and spectroscopic data on July 12, 2022. One of JWST’s primary goals this year is to better map and create a timeline of the earliest days of the universe with its high resolution and infrared spotting capabilities.  

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Well, there’s a reasonable explanation. Heat travels through the cosmos as radiation, an infrared wave of energy that migrates from hotter objects to cooler ones. The radiation waves excite molecules they come in contact with, causing them to heat up. This is how heat travels from the sun to Earth, but the catch is that radiation only heats molecules and matter that are directly in its path. Everything else stays chilly. Take Mercury: the nighttime temperature of the planet can be 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit lower than the radiation-exposed day-side, according to NASA.

Compare that to Earth, where the air around you stays warm even if you’re in the shade—and even, in some seasons, in the dark of night. That’s because heat travels throughout our beautiful blue planet by three methods instead of just one: conduction, convection, and radiation. When the sun’s radiation hits and warms up molecules in our atmosphere, they pass that extra energy to the molecules around them. Those molecules then bump into and heat up their own neighbors. This heat transfer from molecule to molecule is called conduction, and it’s a chain reaction that warms areas outside of the sun’s path.

[Related: What happens to your body when you die in space?]

Space, however, is a vacuum—meaning it’s basically empty. Gas molecules in space are too few and far apart to regularly collide with one another. So even when the sun heats them with infrared waves, transferring that heat via conduction isn’t possible. Similarly, convection—a form of heat transfer that happens in the presence of gravity—is important in dispersing warmth across the Earth, but doesn’t happen in zero-g space.

These are things Elisabeth Abel, a thermal engineer on NASA’s DART project, thinks about as she prepares vehicles and devices for long-term voyages through space. This is especially true when she was working on the Parker Solar Probe, she says.

“The job of that heat shield,” Abel says, is to make sure “none of the solar radiation [will] touch anything on the spacecraft.” So, while the heat shield is experiencing the extreme heat (around 250 degrees F) of our host star, the spacecraft itself is much colder—around -238 degrees F, she says.

[Related: How worried should we be about solar flares and space weather?]

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Breathtaking visuals of the swirling arms of spiral galaxies are some of the awe-inspiring images our galaxy and others have to offer. 

In only its first Earth-year in space, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), has already captured some stunning images of these spinning wonders.

[Related: Our universe mastered the art of making galaxies while it was still young.]

In the constellation Hercules–named for the Roman spelling of the Greek demigod Heracles known for his strength–are trillions of stars that stretch back about 13 billion light-years. In the lower center of the constellation is a spiral galaxy known as LEDA 2046648. It’s a billion light-years away, but one of its defining characteristics is that it looks like our very own Milky Way galaxy. 

A new image from JWST is so clear that the spiral arms of the galaxy are visible—impressive for a sight so far away. It shows multiple galaxies and stars in six-pointed diffraction spikes that have become one of JWST’s signature observations. 

The image was taken with JWST’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) which can detect infrared rays and see light on the infrared spectrum. This is an important part of one of Webb’s main missions of exploring the age of when stars and galaxies first began to light up the universe.

JWST also discovered a cannibal galaxy named “Sparkler,” for the dwarf galaxies and 12 globular clusters shining around it. In the results published towards the end of last year in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, it appears to be a “very early” mirror image of the Milky Way. Studying Sparkler could help astronomers understand how our home galaxy took shape. 

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope just identified its first exoplanet.]

According to the study team, the galaxy is a cannibal because it is gobbling up nearby celestial objects to grow ever larger. It’s believed that the Milky Way galaxy also grew this way. Astronomers spotted the star in JWST’s First Deep Field  released in July 2022. This image is the deepest and most detailed view of the universe ever captured and was Webb’s first full-color picture.

The Sparkler galaxy is shown as a warped orange line surrounded by spots of light. 

“We appear to be witnessing, first hand, the assembly of this galaxy as it builds up its mass—in the form of a dwarf galaxy and several globular clusters,” said co-author Duncan Forbes, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, in a statement. “We are excited by this unique opportunity to study both the formation of globular clusters, and an infant Milky Way, at a time when the universe was only one-third of its present age.”

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Happy “spoke” season, Saturnians! NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured new images of the spoke season during the planet’s equinox, when mysterious smudgy spokes appear around Saturn’s famed rings. Scientists still don’t have a full understanding of what causes these spokes and their seasonal variations. 

Saturn is tilted on its axis and has four seasons just like Earth. Since Saturn has a larger orbit around the sun, each season on Saturn lasts about seven Earth years. During this cycle, an equinox occurs when Saturn’s rings are tilted edge-on to the sun, and as Saturn approaches its summer and winter solstices, these spokes disappear. 

[Related: The origin of Saturn’s slanted rings may link back to a lost, ancient moon.]

The autumnal equinox for Saturn’s northern hemisphere is on May 6, 2025 and it gets closer, the spokes are expected to become more prominent and observable.

Astronomers believe that the spokes are caused by Saturn’s variable magnetic field. When a planet’s magnetic field interacts with solar wind, it creates an electrically charged environment. 

Scientists believe that the smallest, dust-sized icy ring particles can also become charged, and temporarily levitate those particles above the larger icy particles and boulders in the rings.

NASA’s Voyager mission first observed the ring spokes during the early 1980s. Depending on how much is illuminated and the viewing angle, the strange features can appear dark or light.

To learn more about Saturn and the other gas giants of our solar system (Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune), Hubble’s Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) is a project, is taking long time baseline observations of the outer planets to better understand their evolution and atmospheric dynamics. The measurements will be taken throughout the remainder of Hubble’s operation,  which could be into the 2030s.

“Thanks to Hubble’s OPAL program, which is building an archive of data on the outer solar system planets, we will have longer dedicated time to study Saturn’s spokes this season than ever before,” said NASA senior planetary scientist Amy Simon, head of the Hubble OPAL program, in a statement.

Saturn’s last equinox occurred in 2009 and NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was orbiting it for close-up reconnaissance. Hubble is now continuing the work of monitoring Saturn and other outer planets for long-term now that Cassini and Voyager have wrapped up their missions.

[Related: Is something burping methane on Saturn’s ocean moon?]

“Despite years of excellent observations by the Cassini mission, the precise beginning and duration of the spoke season is still unpredictable, rather like predicting the first storm during hurricane season,” said Simon.

While other planets have ring systems, Saturn’s are the most prominent which makes them a good laboratory for studying spokes. “It’s a fascinating magic trick of nature we only see on Saturn – for now at least,” Simon said.

Next, Hubble’s OPAL program will add visual and spectroscopic data to Cassini’s archived observations. Putting these pieces together could paint a more complete picture of the spoke phenomenon and what it can tell us about the physics of planetary rings. 

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When the universe first began about 13 billion years ago, all of the matter that eventually formed the galaxies, stars, and planets of today was flung around like paint splattering from a paintbrush. 

Now, an international group of over 150 scientists and researchers have released some of the most precise measurements ever made of how all of this matter is distributed across the universe. With a map of that matter in the present, scientists can try to understand the forces that shaped the evolution of the universe.

[Related: A key part of the Big Bang remains troublingly elusive.]

The team combined data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the South Pole Telescope, which conducted two major telescope surveys of the present universe. The analysis was published in the journal Physical Review D as three articles on January 31.

In the analysis, the team found that matter isn’t as “clumpy” as previously believed, adding to a body of evidence that something might be missing from the existing standard model of the universe.

By tracing the path of this matter to see where everything ended up, scientists can try to recreate what happened during the Big Bang and what forces were needed for such a massive explosion. 

To create this map, an enormous amount of data was analyzed from the DES and South Pole Telescope. The DES surveyed the night sky for six years from atop a mountain in Chile, while the South Pole Telescope scoured the universe for faint traces of traveling radiation that date back to the first moments of our universe.

Scientists were able to infer where all of the universe’s matter ended up and are offering a more accurate matter map by rigorously analyzing both data sets. “It is more precise than previous measurements—that is, it narrows down the possibilities for where this matter wound up—compared to previous analyses,” the authors said.

Combining two different skygazing methods reduced the chance of a measurement error throwing off the results. “It functions like a cross-check, so it becomes a much more robust measurement than if you just used one or the other,” said co-author Chihway Chang, an astrophysicist from the University of Chicago, in a statement. 

The analyses looked at gravitational lensing, which occurs when some of the light traveling across the universe can be slightly bent when it passes objects like galaxies that contain a lot of gravity. 

Regular matter and dark matter can be caught by this method. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter that makes up most of the universe’s mass, but it is so mysterious that scientists know more about what it isn’t than what it is. It doesn’t emit light, so it can’t be a planet of stars, but it also isn’t a bunch of black holes. 

[Related: A key part of the Big Bang remains troublingly elusive.]

While most of the results fit perfectly with the currently accepted best theory of the universe, there are some signs of a crack in the theory.

“It seems like there are slightly less fluctuations in the current universe, than we would predict assuming our standard cosmological model anchored to the early universe,” said analysis coauthor and University of Hawaii astrophysicist Eric Baxter, in a statement.

Even if something is missing from today’s matter models, the team believes that using information from two different telescope surveys is a promising strategy for the future of astrophysics.

“I think this exercise showed both the challenges and benefits of doing these kinds of analyses,” Chang said. “There’s a lot of new things you can do when you combine these different angles of looking at the universe.”

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Enlisting advanced artificial intelligence to help humans search for signs of extraterrestrial life may sound like the premise to a sci-fi novel. Nevertheless, it’s a strategy that investigators are increasingly employing to help expedite and improve their ET detection methodologies. As a new paper published in Nature Astronomy reveals, one of the most promising advancements in the field may have arrived courtesy of a college undergrad.

Over the past few years, Peter Ma, a third-year math and physics student at the University of Toronto, has worked alongside mentors at SETI and Breakthrough Listen—an initiative tasked with finding “technosignatures” of extraterrestrial intelligence—to develop a new neural network technique capable of parsing through massive troves of galactic radio signals in the pursuit of alien life. Narrowband radio frequencies have been hypothesized as a potential indicator for ETs, given they require a “purposely built transmitter,” according to SETI’s FAQ.

[Related: Are we alone in the universe? Probably not.]

While prior search algorithms only identified anomalies as exactly defined by humans, Ma’s deep machine learning system allows for alternative modes of thinking that human-dictated algorithms often can’t replicate.

In an email to PopSci, Ma explains, “people have inserted components of machine learning or deep learning into search techniques to assist [emphasis theirs] with the search. Our technique is the search, meaning the entire process is effectively replaced by a neural network, it’s no longer just a component, but the entire thing.”

As Motherboard and elsewhere have recently noted, the results are already promising, to say the least—Ma’s system has found eight new signals of interest. What’s more, Ma’s deep learning program found the potential ET evidence while combing through 150TB of data from 820 nearby stars that were previously analyzed using classical techniques, but at the time determined to be devoid of anything worth further investigation.

According to Ma’s summary published on Monday, the college student previously found the standard supervised search models to be too restrictive, given that they only found candidates matching simulated signals they were trained on while unable to generalize arbitrary anomalies. Likewise, existing unsupervised methods were too “uncontrollable,” flagging anything with the slightest variation and “thus returning mostly junk.” By intermediately swapping weighted considerations during the deep learning program’s training, Ma found that he and his team could “balance the best of both worlds.”

[Related: ‘Historical’ AI chatbots aren’t just inaccurate—they are dangerous.]

The result is ostensibly an additional proofreader for potential signs of alien life able to highlight possible anomalies human eyes or even other AI programs might miss. That said, Ma explains that his program is far from hands-off, and required copious amounts of engineering to direct it to learn the properties researchers wanted. “We still need human verification at the end of the day. We can’t solely rely on, or trust, a black box tool like a neural network to conduct science,” he writes. “It’s a tool for scientists, not a replacement for scientists.”

Ma also cautions that the eight newly discovered signals of interest are statistically unlikely to yield any definitive proof of alien life. That said, his new AI advancements could soon prove an invaluable tool for more accurate searches of the stars. SETI, Breakthrough Listen, and Ma are already planning to soon help with 24/7 technosignature observations using South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope array, as well as “analysis that will allow us to search for similar signals across many petabytes of additional data.”

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The last time Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) passed by Earth, our human cousins the Neanderthals still roamed the Earth.      

Discovered in March 2022 by US-based astronomers, the comet, which sports an emerald green coma, is believed to have last passed through the inner solar system some 50,000 years ago. It made its closest pass by the sun on January 12 and will fly within a mere 27 million miles of Earth on February 1 on its way out of the solar system. This is why University of Maryland Astronomy graduate student Carrie Holt and US Naval Academy professor of astronomy Matthew Knight were in Flagstaff, Arizona, to observe the comet from Lowell Observatory last week.

“Because this comet travels fairly close to the Earth, we are presented with a great opportunity to study a more detailed view of the composition and structure of the coma, the cloud of gas and dust that surrounds the comet nucleus,” Holt says.

Comets consist of icy volatiles, such as water and carbon dioxide ice, around a nucleus of rocky material pulled from the protoplanetary disc that formed the planets billions of years ago. They can be difficult for astronomers to find until they get close enough to the sun for the volatiles to begin to sublimate, the process by which the off-gassing materials generate the comet’s coma and form its tail.

“They get really bright when they start evaporating water ice from their surface,” says Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science. He notes most comets don’t even get warm enough to begin off-gassing until they’re in Saturn’s orbit.

[Related: Scientists finally solved the mystery of why comets glow green]

The contents of a comet’s ice can also determine its appearance. The green hue of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is common among its kind, according to Holt, and is due to the presence of diatomic carbon, which “emits green light when it interacts with ultraviolet radiation from the sun,” she says.

While there was a time centuries ago when professionals and amateur comet hunters shared similar stargazing equipment, most comets today are discovered by professional digital sky surveys. Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California, for instance, an observatory that scans the entire northern sky every two days looking for changes—such as the appearance of a suddenly brightening comet.

“The few comet discoveries outside of these surveys are usually found by amateur astronomers searching in regions of the sky where surveys don’t typically reach, like near the sun,” Holt explains. In 2020, amateur astronomer Michael Mattiazzo discovered C/2020 F8 (SWAN) by combing through data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO satellite, a joint project by NASA and the European Space Agency.

There are two main populations of comets in the solar system, according to Sheppard. There are the Jupiter family comets, which have short orbits of around 20 years or so and rarely travel much further out than the orbit of the gas giant. And then there are long period comets, a category that includes C/2022 E3 (ZTF).

“Their orbits take them beyond the orbit of Neptune,” Sheppard says. “They have these very elongated orbits” that can take thousands of years to traverse. Compared to short period comets, long period comets also travel much faster relative to Earth during their time in the inner solar system, reaching speeds of about 40 miles per second. Shorter period comets average closer to 10 miles per second.

When a phenomenon like C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is discovered, the coordinates are submitted to the Minor Planet Center, an international organization dedicated to tracking comets, asteroids, and other small bodies in the solar system. The center uses software to take the location of the new comet and project an orbit path and length, or period, for it, according to Knight. This can also allow scientists to project when a comet will past closest to the sun and to Earth.

“It takes a good bit of data to reliably determine just how long the period is,” he says. “The length of data needed varies by object, but usually weeks or months are needed before we have a confident handle on the period.”

Having observed Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) since last March, astronomers are fairly confident it is a long period comet with an orbit period of about 50,000 years. This means it likely originated in the Oort Cloud, a far-off shell of icy bodies enveloping our solar system at a distance 2,000 times greater than that of the sun from the Earth.

“The Oort Cloud has never been observed directly, but it is thought to be made up of many comets on circular orbits,” Holt says. “Gravitational interactions of passing stars or galactic tides can perturb these comets inward into an elliptical orbit.”

[Related: Our universe mastered the art of making galaxies while it was still young]

And it’s this origin at the periphery of our solar system that makes comets an interesting focus of research, Holt explains. “We study comets because they are the leftover building blocks of planet formation, spending most of their lifetime relatively unprocessed in the cold, outer solar system. When a comet enters the inner solar system and begins to outgas, we are able to gain insight into the conditions that existed during planet formation. We want to understand how our solar system came to be.”

Should you be lucky enough to catch sight of comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)—look for a greenish glow in the northern sky after sunset with binoculars or a small telescope—keep in mind you’re witness the slow unsealing of time capsule from before the Earth was formed.

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The lifetime of the universe is, unfortunately, so long that we can’t just wait and watch what happens to understand how it works. It’s a movie marathon that started billions of years before our species began, and will likely continue after us, too. But what if there was a recording, and we could wind back the tape?

Astronomers are doing just that with the famed James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), using the behemoth flying observatory to rewind through our universe’s history, searching for early galaxies. As a result, astronomers have found hundreds of galaxies from 11 to 13 billion years ago that also show a remarkable diversity of shapes: disks, bulges, clumps, lumps, and more. These star groupings emerged earlier in the universe’s timeline than previously thought, according to new research recently presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting and soon to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

“It is amazing to be able to see the structures of these distant galaxies with such clarity for the first time,” said Jeyhan Kartaltepe, Rochester Institute of Technology astronomer and lead author on the new study. “They are anything but boring.”

To estimate the ages, Kartaltepe and her team used a well-established method in astronomy. Galaxies farther away from us in space also go back further in the universe’s history, thanks to the finite speed of light. Plus, given that the universe is expanding, galaxies farther away from us appear more red than they would if they were nearer, as their light gets stretched out while traveling the vast, lengthening cosmic distances to our telescopes. This gives astronomers an easy way to mark when something existed in the universe, known as redshift. 

But, this also means targets with a higher redshift literally appear red, or even shine mostly in the infrared. So, a galaxy that looked bright blue billions of years ago may appear bright in infrared light to our cameras. This is the distinct advantage of JWST—because it sees the universe in the infrared, it can spot these distant, red galaxies. The telescope is also quite simply bigger than past space tools, and in the world of telescopes, bigger really is better.

[Related: How the James Webb Space Telescope is hunting for ‘first light’]

With previous data from the Hubble Space Telescope, which sees in the visible and near-infrared, astronomers already knew there were interesting and diverse galaxies in our universe from 11 billion years ago. To find out when the sweeping spirals and rotund bulges (like those in our own Milky Way) first formed, though, researchers needed to rewind the tape a bit further. 

“We do not know what happened in the early universe to create disks and bulges, or when it happened, or where it happened, or how it happened—and we had no way of finding this out until JWST,” says University of Melbourne astronomer Benji Metha, a researcher not affiliated with the new findings. “We can use these [galactic] observations like a fossil record, to dig back through time and see what features existed in these galaxies while the universe was still under construction.”

The team gathered images of 850 galaxies with JWST, and classified them into the typical galaxy shapes: disks (like our own spiral galaxy), clumps, irregulars, or some combination of the three. The data was all analyzed by hand, with astronomers sifting through each and every file. “One thing I love about this paper is how human it is,” says Metha. He explains how a century ago, American astronomer Edwin Hubble used the Mount Wilson Observatory in California to sort different types of nearby galaxies, creating the classification system most astronomers use today. “At its core, this paper uses the exact same method that Hubble used: Look at some pictures, and write down what you see,” Metha adds.

The international group of researchers found lots of disks, which may be precursors to galaxies like the Milky Way. They also spotted lots of irregulars, which are signs of two galaxies whose gravitational fields got a little too close and nudged each others’ stars around, or even merged completely.

“We see all sorts of structures across cosmic time less than a billion years after the Big Bang,” says Olivia Cooper, an astronomer at UT Austin. These new images, she said, “demonstrate what we are able to do with JWST and hint at a universe that hosted evolved galaxies earlier than we thought.”

The fact that there was such a variety of galaxies while the universe was still young is puzzling, and sure to keep astronomers busy as they build better models to learn how these cosmic entities formed and grew. The study also shows that to see the first galaxies, experts will need to keep rewinding that tape, and pushing the boundaries of how far back JWST can peer into the universe’s past.

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Long ago—before humans, before Earth, before even the sun—there was stardust.

In time, the young worlds of the solar system would eat up much of that dust as those bodies ballooned into the sun, planets, and moons we know today. But some of the dust survived, pristine, in its original form, locked in places like ancient meteorites.

Scientists call this presolar dust, since it formed before the sun. Some grains of presolar dust contain tiny bits of carbon, like diamond or graphite; others contain a host of other elements such as silicon or titanium. One form contains a curious and particularly hardy material called titanium carbide, used in machine tools on Earth. 

Now, physicists and engineers think they have an idea of how those particular dust grains formed. In a study published today in the journal Science Advances, researchers believe they could use that knowledge to build better materials here on Earth.

These dust grains are extremely rare and extremely minuscule, often smaller than the width of a human hair. “They were present when the solar system formed, survived this process, and can now be found in primitive solar system materials,” such as meteorites, says Jens Barosch, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, who was not an author of the study.

[Related: See a spiral galaxy’s haunting ‘skeleton’ in a chilly new space telescope image]

The study authors peered into a unique kind of dust grain with a core of titanium carbide—titanium and carbon, combined into durable, ceramic-like material that’s nearly as hard as diamond—wrapped in a shell of graphite. Sometimes, tens or even hundreds of these carbon-coated cores clump together into larger grains.

But how did titanium carbide dust motes form in the first place? So far, scientists haven’t quite known for sure. Testing it on Earth is hard, because would-be dustbuilders have to deal with gravity—something that these grains didn’t have to contend with. But scientists can now go to a place where gravity is no object.

On June 24, 2019, a sounding rocket launched from Kiruna, a frigid Swedish town north of the Arctic circle. This rocket didn’t reach orbit. Like many rockets before and since, it streaked in an arc across the sky, peaking at an altitude of about 150 miles, before coming back down.

Still, that brief flight was enough for the rocket’s components to gain more than a taste of the microgravity that astronauts experience in orbit. One of those components was a contraption inside which scientists could incubate dust grains and record the process. 

“Microgravity experiments are essential to understanding dust formation,” says Yuki Kimura, a physicist at Hokkaido University in Japan, and one of the paper’s authors.

Just over three hours after launch, including six and a half minutes of microgravity, the rocket landed about 46 miles away from its launch site. Kimura and his colleagues had the recovered dust grains sent back to Japan for analysis. From this shot and follow-up tests in an Earthbound lab, the group pieced together a recipe for a titanium carbide dust grain.

[Related: Black holes have a reputation as devourers. But they can help spawn stars, too.]

That recipe might look something like this: first, start with a core of carbon atoms, in graphite form; second, sprinkle the carbon core with titanium until the two sorts of atoms start to mix and create titanium carbide; third, fuse many of these cores together and drape them with graphite until you get a good-sized grain.

It’s interesting to get a glimpse of how such ancient things formed, but astronomers aren’t the only people who care. Kimura and his colleagues also believe that understanding the process could help engineers and builders craft better materials on Earth—because we already build particles not entirely unlike dust grains.

They’re called nanoparticles, and they’ve been around for decades. Scientists can insert them into polymers like plastic to strengthen them. Road-builders can use them to reinforce the asphalt under their feet. Doctors can even insert them into the human body to deliver drugs or help image hard-to-see body parts.

Typically, engineers craft nanoparticles by growing them within a liquid solution. “The large environmental impact of this method, such as liquid waste, has become an issue,” says Kimura. Stardust, then, could help reduce that waste.

Machinists already use tools strengthened by a coat of titanium carbide nanoparticles. Just like diamond, the titanium carbide helps the tools, often used to forge things like spacecraft, cut harder. One day, stardust-inspired machine coatings might help build the very vessels humans send to space.

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After launching on Christmas Day 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has continued to dazzle us with its data and discoveries. Now, the multi-mirrored space observatory has identified its first new exoplanet named LHS 475 b. At only 41 light years away from Earth in the constellation Octans, the exoplanet is about 99 percent of our world’s diameter.

After reviewing the targets of interest from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, the team from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland honed in on hints of the exoplanet’s existence with JWST. With only two transit observations (when an exoplanet passes in front of its star), JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) captured the distant celestial body clearly. “There is no question that it’s there. Webb’s pristine data validate it,” said Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, an astronomer and astrobiologist at APL, in a statement.

[Related: James Webb Space Telescope reconstructed a ‘star party,’ and you’re invited.]

“The fact that it is also a small, rocky planet is impressive for the observatory,” Kevin Stevenson, an astronomer also from APL, added in the statement,

JWST can characterize the atmosphere of exoplanets that are close to Earth’s size. The team tried to assess LHS 475 b’s atmosphere by analyzing its transmission spectrum. According to NASA, “When starlight passes through the atmosphere of a planet some of the light is absorbed by the atmosphere and some is transmitted through it. The dark lines and dim bands of light in a transmission spectrum correspond to atoms and molecules in the planet’s atmosphere. The amount of light that is transmitted also depends on how dense the atmosphere is and how warm it is.”

The data shows that the exoplanet is an Earth-sized terrestrial (not water covered) world, but it is not known if it has an atmosphere.

“The observatory’s data are beautiful,” noted Erin May, an astrophysicist at APL, in a statement. “The telescope is so sensitive that it can easily detect a range of molecules, but we can’t yet make any definitive conclusions about LHS 475 b’s atmosphere.”

That said, the team can definitely say what is not present. “There are some terrestrial-type atmospheres that we can rule out,” explained Lustig-Yaeger. “It can’t have a thick methane-dominated atmosphere, similar to that of Saturn’s moon Titan.”

While it is possible that the exoplanet doesn’t have an atmosphere, some environmental conditions haven’t been ruled out. One of those conditions is a pure carbon dioxide atmosphere. “Counterintuitively, a 100-percent carbon dioxide atmosphere is so much more compact that it becomes very challenging to detect,” said Lustig-Yaeger. To distinguish a pure carbon dioxide atmosphere from no atmosphere at all will take even more precise measurements that the team is scheduled to receive this summer.

[Related on PopSci+: There is no Planet B.]

JWST also revealed that LHS 475 b is much warmer than Earth. If clouds are detected, it could be more like Venus, which does have a carbon dioxide atmosphere. It also completes an orbit in just two days, which the JWST’s precise light curve from the telescope’s NIRSpec was able to reveal.

Findings like JWST’s also open up possibilities of pinpointing Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting smaller red dwarf stars. “This confirmation highlights the precision of the mission’s instruments,” said Stevenson.

In addition to LHS 475 b, NASA has confirmed 5,000-plus exoplanets with its many deep-space searching tools. The roster is incredibly diverse, with some looking like Mars’s pebbly terrain and others like Jupiter-esque gas giants. Some of them orbit two stars at once, while others orbit long-dead stars. It is very likely that there are hundreds of billions of exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy alone. JWST will be able to tell scientists even more about these other worlds.

“We have barely begun scratching the surface of what their atmospheres might be like. And it is only the first of many discoveries that it will make,” stated Lustig-Yaeger. “With this telescope, rocky exoplanets are the new frontier.”

Correction (January 19, 2023): The story initially said that when an exoplanet “transits,” it passes in front of its moon, which was incorrect. It passes in front of its star.

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Far from our cozy home in the cosmos, stars are performing violent and extreme acts almost beyond our imagination. Neutron stars, the unbelievably dense remnants of huge stars—a teaspoon of their matter weighs as much as Mount Everest—are smashing into each other. This impact creates black holes and releases extremely energetic flashes of light known as gamma ray bursts (GRBs). 

Astronomers have been interested in GRBs since the first one was spotted in 1967. But there’s still much to understand about exactly what goes on when two neutron stars collide. New research, recently published in the journal Nature, reveals helpful signals known as quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) in old observations of GRBs. QPOs provide a window for scientists to explore the brief time after the neutron stars collide but before they’ve collapsed into a black hole. They’re the fingerprints of how matter is swirling and mixing together in the merger.

Since the advent of gravitational wave detection in 2016, many astronomers have been focused on exploring neutron star mergers with LIGO and similar experiments. But, those observations provide half the picture, since current detectors are only sensitive to some of the gravitational waves created by the mergers. To detect the higher-frequency waves we’re currently missing, we’d have to wait years—maybe even decades—for new projects like the Einstein Telescope to come online. 

This new research shows that existing technology, using gamma-rays, may be an alternative to probe the same physics that creates higher-frequency waves. QPOs, which are wiggles in the observed gamma-rays that repeat semi-regularly, encode information about the physics of the merger. The study authors analyzed two events that produced QPOs of uncertain origin–they may have originated within our galaxy or far beyond it.

“We’re looking at what happens in the split second between the merger of the two stars and the launch of the gamma ray burst. It is almost frustrating that these signals will only be detectable in gravitational waves some 10 to 15 years from now,” says lead author Cecilia Chirenti, a research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland. “But I am impatient and don’t want to wait! It’s exciting that we’re able to start looking for and learning from them now using gamma-rays!”

[Related: Why are big neutron stars like Tootsie Pops?]

The collision of two neutron stars is an excellent laboratory for exploring the physics of these weird, dead orbs. Their ultimate fate depends on an important unknown in high-energy physics: the equation that describes what neutron stars are made of and how that material moves, flows, and interacts with the world around it. 

“The matter in the cores of neutron stars exists in a state seen nowhere else in the universe, including in laboratories on Earth,” says Cole Miller, astronomer at the University of Maryland and co-author on the study. “Measurements of neutron star properties can give us insights into an otherwise inaccessible physical realm.”

In their search for QPOs, the research team explored archives of data from multiple NASA space telescopes: the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, the Swift Observatory, and the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory. Although these GRBs were identified years ago—as early as the 1990s—the enormous complexity of GRB signals has kept these QPO signals hidden from astronomers until now. “One of my colleagues wryly noted that ‘If you’ve seen one gamma-ray burst, you’ve seen one gamma-ray burst,’” says Miller. “This makes it difficult to tell whether there is some signal of oscillation, or whether that’s just GRBs being GRBs.”

[Related: Black holes can gobble up neutron stars whole]

In both events, the QPOs suggest that a mega-sized neutron star may have formed before collapsing into a black hole. Itai Linial, a Columbia and Princeton astronomer not involved with the study, says it is still unclear in general whether a black hole forms immediately or a neutron star appears for a fraction of a second before the collapse to a black hole during a GRB, but agrees these new signals “may be the result of a rapidly rotating neutron star remnant.” 

With the detection of these gamma-ray signals, astronomers now have a new tool to explore some of the weirdest and wildest phenomena in the universe. With a treasure trove of old data to explore, the team now hopes to use this tool to find more examples of these curious mergers.

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The past few years have been a space launch boom: Late 2021 saw the long-awaited arrival of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and in 2022 NASA finally launched its massive new Space Launch System Moon rocket. This year will continue that trend, as several scientific and commercial craft zoom off our world to orbit and beyond.

This year’s historic flights include missions to Jupiter and the asteroid belt, robotic moon landings, and the maiden flight of a new spacecraft to take astronauts to and from the aging International Space Station (ISS). Here are some of the major launches to look forward to in 2023.

Asteroids and icy moons

Both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have big plans for studying celestial bodies beyond the orbit of Mars that kick off in 2023.

ESA’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer, or JUICE mission, will study the icy Galilean moons of Jupiter, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. Of the three moons, Europa has so far garnered the lion’s share of scientific interest due to the global liquid water ocean beneath the moon’s icy crust, an environment that could host alien life. But evidence now suggests Callisto and Ganymede may also host subsurface liquid water oceans. JUICE, which is scheduled to launch atop an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana sometime in April and will arrive at Jupiter in 2031, will fly by each of the three moons to compare the three icy worlds.

[Related: Jupiter’s moons are about to get JUICE’d for signs of life]

The JUICE spacecraft will enter orbit around Ganymede in 2034, the first time a spacecraft has circled a moon other than Earth’s, where it will spend roughly a year studying the satellite in greater detail. Ganymede, in addition to its potential subsurface ocean and potential habitability, is the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetic field. JUICE will study how this field interacts with Jupiter’s even  larger one.

NASA’s Psyche mission, meanwhile, will blast off no earlier than October 10 on a mission to rendezvous with its namesake asteroid, when it arrives in the belt between Mars and Jupiter in August 2029. The Psyche mission was originally scheduled to launch in August 2022, but was delayed due to problems developing mission-critical software at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The asteroid 16 Psyche is a largely metallic space rock that scientists believe could be the exposed core of a protoplanet that formed in the early solar system. If that theory bears out, the Psyche spacecraft could end up traveling millions of miles to give scientists a better understanding of the Earth’s iron core far beneath their feet.

India returns to the moon

The Indian Space Research Organization, ISRO, is going back to the moon with its Chandrayaan-3 mission, which is scheduled to launch over the summer. The space agency’s Chandrayaan-2 mission carried an orbiter and lander to the moon in 2019, but a software glitch caused the lander to crash on the lunar surface. The Chandrayaan-3 mission is ditching the orbiter in favor of a redesigned lander and rover intended for the lunar South Pole. Carrying a seismometer and spectrographs, among other instruments, the lander and rover will study the chemical composition and geology of the polar region. 

[Related: 10 incredible lunar missions that paved the way for Artemis]

The hunt for dark matter

Astrophysicists believe dark matter and dark energy shape the structures of entire universes—and drive the accelerated expansion of ours. But experts don’t understand much about these enigmatic phenomena. ESA’s Euclid space telescope, scheduled to launch sometime in 2023, will measure the effects of these dark forces on the cosmos over time to try and discern their properties.

After launch, Euclid will make its way to the same operational location as JWST, entering an orbit around Lagrangian Point 2, about 1 million miles behind Earth. From there, Euclid will use its nearly 4-foot diameter mirror, visible light imaging system, and near-infrared spectrometer to survey a third of the sky out to a distance of about 15 billion light years. That will give a view  some 10 billion years into the past. By studying how galaxies and galaxy clusters change over eons and across much of the sky, Euclid scientists hope to grasp how dark matter and dark energy shape galactic formation and the evolution of the entire universe.

Boeing catches up to SpaceX

Boeing will finally launch a crewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft sometime in April 2023. Boeing developed the Starliner, a capsule that holds up to seven people, as a competitor to the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Like Dragon, Starliner will ferry astronauts and cargo to and from the ISS as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

[Related: ISS astronauts are building objects that couldn’t exist on Earth]

But while Crew Dragon began flying astronauts to the ISS in November 2020, the Starliner ran into many delay-causing problems, beginning with a software glitch that kept the spacecraft from rendezvousing with the ISS during an uncrewed test flight in December 2020. Boeing kept at it, however, and completed a second attempt at an uncrewed rendezvous with the ISS in May 2022, paving the way for the coming crewed test flight.

If all goes well, NASA will integrate Starliner flights alongside Crew Dragon launches within the Commercial Crew program, providing the space agency some redundancy in case of problems with either type of spacecraft.

The (private) enterprise

As NASA becomes more and more reliant on Boeing, SpaceX, and other contractors for flights to the ISS, private space operators have big plans of their own for 2023.

Axiom Space plans to send a crew of private citizens for a two-week stay on the ISS in the  summer, following the company’s first mission in April 2022 when four private astronauts spent more than two weeks aboard the space station. Axiom Space plans to build a new habitat—first connected to the ISS, then separated to create a free-flying space station when NASA retires the ISS in 2031.

[Related: SpaceX’s all-civilian moon trip has a crew]

Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who funded the first ever all-private orbital space flight in September 2021 with the Inspiration 4 mission, will also be back at it in 2023. The Polaris Dawn mission is scheduled to launch no sooner than March and will once again see Isaacman fly aboard a chartered SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft along with three crewmates. Unlike Inspiration 4, at least two of the Polaris Dawn crew plan to conduct the first-ever private astronaut spacewalks outside a spacecraft.

The Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin, meanwhile, will attempt to launch the first test flight of its orbital rocket, known as New Glenn, sometime in 2023. While the company has flown celebrities such as Bezos and William Shatner to the edge of space aboard its suborbital New Shepard rocket, the company has yet to make an orbital flight. This year, it’s aiming higher.

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A former spy satellite is now being overhauled by NASA to search for planets beyond the solar system. Once operational—the space agency plans to launch the craft within the next five years—it could reveal the origins of life itself by hunting for planets in the distant reaches of their solar systems.

Now that the James Webb Space Telescope has finally launched and is in full science operation mode, the astronomical community is looking with eager anticipation to the next major launch, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Among other directives, the Roman will be an exoplanet hunter extraordinaire, revealing key information about the formation of solar systems and planets like our own.

But, initially, it looked like the mission would never happen. In the early 2000s, scientists at NASA and the Department of Energy both proposed a new satellite to study the farthest reaches of the cosmos, hoping to understand the cause behind dark energy, the name given to the mysterious accelerated expansion of the universe. However, with political and financial capital shifting to the development of what would become the JWST, the proposal faltered.

And then in 2011 came an unexpected gift. The National Reconnaissance Office, the organization within the US government tasked with building and operating spy satellites for the NSA, CIA, and other three-letter agencies, apparently had some…extras. Sitting in a warehouse in upstate New York were two mirrors, similar to the one on the Hubble Space Telescope, that the NRO seemingly had no use for. The agency offered the mirrors to NASA free of charge.

[Related: In NASA’s new video game, you are a telescope hunting for dark matter]

To give you a sense of just how surreal this is, imagine all of the time, money, and engineering that went into designing and launching the JWST. Now imagine that a spy agency not only had two more JWST-class instruments, but didn’t even need them anymore.

Although the actual cost of the mirror represents only a relatively small fraction of the overall budget for a space mission like this, the unexpected gift galvanized support for the satellite, and the mission got its first official name: the Wide-Field Infrared Space Telescope, or WFIRST.

Now expected to launch in 2026 in 2027 (although likely later, as its development was already pushed back by the delays in getting the JWST to space), WFIRST has received its new monniker, in honor of the first female executive at NASA, Nancy Roman, who also served as the agency’s first Chief of Astronomy in the 1960s and 70s.

The Roman has the same size of mirror as the Hubble’s, but it will boast a much wider field of view. Equipped with a big enough camera, it can essentially act as “a hundred Hubbles” at a time. According to Scott Gaudi, a professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University and one of the leaders of the Roman mission, the team hopes to find around 1,500 exoplanets during its planned primary 5-year mission. However, it’s difficult to pin down the exact number, because figuring out how many planets orbit other stars is “exactly what Roman is trying to find out,” he says.

Among other science goals, one of the primary missions of the Roman Space Telescope will be to hunt down new populations of exoplanets using an innovative trick known as gravitational microlensing.

Microlensing is when “light from distant background stars is temporarily magnified when a planetary system passes close to our line of sight,” Gaudi says. Microlensing relies on sheer coincidence: While staring at one star, if another object passes through the line of sight to that star, that background light will briefly increase in brightness due to the bending of the light around the object.

[Related: See the first image of an exoplanet caught by the James Webb Space Telescope]

The interloping object could be an entire planetary system, or it could be a wandering, “rogue” exoplanet, detached from any star. Astronomers know of only a couple dozen of these lost souls, but they estimate that our galaxy could be swarming with hundreds of billions of them. The Roman can find wandering exoplanets as small as Mars, and could potentially expand our catalog to a few hundred. That will give astronomers critical information as to how chaotic solar system formation is, which will help fine-tune models of the development of Earth-like planets. 

Since the microlensing technique has trouble identifying planets orbiting close to their parent stars, the Roman Space Telescope won’t be able to pick out an Earth 2.0, though. Instead, it will focus on planets orbiting far away from their suns, analogous to the gas and ice giants of our solar system. Astronomers don’t know if our solar system, dominated by Jupiter and Saturn, is typical, or if ice giants like Neptune and Uranus are more common. Or maybe even something smaller: Unlike any other exoplanet-hunting telescope, the Roman will be able to detect planets as small as a few times the mass of the moon.

Creating the first-ever survey of planets orbiting far from their stars is crucial to understanding the origins of life on planets like Earth. “Since we think all of the water on Earth-like planets was delivered from the outer regions of planetary systems,” Gaudi says, ”by surveying these regions we can begin to understand how common potentially habitable planets are.”

If that weren’t enough, the Roman has one more planet-hunting trick up its sleeve. It will carry a coronagraph, a device that allows it to block out the light from nearby stars and directly image any exoplanets around it—a feat not even the JWST is capable of.

Taken altogether, Gaudi had a simple reaction to what he was most excited for with this upcoming super-telescope: “the unexpected!”

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The James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s newest and biggest off-world observatory, has been collecting jaw-dropping images of the cosmos since June. Astronomers quickly shared their results online, even before the telescope’s calibrations were finished. Some of these findings were record-breaking, including observations of the most distant galaxies yet found. Significant debate and discussion ensued among researchers—was science moving too quickly by publishing observations before peer review, forsaking rigor for the glory of being first to a new discovery?

As the dust has settled, many astronomers think the early results remain informative. But, in the rush to work with a groundbreaking new observatory and sift through its mountains of data, they report stressful working conditions. That’s a scenario they hope to improve upon in 2023 and beyond, finding a balance between quickly offering exciting results to the public and taking the time needed for rigorous, sustainable science.

“I was actually quite excited to see science happening very fast,” says Klaus Pontoppidan, JWST project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “This is the way science works … if there are issues with calibration, that gets tested by other teams, and any errors get corrected later.”

[Related: A fierce competition will decide James Webb Space Telescope’s next views of the cosmos]

Every day JWST returns around 60 gigabytes of data to Earth, about the amount of information a basic iPhone can hold. This may not seem like much, but the steady stream of data amounts to a whopping 12,000 gigabytes so far—enough to fill a roomful of laptops—with much more to come. Each bit of this valuable data will be subject to the intense scrutiny of astronomers, who are trying to glean as much information as they can about the cosmos with JWST’s new view.

Some of that analysis started almost as soon as the telescope was operational, with programs known as Early Release Science (ERS), which made JWST data publicly available this June and July. 

Hannah Wakeford, an astronomer at the University of Bristol, worked on some of these early release science programs. Although she is excited about the scientific breakthroughs, she also experienced an extremely intense work environment—she hasn’t taken a break since mid-July. She criticizes this initial period of rushed results, saying that usually “fast science results in poorer or incomplete work. This is not necessarily the scientists themselves at fault for this, but the enormous external pressure to get publications.”

On the other hand, Ryan Trainor, an astrophysicist at Franklin & Marshall College, considers this frenzy as just “part of the modern scientific process, particularly given the pressure to be first to any big discovery.” Wakeford and Trainor’s statements are not mutually exclusive—the race to publish is both an accepted part of science and a possible hazard. For those trying to make astronomy their career, publishing an idea first and getting the credit for it is a necessary evil.

As we approach the one year anniversary of JWST’s launch on Christmas Day, the debate about the speed of astronomy has resurfaced again, now in the context of observations proposed by teams of scientists. NASA reportedly planned to make all data available from the telescope immediately, removing so-called proprietary periods that allow astronomers time to work with data they planned and designed. There isn’t currently a clear deadline for this change, but it may fall in line with the White House’s call for open access science by 2026.

Those in favor of removing proprietary periods claim that public access to the data will be more equitable, allowing anyone a chance to explore the wonders of the new telescope. Many astronomers disagree, though, explaining that their field will become impossibly competitive without proprietary periods to protect scientists’ ideas. The rush to publish would undermine work-life balance, and disadvantage those who can’t work as fast: parents who have to contend with childcare, astronomers at smaller schools with fewer resources, early career students who are still learning, and others.

[Related: James Webb Space Telescope reconstructed a ‘star party,’ and you’re invited]

“JWST will produce ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting science over the next 20 years of its observing time,” says Wakeford. “Why not cut the scientists a break and give them time to make sure we can do the work with rigor, while not destroying our mental and physical health at the same time?” 

Lafayette College astronomer Stephanie Douglas agrees, explaining that “this is an equity issue. We need to protect the more vulnerable members of our community.”

The situation is not so simple for the NASA scientists in charge of the telescope, though. They have a responsibility to both scientists and the general public, whose taxpayer money funds the entire program. “I think it’s a balance,” says Pontoppidan. “You’re balancing public programs and proprietary time, and both things you need to do for equity.” The future of proprietary periods is yet undecided, but no matter the outcome it will surely affect the process of science in JWST’s second year. Astronomers are currently preparing for the second round of proposals to use JWST, due just after the holidays in January. “I’m hoping that we’ll see some really ambitious proposals,” says Pontoppidan. The first year of JWST observations explored what the observatory could do—and now astronomers can start pushing the limits of those capabilities.

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) proves yet again that its gorgeous images are the gift that keeps on giving in 2022.

A dazzling new image is one of the first medium-deep wide-field images of the cosmos and accompanies a paper published Wednesday in the Astronomical Journal. It features a region of the sky called the North Ecliptic Pole and comes from the Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science (PEARLS) program. PEARLS’ main goal is to study, “galaxy assembly, AGN growth, and First Light,” using the data from JWST.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope is about to beam us monster amounts of cosmic data.]

The term medium-deep refers to the faintest objects that can be seen within this image, and they are roughly 29th magnitude (1 billion times more faint than the unaided eye can see). Wide-field refers to the total area that will be covered by the PEARLS program, about one-twelfth the area of the full moon.

The new image uses data collected from the JWST and the dependable Hubble Space Telescope. It’s made up of eight different colors of near-infrared light captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), and is also boosted with three colors of ultraviolet and visible light from the Hubble.

The colors show off in stellar detail the depth of a universe that’s chock full of galaxies, many of which were previously unseen by Hubble or even the largest and most sophisticated land-based telescopes. The image includes thousands of galaxies and some of the light in the image traveled roughly 13.5 billion years. These far ranging stars are shown alongside an assortment of stars within our own Milky Way galaxy, giving it an all-inclusive vibe.

“The stunning image quality of Webb is truly out of this world,” said co-author Anton Koekemoer, research astronomer at STScI, who assembled the PEARLS images into very large mosaics, in a statement. “To catch a glimpse of very rare galaxies at the dawn of cosmic time, we need deep imaging over a large area, which this PEARLS field provides.”

[Related: The most awesome aerospace innovations of 2022.]

Some of the pinpricks of light within the image show the range of stars that are present in our home Milky Way galaxy and is a useful tool in understanding the universe’s past.

“The diffuse light that I measured in front of and behind stars and galaxies has cosmological significance, encoding the history of the universe,” said co-author Rosalia O’Brien, a graduate research assistant at Arizona State University (ASU), in a statement. “I feel very lucky to start my career right now. Webb’s data is like nothing we have ever seen, and I’m really excited about the opportunities and challenges it offers.”

The NIRCam observations will also be combined with data from another instrument on JWST, the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), allowing the team to search for faint objects with spectral emission lines, which can then be used to estimate their distances more accurately.

The new image shows just a portion of the full PEARLS field, which will eventually be about four times larger. However, this huge panel of stars exceeded scientists’ expectations from the simulations they ran they ran before JWST began making scientific observations (and sending us gorgeous images) in July.

“There are many objects that I never thought we would actually be able to see, including individual globular clusters around distant elliptical galaxies, knots of star formation within spiral galaxies, and thousands of faint galaxies in the background,” said co-author Jake Summers, a research assistant at ASU, in a statement.

In the future, the PEARLS team hopes to catch a glimpse of more space objects in this region, such as the varying flares of light around black holes or distant exploding stars.

“This unique field is designed to be observable with Webb 365 days per year, so its time-domain legacy, area covered, and depth reached can only get better with time,” said lead study author Rogier Windhorst, from ASU and PEARLS principal investigator, in a statement.

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When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began sending back its incredible images in July, some of the first data showed that there were at least two, and possibly three more unseen stars in the oblong, curvy shapes of the Southern Ring Nebula.

The Southern Ring Nebula is a planetary nebula, which actually doesn’t have anything to do with planets. Instead, it is the result of the implosion of a star called a red giant. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), a star swells into a red giant when a star that is a bit bigger than our sun runs out of hydrogen fuel at its core and red giants can even be hundreds of times wider than the original star. The red giant eventually sheds its outer layers, which then forms the nebula, and contracts into the cooling remnants called a white dwarf.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope’s first glimpses into deep space reveal 4 mind-blowing finds.]

Now, researchers have reconstructed an image of this particular nebula roughly 2,000 light years away from Earth , that shows there were up to five stars at this ‘star party,’ but only two partying stars appear there now.

The team of almost 70 researchers led by Orsola De Marco of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia details the findings in a study published yesterday in the journal Nature Astronomy. They began by analyzing Webb’s 10 highly detailed exposures of the Southern Ring Nebula to reconstruct the “party scene.” According to NASA, it’s common for small groups of stars that span a range of masses to form together and continue to orbit one another as they get older. The team used this principle to travel back in time thousands of years to figure out what might explain the shapes of the colorful clouds of gas and dust in this nebula.

They found that possibly more than one star in the nebula interacted with the dimmer of the two central partying stars (shown in red), before that star created this planetary nebula. “The first star that ‘danced’ with the party’s host created a light show, sending out jets of material in opposite directions. Before retiring, it gave the dim star a cloak of dust. Now much smaller, the same dancer might have merged with the dying star – or is now hidden in its glare,” writes the team at NASA.

Adding to the mix, a third partygoer may have gotten close to the central star several times. That star then stirred up the jets ejected by the first companion, which helped form the wavy shapes at the edges of the gas and dust in the nebula. The fourth star didn’t want to be left out, and contributed to the celebration with its wider orbit. It then circled the scene, stirring up the gas and dust, creating the big system of rings on the outside the nebula. The fifth star is the best known and life of the party. It’s the bright white-blue star that continues to orbit the gathering “predictably and calmly.”

[Related: The 100 greatest innovations of 2022.]

In addition to taking a peek at the star party, the team also accurately measured the mass that the central star had before it shed layers of gas and dust. They estimate that the star was about about three times the mass of the sun before it created this specific planetary nebula. After ejecting the dust and gas, it was about 60 percent of the sun’s mass.

According to NASA, this is some of the first published research regarding some of the first images taken by the JWST to be published, so more details and findings are likely to be released. It also shows the first time that images taken with JWST’s NIRCam and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), were paired with existing data from the ESA’s Gaia observatory. This data enabled the team to precisely pinpoint the mass of the central star before it created the nebula.

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Fifty years ago, on December 7, 1972, NASA’s Saturn V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the last of the Apollo-era astronauts to walk on the lunar surface. 

Apollo 17—the sixth and final mission of NASA’s history-making initiative to land human explorers on the moon—was a scientific breakthrough: During their 75-hour lunar stay, crewmembers Eugene A. Cernan, Ronald E. Evans, and Harrison H. Schmitt collected rare types of lunar rock and samples of “orange soil,” or regolith, that once formed in a lunar volcanic eruption, indicating that the moon’s past eras of geologic activity lasted longer than previously thought—which recent research has confirmed. But their most influential observation quickly became a milestone in our culture: With the help of one iconic photo, the mission vastly changed the way humans view our space environment. 

About five hours into the crew’s moon-bound journey, the shrinking sphere of our world drew someone’s gaze (it’s still up in the air which member of the three-person crew was responsible) to the window. Upon seeing the beautiful, brightly illuminated Earth, a particularly astute astronaut grabbed hold of the onboard Hasselblad film camera and began snapping. Among those images was the one now known as the Blue Marble shot, the first photograph ever taken of the planet in its entirety. 

The once-in-a-lifetime shot showcases the African continent, which is almost completely visible and backed by the swirling blue ocean. Above it, chaotic, wind-swept clouds dot our atmosphere. This was Earth as humanity had never seen it before, richly detailed and alight with life.

Easily one of the most recognizable space images ever made, Blue Marble is the only picture of the entire, round Earth taken by human hands to date. It and those first few stunning images of our planet went on to inform how official space agency photographers arrange shots of Earth and other celestial bodies, and influenced the way we take and share images of space today. 

Travis Rector, an astronomer at the University of Alaska Anchorage and an astrophotographer, someone who takes photos of space phenomena in their free time, believes that all astronomers of his generation were especially inspired by the beauty of early space-age photos. “They were our first high-quality views of exotic worlds like Mars and the moon, turning these dots in the sky into real worlds we could imagine visiting in person,” he says. “The Blue Marble photo is especially important because not only does it show the spectacular beauty of our world but also its limits.” 

[Related: How scientists colorize Hubble’s deep space photographs]

Those limits are all the world’s resources, like the food, air, and water that sustain us, he says. Yet in celebrating Apollo 17’s 50th anniversary, how has humanity’s ability to capture otherworldly beauty evolved since we began heading to the stars? 

When Blue Marble is compared to modern high-resolution pictures of Earth and other celestial entities delivered by satellite, or by the Artemis program’s soon-to-be-returning Orion spacecraft, for example, the difference a few decades of technological advancement makes is palpable. In fact, the advent of more powerful cameras, able to take photos in infrared, X-ray, and other light that our eyes cannot see, is a major influence on our expectations about what the universe looks like. 

The second factor, Rector notes, is “better data-processing and image-processing software.” As every iteration of spacecraft improved, camera-equipped craft have taken many of the daring space images that adorn our nerdiest space merchandise. And humanity has only gotten better at sending and receiving data from its most distant space explorers. Though Apollo often sent back grainy black and white video from the moon, according to NASA, the Artemis II mission will transmit ultra high-definition video from lunar orbit.

Such incredible technicolor is a far cry away from when the Voyager missions, twin crafts that are now celebrating their 45th mission year, were sent to space with what would be now rudimentary 800×800 pixel digital video cameras. “For comparison, the Wide Field Instrument that will fly on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a 300-megapixel camera,” Rector says. He imagines that the technology we use to take high-resolution images of space might still evolve as cameras get better at measuring light without the need for filters, noting that it “will open up all sorts of new ways to make color composite images of space.”

[Related: 2021’s best space photos are out of this world]

Astrophotography has become a beloved staple across social media, the final product of which is often featured on hundreds of dedicated websites, and emblazoned on clothing, book covers, and space-inspired posters. And as the first of NASA’s next-generation lunar missions comes to an end, the returned stills and videos gifted us by Orion have already cemented their place as some of the most absorbing snapshots to ever come out of a space program. 

Apollo 17’s famous photo marked the end of an era in human spaceflight. It ended up being a hallmark in the history of space photography,

It’s a fitting tribute to human exploration of the moon—a feat that was once deemed impossible.

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When stars are born, more times than not, they arrive into the universe as twins. In the first step of stellar creation, a large cloud of gas and dust collapses due to gravity, often fragmenting into pieces. If each piece collapses again, multiple stars will be birthed from the same gas cloud. These infant suns are then surrounded by a halo of matter, the precursor to planets, known as a planet-forming disk. And, if these stars are close enough, the planet-forming disks around them can even swirl together, creating fantastic spiral tails.

New astronomical images published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on November 28 reveal three such interacting twin planetary disks in stunning detail. The team took these photos using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. Although this is not the first time these disks have been imaged, advances in astronomical technology offer a new, more comprehensive vantage of the dramatic cosmic scene.

The stars are all in the Milky Way, fairly nearby by galactic standards. Astronomers photographed these three sets of known twins in polarized light, which can help untangle the dust from each disk. Certain telescope technologies, like those used in this study, can record the specific direction, or polarization, of incoming light waves. Polarized light is a great trick for finding faint structures such as the dusty disks around bright stars. Stars aren’t expected to emit this kind of light, but starlight scattered off dust will become polarized, making the disks and their spirals easier to see. 

Polarization is also a powerful tool for astronomers—it encodes a lot of information about how the light made its way to our telescopes. As a star’s light zooms through space, if it hits small bits of dust, it will bounce off those particles in specific ways. The polarization of that light results from the precise angle of its bounce and what type of matter it hits. “There are loads of intricate processes involved,” says Universidad de Santiago de Chile astronomer Sebastián Perez, a co-author of the new study. The research team used the information provided by polarization to trace which star illuminated each part of the disks, helping them to understand the geometry of the systems.

[Related: The biggest gaseous structure in our galaxy is filled with baby star factories]

Their goal is to understand how neighboring stars influence the planet-forming disks. “A large fraction of stars probably go through such a phase,” Perez says, referring to their sibling-filled childhood, “but we know little about it.” Nearby sibling stars can orbit each other, or one star can drop by for a visit to another, known as a fly-by. These new images are a first step toward determining which scenario happened for each of the three systems.

“We expect that most stars form in dense regions of the galaxy and are surrounded by other stars forming at almost the same time,” says Philipp Weber, astronomer at Universidad de Santiago de Chile and lead author of the study. Despite this fact, astronomers “mainly treat protoplanetary discs as isolated systems,” he adds. 

[Related: NASA releases Hubble images of cotton candy-colored clouds in Orion Nebula]

The new observations by Perez and Weber, who both partake in the research group YEMS Nucleus, suggest that for many star systems, this is a bad assumption to make. Fly-bys “could have lasting effects” on the structure of these planet-forming disks, says Weber, who still has a number of outstanding questions. How common are fly-bys? How do sibling stars change the evolution of disks and their planets? These new data will no doubt keep astronomers busy refining their theories as they seek to understand how planets form.

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It’s been almost a year since the James Webb Space Telescope was launched into space, and NASA’s most powerful far-flung traveler has already given us many new glimpses of our ever-captivating universe.

Able to see objects 100 times fainter than the Hubble Space Telescope, JWST is a hot commodity; excitement over the craft has only skyrocketed since scientists recently began utilizing the data it sends back. Since leaving Earth on December 25, 2021, JWST has reported novel details about faraway exoplanets and insights about the earliest days of the universe. As the telescope’s first year of research comes to an end, scientists are lining up for a chance to work with JWST, offering up their bids to determine where the observatory’s next science goals will lie next. But securing even a slice of observing time is easier said than done. 

The process to determine JWST’s upcoming science targets is a bit more technical than you might imagine, says Mercedes López-Morales, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Research projects are scheduled for mission crafts in research cycles, a period that lasts about 12 months. Yet selection isn’t determined by random name drawing or by first-come first-serve reservation, like booking a dinner table or library computer. Instead, astronomers often have to submit detailed research proposals in order to be awarded observation time on a NASA mission. 

In JWST’s case, the decision is made by the JWST Users Committee, a group of twelve  scientists, whose role was established by the Space Telescope Science Institute and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The committee’s job is to ensure that observatory operations proceed in a manner meant to “maximize” the telescope’s scientific performance. López-Morales, who serves as the chair of the committee, says while astronomers from all over the world are eligible to submit a case for observations they’d like the telescope to make, the process is so highly competitive that only about 25 percent (one in four proposals) had been successfully selected for the last research cycle. 

“Some years you get lucky and you get time, and some years, you just don’t get lucky and you have to wait,” López-Morales says. 

[Related: Get alerts every time the James Webb Space Telescope drops a heavenly new look]

It’s also no easy feat to convince NASA to turn the telescope’s sensitive instruments toward a brand new location in the vast expanse. Scientists have to be prepared to send in target coordinates, emphasize when and for how long they’d like JWST to observe that object, as well as recommend what instruments will be used and how they’d like the data to be collected.

After the painstaking process of creating such a detailed roadmap, the proposals undergo anonymous review, before eventually being chosen and sent off to telescope engineers to check to see if those programs are feasible or not, says López-Morales, who has gone through the steps herself. 

López-Morales was part of a team that recently used JWST data to reveal new details about the atmosphere of the exoplanet WASP-39 b, a Saturn-sized planet about 700 light-years away from Earth. Her team and their collaborators were initially awarded about 270 hours (just under 12 days) of telescope time to complete all of their observations for the study, she says. JWST’s current science cycle started on July 10, 2022 and will end June 30, 2023. The proposal deadline for JWST’s next cycle is January 27, 2023, which will ultimately run from July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024.

Though the application process is fierce, shedding light on how scientists are granted access to heavy-duty technology also brings up questions about how findings are distributed to the public. In August of this year, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy installed new guidance that makes research funded by taxpayers immediately accessible to the public. All government agencies—including NASA—will be expected to implement the policy no later than December 31, 2025. 

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope is about to beam us monster amounts of cosmic data]

To date, many space missions have proprietary research periods that typically range from six months to a year. At this time, only observers who have gone through the formal proposal process and are approved for that instrument’s science data have exclusive access to it. Other missions with many targets or objects to observe, like the survey mission TESS, have no proprietary period at all. But some researchers note that the possibility of completely eliminating exclusive access periods from future missions could cause deeper issues inside the scientific community.  

“I think in astronomy there’s this idea that the results should come out immediately, so that anyone could use it,” says Stephanie T. Douglas, an assistant professor of physics at Lafayette College who has not been involved with JWST. But the general public isn’t inclined to do the deeper, time-intensive “science analysis that [researchers] want to do with these images.” The proprietary period, Douglas notes, protects the person who was originally selected to get those results and helps give them credit. If released to the public immediately, the scientists who initially proposed the analysis and collected the data will have to rush to use it before other research groups get a chance, she says. 

Mia de los Reyes, an observational astronomer and a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University, says she’s seen many colleagues deal with the frustrations these issues cause. For instance, the pressure to be first to publish often exacerbates inequity in the astronomy community, she says. 

“It’s not that astronomers don’t want the public to have access to data,” de los Reyes says. “I think astronomers, on the contrary, feel very strongly that open-access research is good.” 

That said, the lack of a proprietary period incentivizes a poor work-life balance and puts early-career scientists from backgrounds and communities not often seen in science at a disadvantage. The pressure to publish could also lead to slapdash first results as scientists rush to turn their complex analyses into easily digestible, actionable results. 

Overall, de los Reyes hopes that early-career scientists will start thinking of creative ways to combat these underlying issues, as who is alloted time on ground-breaking space missions like JWST ultimately influences what research is done.   
Regardless of who gets dibs on JWST’s leaderboard next, López-Morales says that the telescope isn’t just a privilege for scientists, but is truly meant for everyone. “You often hear that this is a toy for scientists, and in reality it’s not a toy, it’s a tool,” she says. “It’s a tool for humankind to understand our place in the universe and where we came from, and where we are going.”

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In space, no one can hear a probe smash into an asteroid—but that’s just what happened in September, when NASA’s successful DART experiment proved that it’s possible to reroute a space rock by crashing into it on purpose. And that wasn’t even the most important event to materialize in space this year—more on the James Webb Space Telescope in a moment. Back on Earth, innovation also reached new heights in the aviation industry, as a unique electric airplane took off, as did a Black Hawk helicopter that can fly itself. 

Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Check it out here.

Innovation of the Year

The James Webb Space Telescope by NASA: A game-changing new instrument to see the cosmos 

NASA

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Once a generation, an astronomical tool arrives that surpasses everything that came before it. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is just such a creation. After more than two decades and $9.7 billion in the making, JWST launched on December 25, 2021. Since February of this year, when it first started imaging—employing a mirror and aperture nearly three times larger in radius than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope—JWST’s vibrant images have captured the attention of the world.

The JWST can see deep into fields of forming stars. It can peer 13 billion years back in time at ancient galaxies, still in their nursery. It can peek at exoplanets, seeing them directly where astronomers would have once had to reconstruct meager traces of their existence. It can teach us about how those stars and galaxies came together from primordial matter, something Hubble could only glimpse.

While Hubble circles in low Earth orbit, JWST instead sits hundreds of thousands of miles farther away, in Earth’s shadow. It will never see sunlight. There, protected even further by a multi-layer sunshield thinner than a human fingernail, the telescope chills at -370 degrees F, where JWST’s infrared sight works best. Its home is a fascinating location called L2, one of several points where the sun and Earth’s gravities balance each other out. 

All this might just be JWST’s prologue. Since the telescope used less fuel than initially anticipated when reaching its perch, the instrument might have enough to last well past its anticipated 10-year-long window. We can’t wait to see what else it dazzles us with.

Parallel Reality by Delta: A screen customized for you

Delta

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You’ve probably found yourself running through an airport at some point, squinting up at a screen filled with rows of flight information. A futuristic new offering from Delta and a startup called Misapplied Sciences aims to change that. At Detroit Metro Airport, an installation can show travelers customized information for their flight. A scan of your boarding pass in McNamara Terminal is one way to tell the system who you are. Then, when you look at the overhead screen, you see that it displays only personalized data about your journey, like which gate you need to find. The tech behind the system works because the pixels in the display itself can shine in one of 18,000 directions, meaning many different people can see distinct information while looking at the same screen at the same time. 

Electronic bag tags by Alaska Airlines: The last tag you’ll need (for one airline)

Alaska Airlines

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Believe it or not, some travelers do still check bags, and a new offering from this Seattle-based airline aims to make that process easier. Flyers who can get an electronic bag tag from Alaska Airlines (at first, 2,500 members of their frequent flier plan will get them, and in 2023 they’ll be available to buy) can use their mobile phone to create the appropriate luggage tag on this device’s e-ink display while at home, up to 24 hours before a flight. The 5-inch-long tag itself gets the power it needs to generate the information on the screen from your phone, thanks to an NFC connection. After the traveler has done this step at home, they just need to drop the tagged bag off in the right place at the airport, avoiding the line to get a tag. 

Alice by Eviation: A totally electric commuter airplane 

Eviation

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The aviation industry is a major producer of carbon emissions. One way to try to solve that problem is to run aircraft on electric power, utilizing them just for short hops. That’s what Eviation aims to do with a plane called Alice: 8,000 pounds of batteries in the belly of this commuter aircraft give its two motors the power it needs to fly. In fact, it made its first flight in September, a scant but successful eight minutes in the air. Someday, as battery tech improves, the company hopes that it can carry nine passengers for distances of 200 miles or so. 

OPV Black Hawk by Sikorsky: A military helicopter that flies itself 

Sikorsky

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Two pilots sit up front at the controls of the Army’s Black Hawk helicopters, but what if that number could be zero for missions that are especially hazardous? That’s exactly what a modified UH-60 helicopter can do, a product of a DARPA program called ALIAS, which stands for Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System. The self-flying whirlybird made its first flights with zero occupants on board in February, and in October, it took flight again, even carrying a 2,600-pound load beneath it. The technology comes from helicopter-maker Sikorsky, and allows the modified UH-60 to be flown by two pilots, one pilot, or zero. The idea is that this type of autonomy can help in several ways: to assist the one or two humans at the controls, or as a way for an uninhabited helicopter to execute tasks like flying somewhere dangerous to deliver supplies without putting any people on board at risk. 

Detect and Avoid by Zipline: Drones that can listen for in-flight obstacles

Zipline

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As drones and other small aircraft continue to fill the skies, all parties involved have an interest in avoiding collisions. But figuring out the best way for a drone to detect potential obstacles isn’t an easy problem to solve, especially since there are no pilots on board to keep their eyes out and weight is at a premium. Drone delivery company Zipline has turned to using sound, not sight, to solve this conundrum. Eight microphones on the drone’s wing listen for traffic like an approaching small plane, and can preemptively change the UAV’s route to get out of the way before it arrives. An onboard GPU and AI help with the task, too. While the company is still waiting for regulatory approval to totally switch the system on, the technique represents a solid approach to an important issue.

DART by NASA and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory: Smashing into an asteroid, for good 

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Earthlings who look at the sky in fear that a space rock might tumble down and devastate our world can now breathe a sigh of relief. On September 26, a 1,100-pound spacecraft streaked into a roughly 525-foot-diameter asteroid, Dimorphos, intentionally crashing into it at over 14,000 mph. NASA confirmed on October 11 that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)’s impact altered Dimorphos’s orbit around its companion asteroid, Didymos, even more than anticipated. Thanks to DART, humans have redirected an asteroid for the first time. The dramatic experiment gives astronomers hope that perhaps we could do it again to avert an apocalypse.

CAPSTONE by Advanced Space: A small vessel on a big journey

Advanced Space

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Some lunar craft fill up whole rooms. On the other hand, there’s CAPSTONE, a satellite that can fit on a desk. Despite control issues, CAPSTONE—which launched on June 28—triumphantly entered lunar orbit on November 13. This small traveler is a CubeSat, an affordable design of mini-satellite that’s helped make space accessible to universities, small companies, and countries without major space programs. Hundreds of CubeSats now populate the Earth’s orbit, and although some have hitched rides to Mars, none have made the trip to the moon under their own power—until CAPSTONE. More low-cost lunar flights, its creators hope, may follow.

The LSST Camera by SLAC/Vera C. Rubin Observatory: A 3,200-megapixel camera

SLAC/Vera C. Rubin Observatory

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Very soon, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the high desert of Northern Chile will provide astronomers with what will be nearly a live-feed view of the southern hemisphere’s sky. To do that, it will rely on the world’s largest camera—with a lens 5 feet across and matching shutters, it will be capable of taking images that are an astounding 3,200 megapixels. The camera’s crafters are currently placing the finishing touches on it, but their impressive engineering feats aren’t done yet: In May 2023, the camera will fly down to Chile in a Boeing 747, before traveling by truck to its final destination.

The Event Horizon Telescope by the EHT Collaboration: Seeing the black hole in the Milky Way’s center

ESO

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Just a few decades ago, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s heart, was a hazy concept. Now, thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), we have a blurry image of it—or, since a black hole doesn’t let out light, of its surrounding accretion disc. The EHT is actually a global network of radio telescopes stretching from Germany to Hawaii, and from Chile to the South Pole. EHT released the image in May, following years of painstaking reconstruction by over 300 scientists, who learned much about the black hole’s inner workings in the process. This is EHT’s second black hole image, following its 2019 portrait of a behemoth in the galaxy M87.

Starliner by Boeing: A new way of getting to the ISS 

Boeing

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After years of budget issues, technical delays, and testing failures, Boeing’s much-awaited Starliner crew capsule finally took to the skies and made it to its destination. An uncrewed test launch in May successfully departed Florida, docked at the International Space Station (ISS), and landed back on Earth. Now, Boeing and NASA are preparing for Starliner’s first crewed test, set to launch sometime in 2023. When that happens, Starliner will take its place alongside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, and NASA will have more than one option to get astronauts into orbit. There are a few differences between the two: Where Crew Dragon splashes down in the sea, Starliner touches down on land, making it easier to recover. And, where Crew Dragon was designed to launch on SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 rockets, Starliner is more flexible. 

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At the heart of nearly all of NASA’’s complex space missions is an unseen quartermaster, a key system often referred to as the agency’s “eyes”: the Deep Space Network.

The largest and most sensitive telecommunications system on the planet, the Deep Space Network, or DSN, is an international array of giant radio antennas. The network is made up of three ground-based facilities around the world, each located 120 degrees apart in longitude (or between 5,000 and 10,000 miles away) from each other, with one based at Goldstone near Barstow, California, another in Madrid, Spain, and the last in Canberra, Australia). This powerful network allows NASA to remain in constant communication with spacecraft that venture far beyond Earth’s orbit. 

[Related: NASA is testing space lasers to shoot data back to Earth]

Operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, the system has played a crucial role in deep space communications since it began continuous operation in 1963. In its youth, the network was an important part of tracking and communicating with the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, and has since contributed to the well-being of dozens of NASA’s most historic projects. For instance, it helped transmit data back and forth from missions like DART, Lucy, the Solar Parker Probe, and the James Webb Space Telescope. As of 2021, the DSN tracks and supports 39 missions regularly, with another 30 more NASA missions in development.  

Jeff Berner, the Deep Space Network’s chief engineer, says that the network still even tracks NASA’s Voyager probes—the twin crafts that launched in 1977 and continue to float far outside the solar system. “As spacecrafts get further away, the power received from a spacecraft goes down,” he says. “So the signal gets weaker and weaker as the spacecraft gets further and further away.” 

For perspective, sending and receiving data to the moon and back (an average of 477,710 miles) would take only a few seconds, but the same signal sent to Mars (about 280 million miles round-trip) could take anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to arrive. For a craft as far out of humanity’s range as Voyager, Berner says a signal’s two-way light time (the time it takes to get to the craft and back to Earth) could take upwards of 29 hours. Additionally, because any mission can be tracked using any of the DSN’s powerful antennas, the easy flexibility of this complex relay network is one of the reasons why the DSN is “truly a multi-mission system,” Berner explains. Each complex is home to a 230-foot-wide antenna and numerous 111-feet-wide ones that, besides communicating with spacecraft as Earth rotates, are also used to conduct radio science, like studying planets and black holes. But a close look at the inner-workings of this system reveals how integral the DSN will be to NASA’s latest push to reach the lunar surface with the Artemis program.

Getting Artemis I to the moon and back

Last week, NASA’s Orion spacecraft kissed the moon, and is now shuffling along right behind our satellite, covertly taking jaw-dropping new high-definition images of its crater-dotted surface. But if Orion is Earth’s latest spy, then the DSN is essentially mission control, the voice in every good hero’s ear. 

According to the JPL, the DSN is currently supporting a large, constant influx of data from the uncrewed capsule, a process which will continue throughout its outbound journey, the mission maneuvers in between, as well as the craft’s much-awaited return. The process will ensure commands can be sent and data can be swiftly returned, even while deftly supporting the many other missions the network tracks. Artemis initially relied on NASA’s Near Space Network (NSN), another relay communications system managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, that can connect with government or commercial missions in near-Earth orbit. But because its antennas aren’t able to get enough energy to support high data rates, or the rapid transmission of data to ground stations once a spacecraft goes beyond low-Earth orbit, the DSN became a better fit for Artemis to go the distance. Without the existence of the DSN, “you would not be able to get the data rates that they are getting for the moon,” Berner says. That means that all of those fantastic photos and images the craft has already sent back would certainly be less precise, and surely, more dull. 

Just before Orion is slated to splash down back on Earth, the DSN will pass the baton back to the NSN once more. This handoff marks a new chapter of human space exploration—together with the Space Communications and Navigation program, the telecommunications systems will lay the groundwork for future crewed Artemis launches to the moon. 

A space network for the future

To keep up with NASA’s jam-packed mission schedule, the nearly 60-year-old network will need a few upgrades. “We’ve got equipment that’s been in the network for 30, 40 years that, needless to say, is very hard to maintain,” says Berner, who was present when the DSN first began converting its analog systems to digital in the early 1990s. But bringing the DSN up-to-date with the latest technology “takes time and money.” 

Berner says there are a number of improvements the network will undergo in the next few years to ensure it has the capability to support new missions, specifically NASA’s Gateway, an outpost that will orbit the moon and provide support for long-term human lunar and deep space exploration. Because many of those future systems will be using higher data rates at higher frequencies than previous missions, antennas at each DSN complex are being upgraded to support much higher data rates at uplink and downlink, or transmissions to and from a craft. 

[Related: NASA is launching a new quantum entanglement experiment in space]

But as humanity once again seeks to plant its flag on the moon (hopefully more permanently this time), Berner notes that the success of a spacecraft mission often depends on the ground-based tracking system that supports them, a concept that can sometimes get lost in the mix and pushed to the shadows in celebration of new discoveries. Ultimately, behind every far-reaching, data-hungry spacecraft is a harmony of capable antennas enabling it to go further. 

“When you see the pictures in the newspaper about the discoveries, [if] we didn’t have the network’s on the ground, you wouldn’t see any of this stuff,” Berner says. 

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Stars love personal growth, but even they have limits. A new composite image from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) illustrates how the youngest members of a cluster in the Milky Way can exert “self control” in a process known as “stellar feedback.”

The action takes place in RCW 36, a cloud of mostly hydrogen ions located 2,900 light-years away from Earth. A group of stars is emerging from super-hot gas there—and leaving a strange pair of voids in its wake. The formation is also pulled together by dense, cool gas, giving it an hourglass-like appearance.

With data collected from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, APEX telescope, and the now-retired SOFIA and Herschel space instruments, a team of international researchers dove into RSW 36’s deserted regions. They learned that the ring of freezing gas (estimated at -430 to -410 degrees Fahrenheit) is being pushed out by the pressure of sizzling atoms in the middle (estimated at 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit). Radiation from the natal stellar bodies also helped clear out raw materials from both sides of the cloud. “This process should drastically slow down the birth of new stars, which would better align with astronomers’ predictions for how quickly stars form in clusters,” NASA explained in a blog post this week.

The pressure and plasma coming out of the hotspots are called “stellar winds,” and act similar to a galactic power washer. The scientists observing RSW 36 think the cold gas could be moving upward of 30,000 miles per hour, which means it’d be cleaning out 170 Earths worth of mass per year. At that rate, the cloud could be free of any fertile bits in the next 1 to 2 million years.

[Related: The Milky Way’s oldest star is a white-hot pyre of dead planets]

The team’s findings, which were published in The Astrophysical Journal in August 2022, indicate that the ruthless “stellar feedback” strategy could be seen elsewhere in the Milky Way and cosmos. Lucky for us, NASA and ESA has the tools to catch the stars red-handed.

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On a cloudy Christmas morning last year, a rocket carrying the most powerful space telescope ever built blasted off from a launchpad in French Guiana. After reaching its destination in space about a month later, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began sending back sparkling presents to humanity—jaw-dropping images that are revealing our universe in stunning new ways.

Every year since 1988, Popular Science has highlighted the innovations that make living on Earth even a tiny bit better. And this year—our 35th—has been remarkable, thanks to the successful deployment of the JWST, which earned our highest honor as the Innovation of the Year. But it’s just one item out of the 100 stellar technological accomplishments our editors have selected to recognize. 

The list below represents months of research, testing, discussion, and debate. It celebrates exciting inventions that are improving our lives in ways both big and small. These technologies and discoveries are teaching us about the nature of the universe and treating diseases, but they’re also giving us better ways of entertaining and expressing ourselves. 

With 10 categories spanning from aerospace to sports and outdoors, the list is a doozy. We’ve got Naval fighter jets on the big screen and TikTok filters on your phone. There’s gear to help you explore the great outdoors, and devices to help you improve your health and home. We’ve got gadgets galore, a very long suspension bridge, and an EV with a range of 747 miles. So buckle up, and explore the winners below. 

• Aerospace
• Engineering
• Gadgets
• Health
• Entertainment
• Personal Care
• Emergency Services and Defense
• Automotive
• Sports and Outdoors
• Home

Aerospace

In space, no one can hear a probe smash into an asteroid—but that’s just what happened in September, when NASA’s successful DART experiment proved that it’s possible to reroute a space rock by crashing into it on purpose. And that wasn’t even the most important event to materialize in space this year—more on the JWST in a moment. Back on Earth, innovation also reached new heights in the aviation industry, as a unique electric airplane took off, as did a Black Hawk helicopter that can fly itself. 

Innovation of the Year

The James Webb Space Telescope by NASA: A game-changing new instrument to see the cosmos 

NASA

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Once a generation, an astronomical tool arrives that surpasses everything that came before it. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is just such a creation. After more than two decades and $9.7 billion in the making, JWST launched on December 25, 2021. Since February of this year, when it first started imaging—employing a mirror and aperture nearly three times larger in radius than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope—JWST’s vibrant images have captured the attention of the world.

The JWST can see deep into fields of forming stars. It can peer 13 billion years back in time at ancient galaxies, still in their nursery. It can peek at exoplanets, seeing them directly where astronomers would have once had to reconstruct meager traces of their existence. It can teach us about how those stars and galaxies came together from primordial matter, something Hubble could only glimpse.

While Hubble circles in low Earth orbit, JWST instead sits hundreds of thousands of miles farther away, in Earth’s shadow. It will never see sunlight. There, protected even further by a multi-layer sunshield thinner than a human fingernail, the telescope chills at -370 degrees F, where JWST’s infrared sight works best. Its home is a fascinating location called L2, one of several points where the sun and Earth’s gravities balance each other out. 

All this might just be JWST’s prologue. Since the telescope used less fuel than initially anticipated when reaching its perch, the instrument might have enough to last well past its anticipated 10-year-long window. We can’t wait to see what else it dazzles us with.

Parallel Reality by Delta: A screen customized for you

Delta

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You’ve probably found yourself running through an airport at some point, squinting up at a screen filled with rows of flight information. A futuristic new offering from Delta and a startup called Misapplied Sciences aims to change that. At Detroit Metro Airport, an installation can show travelers customized information for their flight. A scan of your boarding pass in McNamara Terminal is one way to tell the system who you are. Then, when you look at the overhead screen, you see that it displays only personalized data about your journey, like which gate you need to find. The tech behind the system works because the pixels in the display itself can shine in one of 18,000 directions, meaning many different people can see distinct information while looking at the same screen at the same time. 

Electronic bag tags by Alaska Airlines: The last tag you’ll need (for one airline)

Alaska Airlines

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Believe it or not, some travelers do still check bags, and a new offering from this Seattle-based airline aims to make that process easier. Flyers who can get an electronic bag tag from Alaska Airlines (at first, 2,500 members of their frequent flier plan will get them, and in 2023 they’ll be available to buy) can use their mobile phone to create the appropriate luggage tag on this device’s e-ink display while at home, up to 24 hours before a flight. The 5-inch-long tag itself gets the power it needs to generate the information on the screen from your phone, thanks to an NFC connection. After the traveler has done this step at home, they just need to drop the tagged bag off in the right place at the airport, avoiding the line to get a tag. 

Alice by Eviation: A totally electric commuter airplane 

Eviation

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The aviation industry is a major producer of carbon emissions. One way to try to solve that problem is to run aircraft on electric power, utilizing them just for short hops. That’s what Eviation aims to do with a plane called Alice: 8,000 pounds of batteries in the belly of this commuter aircraft give its two motors the power it needs to fly. In fact, it made its first flight in September, a scant but successful eight minutes in the air. Someday, as battery tech improves, the company hopes that it can carry nine passengers for distances of 200 miles or so. 

OPV Black Hawk by Sikorsky: A military helicopter that flies itself 

Sikorsky

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Two pilots sit up front at the controls of the Army’s Black Hawk helicopters, but what if that number could be zero for missions that are especially hazardous? That’s exactly what a modified UH-60 helicopter can do, a product of a DARPA program called ALIAS, which stands for Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System. The self-flying whirlybird made its first flights with zero occupants on board in February, and in October, it took flight again, even carrying a 2,600-pound load beneath it. The technology comes from helicopter-maker Sikorsky, and allows the modified UH-60 to be flown by two pilots, one pilot, or zero. The idea is that this type of autonomy can help in several ways: to assist the one or two humans at the controls, or as a way for an uninhabited helicopter to execute tasks like flying somewhere dangerous to deliver supplies without putting any people on board at risk. 

Detect and Avoid by Zipline: Drones that can listen for in-flight obstacles

Zipline

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As drones and other small aircraft continue to fill the skies, all parties involved have an interest in avoiding collisions. But figuring out the best way for a drone to detect potential obstacles isn’t an easy problem to solve, especially since there are no pilots on board to keep their eyes out and weight is at a premium. Drone delivery company Zipline has turned to using sound, not sight, to solve this conundrum. Eight microphones on the drone’s wing listen for traffic like an approaching small plane, and can preemptively change the UAV’s route to get out of the way before it arrives. An onboard GPU and AI help with the task, too. While the company is still waiting for regulatory approval to totally switch the system on, the technique represents a solid approach to an important issue.

DART by NASA and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory: Smashing into an asteroid, for good 

NASA

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Earthlings who look at the sky in fear that a space rock might tumble down and devastate our world can now breathe a sigh of relief. On September 26, a 1,100-pound spacecraft streaked into a roughly 525-foot-diameter asteroid, Dimorphos, intentionally crashing into it at over 14,000 mph. NASA confirmed on October 11 that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)’s impact altered Dimorphos’s orbit around its companion asteroid, Didymos, even more than anticipated. Thanks to DART, humans have redirected an asteroid for the first time. The dramatic experiment gives astronomers hope that perhaps we could do it again to avert an apocalypse.

CAPSTONE by Advanced Space: A small vessel on a big journey

Advanced Space

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Some lunar craft fill up whole rooms. On the other hand, there’s CAPSTONE, a satellite that can fit on a desk. Despite control issues, CAPSTONE—which launched on June 28—triumphantly entered lunar orbit on November 13. This small traveler is a CubeSat, an affordable design of mini-satellite that’s helped make space accessible to universities, small companies, and countries without major space programs. Hundreds of CubeSats now populate the Earth’s orbit, and although some have hitched rides to Mars, none have made the trip to the moon under their own power—until CAPSTONE. More low-cost lunar flights, its creators hope, may follow.

The LSST Camera by SLAC/Vera C. Rubin Observatory: A 3,200-megapixel camera

SLAC/Vera C. Rubin Observatory

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Very soon, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the high desert of Northern Chile will provide astronomers with what will be nearly a live-feed view of the southern hemisphere’s sky. To do that, it will rely on the world’s largest camera—with a lens 5 feet across and matching shutters, it will be capable of taking images that are an astounding 3,200 megapixels. The camera’s crafters are currently placing the finishing touches on it, but their impressive engineering feats aren’t done yet: In May 2023, the camera will fly down to Chile in a Boeing 747, before traveling by truck to its final destination.

The Event Horizon Telescope by the EHT Collaboration: Seeing the black hole in the Milky Way’s center

ESO

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Just a few decades ago, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s heart, was a hazy concept. Now, thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), we have a blurry image of it—or, since a black hole doesn’t let out light, of its surrounding accretion disc. The EHT is actually a global network of radio telescopes stretching from Germany to Hawaii, and from Chile to the South Pole. EHT released the image in May, following years of painstaking reconstruction by over 300 scientists, who learned much about the black hole’s inner workings in the process. This is EHT’s second black hole image, following its 2019 portrait of a behemoth in the galaxy M87.

Starliner by Boeing: A new way of getting to the ISS 

Boeing

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After years of budget issues, technical delays, and testing failures, Boeing’s much-awaited Starliner crew capsule finally took to the skies and made it to its destination. An uncrewed test launch in May successfully departed Florida, docked at the International Space Station (ISS), and landed back on Earth. Now, Boeing and NASA are preparing for Starliner’s first crewed test, set to launch sometime in 2023. When that happens, Starliner will take its place alongside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, and NASA will have more than one option to get astronauts into orbit. There are a few differences between the two: Where Crew Dragon splashes down in the sea, Starliner touches down on land, making it easier to recover. And, where Crew Dragon was designed to launch on SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 rockets, Starliner is more flexible. 

Engineering

Zero-emissions vehicles, artificial intelligence, and self-charging gadgets are helping remake and update some of the most important technologies of the last few centuries. Personal devices like headphones and remote controls may be headed for a wireless, grid-less future, thanks to a smaller and more flexible solar panel. Boats can now sail human-free from the UK to the US, using a suite of sensors and AI. Chemical factories, energy facilities, trucks and ships are getting green makeovers as engineers figure out clever new ways to make them run on hydrogen, batteries, or other alternative, non-fossil fuel power sources.

Grand Award Winner

1915 Çanakkale by the Republic of Turkey: The world’s longest suspension bridge

Çanakkale Motorway Bridge Construction Investment Operation

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An international team of engineers had to solve several difficult challenges to build the world’s largest suspension bridge, which stretches 15,118 feet across the Dardanelles Strait in Turkey. To construct it, engineers used tugboats to float out 66,000-ton concrete foundations known as caissons to serve as pillars. They then flooded chambers in the caissons to sink them 40 meters (131 feet) deep into the seabed. Prefabricated sections of the bridge deck were carried out with barges and cranes, then assembled. Completed in March 2022, the bridge boasts a span between the two towers that measures an incredible 6,637 feet. Ultimately the massive structure shortens the commuting time across the congested strait, which is a win for everyone.

NuGen by Anglo American: World’s largest hydrogen fuel cell EV

Anglo American

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When carrying a full load of rock, the standard issue Komatsu 930E-5 mining truck weighs over 1 million pounds and burns 800 gallons of diesel per work day. Collectively, mining trucks emit 68 million tons of carbon dioxide each year (about as much as the entire nation of New Zealand). This company’s solution was to turn to hydrogen power, and so Anglo American hired American contractor First Mode to hack together a hydrogen fuel cell version of their mining truck. It’s called NuGen. Since the original Komatsu truck already had electric traction motors, powered by diesel, the engineers replaced the fossil-fuel-burning engine with eight separate 800-kw fuel cells that feed into a giant 1.1 Mwh battery. (The battery further recaptures power through regenerative braking.)  Deployed at a South African platinum mine in May, the truck refuels with green hydrogen produced using energy from a nearby solar farm.

Hydeal España by ArcelorMittal, Enagás, Grupo Fertiberia and DH2 Energy: The biggest green hydrogen hub

Negro Elkha – stock.adobe.com

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Hydrogen can be a valuable fuel source for decarbonizing industrial processes. But obtaining the gas at scale requires using energy from natural gas to split water into hydrogen and oxygen with electrical currents. To be sustainable, this process needs to be powered with renewables. That’s the goal of an industrial consortium in Spain, comprised of the four companies listed above. It’s beginning work on HyDeal España, set to be the world’s largest green hydrogen hub. Solar panels with a capacity of 9.5 GW will power electrolysers that will separate hydrogen from water at an unprecedented scale. The project will help create fossil-free ammonia (for fertilizer and other purposes), and hydrogen for use in the production of green steel. The hub is scheduled to be completed in 2030, and according to its estimates, the project will reduce the greenhouse gas footprint of Spain by 4 percent. 

DALL-E 2 by Open AI: A groundbreaking text-to-image generator

OpenAI

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Art students will often mimic the style of a master as part of their training. DALL-E 2 by Open AI takes this technique to a scale only artificial intelligence can achieve, by studying hundreds of millions of captioned images scraped from the internet. It allows users to write text prompts that the algorithm then renders into pictures in less than a minute. Compared to previous image generators, the quality of the output is getting rave reviews, and there are “happy accidents” that feel like real creativity. And it’s not just artists—urban planning advocates and even a reconstructive surgeon have used the tool to visualize rough concepts.

The P12 shuttle by Candela: A speedy electric hydrofoil ferry

Candela

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When the first Candela P12 electric hydrofoil goes into service next year in Stockholm, Sweden, it will take commuters from the suburbs to downtown in about 25 minutes. That’s a big  improvement from the 55 minutes it takes on diesel ferries. Because the P12 produces almost no wake, it is allowed to exceed the speed restrictions placed on other watercraft; it travels at roughly 30 miles per hour, which according to the company makes it the world’s fastest aquatic electric vessel. Computer-guided stabilization technology aims to make the ride feel smooth. And as a zero-emissions way to avoid traffic congestion on bridge or tunnel chokepoints without needing to build expensive infrastructure, the boats are a win for transportation.

Bioforge by Solugen: Zero-emission chemical factory

Solugen

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Petrochemical plants typically require acres of towering columns and snaking pipes to turn fossil fuels into useful products. In addition to producing toxic emissions like benzene, these facilities put out 925 million metric tons of greenhouse gas every year, according to an IEA estimate. But outside Houston, Solugen built a “Bioforge” plant that produces 10,000 tons of chemicals like fertilizer and cleaning solutions annually through a process that yields zero air emissions or wastewater. The secret sauce consists of enzymes: instead of using fossil fuels as a feedstock, these proteins turn corn syrup into useful chemicals for products much more efficiently than conventional fossil fuel processes– and at a competitive price. These enzymes even like to eat pieces of old cardboard that can’t be recycled anymore, turning trash into feedstock treasure. Solugen signed a deal this fall with a large company to turn cardboard landfill waste into usable plastics.

HydroSKIN by ILEK/U of Stuttgart: Zero-Emissions Cooling

Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design (ILEK), University of Stuttgart

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Air conditioners and fans already consume 10 percent of the world’s electricity, and AC use is projected to triple by the year 2050. But there are other ways to cool a structure. Installed in an experimental building in Stuttgart, Germany, an external facade add-on called HydroSKIN employs layers of modern textiles to update the ancient technique of using wet cloth to cool the air through evaporation. The top layer is a mesh that serves to keep out bugs and debris. The second layer is a thick spacer fabric designed to absorb water—from rain or water vapor when it’s humid out—and then facilitate evaporation in hot weather. The third layer is an optional film that provides additional absorption. The fourth (closest to the wall of the building) is a foil that collects any moisture that soaks through, allowing it to either be stored or drained.  A preliminary estimate found that a single square meter of HydroSKIN can cool an 8x8x8 meter (26x26x26 feet) cube by 10 degrees Kelvin (18 degrees F).

Powerfoyle by Exeger: Self-charging gadgets

Exeger

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Consumer electronics in the U.S. used about 176 terawatt hours of electricity in 2020, more than the entire nation of Sweden. Researchers at the Swedish company Exeger have devised a new architecture for solar cells that’s compact, flexible, and can be integrated into a variety of self-charging gadgets. Silicon solar panels generate power cheaply at massive scale, but are fragile and require unsightly silver lines to conduct electricity.  Exeger’s Powerfoyle updates a 1980s innovation called dye-sensitized solar cells with titanium dioxide, an abundant material found in white paint and donut glaze, and a new electrode that’s 1,000 times more conductive than silicon. Powerfoyle can be printed to look like brushed steel, carbon fiber or plastic, and can now be found in self-charging headphones by Urbanista and Adidas, a bike helmet, and even a GPS-enabled dog collar.

The Mayflower by IBM: Uncrewed trans-Atlantic voyage

IBM

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Collecting data in the corrosive salt waves and high winds of the Atlantic can be dull, dirty, and dangerous. Enter the Mayflower, an AI-captained, electrically-powered ship. It has 30 sensors and 16 computing devices that can process data onboard in lieu of a galley, toilets, or sleeping quarters. After the Mayflower successfully piloted itself from Plymouth in the UK to Plymouth, MA earlier this year—with pit stops in the Azores and Canada due to mechanical failures—the team is prepping a vessel more than twice the size for a longer journey. The boat is designed to collect data on everything from whales to the behavior of eddies or gyres at a hundredth the cost of a crewed voyage and without risking human life. The next milestone will be a 12,000 mile trip from the UK to Antarctica, with a return trip via the Falkland Islands.

The Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facilities by NextEra Energy Resources and Portland General Electric: A triple threat of renewable energy

Portland General Electric

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In Oregon, the Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facilities, co-owned by NextEra Energy Resources and Portland General Electric (PGE), is combining solar, wind, and battery storage to bring renewable energy to the grid at utility scale. Key to the equation are those batteries, which stabilize the intermittency of wind and solar power. All told, it touts 300 megawatts of wind, 50 megawatts of solar, and 30 megawatts of battery storage capable of serving around 100,000 homes, and it’s already started producing power. The facility is all part of the Pacific Northwestern state’s plan to achieve 100-percent carbon-free electricity by 2040. 

Gadgets

Over the past 15 years or so, smartphones have consumed many familiar gizmos. Calculators, TV remotes, cameras, and other standalone devices have converged into the smartphone that lives in our pockets. Recently, however, that trend has slowed. Phones have been iteratively improving with increasingly granular updates. The gadget and computer market has felt more diverse as more and more devices find their niche outside the confines of a smartphone. That includes hardcore computer hardware, VR and AR devices, and even smart-home tech. Our winner this year addresses the ever-present disparity in the ways we use electronic devices, because gadgets should ultimately give us as many options as possible for how we interact with them.

Grand Award Winner

Adaptive Accessories by Microsoft: Making computers accessible to all

Microsoft

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Microsoft’s Adaptive Mouse might not look very advanced. It’s a simple, squircle-shaped device with two buttons, a scroll wheel, and several slots around its edges. You’re not meant to use it as it ships, however. This mouse is one of Microsoft’s Accessible Accessories that easily connect to custom, 3D-printed attachments to accommodate a wide variety of users with different physical needs. The Microsoft Adaptive Hub allows people to connect up to three of the Accessible Accessories to any computer. Compatible devices include an Adaptive D-pad button, an Adaptive Dual Button, and an Adaptive Joystick button, all of which can accommodate people with limited mobility through the Shapeways 3D printing platform. The hub connects via USB-C or Bluetooth wireless, so it can integrate third-party accessibility devices along with Microsoft’s own accessories. The company plans to continue expanding the platform to help ensure the most people can interact with their computers in ways not previously possible with common mice and keyboards.

C1 Webcam by Opal: A webcam that goes beyond its hardware

Opal

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Computational photography relies on software and processing power in order to make camera hardware perform well above its technical capabilities, which is what makes your smartphone camera so good at what it does. The Opal C1 draws heavily on computational photography to apply those same improvements to a webcam. It relies on a smartphone imaging chip previously found in older Google Pixel phones, which stands to reason since the Opal was developed by a former Google designer, Kenny Sweet. Right out of the box, the camera corrects for common issues like heavy backlighting, mixed lighting (which can make you look sickly), and overly contrasty ambient illumination. People can also customize the look they want based on their environment or personal tastes.

Arc GPUs by Intel: A new chip to shake up the graphics processor market

Intel

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The market for graphics processing units (or GPUs) isn’t very crowded. Two companies, AMD and Nvidia, have dominated for decades. Chipmaker Intel abandoned its GPU ambitions more than 10 years ago—until this year’s release of its Arc hardware. These graphics cards deliver surprisingly powerful performance for even more surprisingly affordable prices. The Arcs’ strength comes from their efficiency. The top-end A770 card isn’t meant to take on the most powerful models from other brands. Instead, at just $329, it provides 1440p gaming for players who might otherwise have to rely on wimpy integrated graphics or an older and outdated card. That should rally gamers who want solid graphics performance without having to shell out the money and power required to run the increasingly ridiculous flagship graphics cards on the market right now.

Ultra Reality Monitor by Brelyon: AR and VR without the headset

Brelyon

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Typical virtual reality headsets create shallow stereoscopic depth by showing each eye a slightly different perspective of the same scene. Brelyon’s new Ultra Reality monitor relies on a more complex phenomenon called monocular depth modulation, which allows the eye to focus deeper into a scene just as it could in the real world. Brelyon’s combination of optics and display tech fill a viewer’s field of vision with 3D images that simulate a 120-inch display—with a device the size of a typical gaming monitor. The eye can focus at various depths in the scene, which makes the display feel as though it extends far beyond the physical bounds of the hardware. Eventually, tech like this could, on a much larger scale, essentially create a Star Trek-like Holodeck that creates room-scale VR without the need for a headset.

Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs by AMD: A big leap in processing performance

AMD

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CPUs (or central processing units) get faster all the time. AMD’s latest Ryzen 7000 Series chips, however, represent more than an iterative jump of pure processing power. These powerful little chips rely on a brand new architecture that AMD calls Zen 4. It’s built on a 5nm process, which doesn’t indicate the actual physical size of the transistors, but rather their density on the chip. By moving to this architecture, AMD has created the fastest CPUs to date for creative and gaming purposes. AMD’s plans for these chips go beyond personal computers and extend out into its commercial data center hardware. But for now, they’ll render those Adobe Premiere edits with the quickness.

OLED Flex LX3 TV by LG: A screen that goes from flat to curved and back again

LG

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Curved displays can immerse you in a viewing or video game experience. Try watching content with a group, however, and that curve becomes a hindrance as the picture loses contrast and color accuracy for everyone sitting off-center. LG’s new 42-inch OLED, however, can rest completely flat for group viewing, then mechanically adjust its curvature with built-in motors. It curves all the way to 900R, which is just shy of the human eye’s natural shape. Because it’s an OLED, this TV offers superior contrast and color reproduction no matter what orientation you choose. Plus, it offers a full suite of advanced features, including HDMI 2.1 and an anti-reflective coating to keep the picture glare-free.

Quest Pro VR by Meta: A VR headset that ropes in reality

Meta

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Until a company convinces us to collectively install Matrix-style data jacks in the backs of our skulls, headsets will be our way into the metaverse. Meta’s new flagship headset offers capabilities well beyond its Quest 2 VR headset that earned a Best of What’s New award in 2020. The Quest Pro features front-facing cameras, which add a mixed-reality element to the overall experience. It can pump a real-time feed of the outside world into high-res displays while integrating digital elements as if they really exist. Replace your desk with a virtual workspace. Get real-time directions on how to fix a piece of machinery. Play fantastical games in a hyper-realistic setting. We’ve seen devices that have promised this kind of AR/VR synergy before, but Meta has brought it a very real step closer to actual reality.

Z9 Mirrorless Camera by Nikon: A professional camera with almost no moving parts

Nikon

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Take the lens off a high-end mirrorless camera and you’ll still find a mechanical shutter that moves up and down when you take a shot. That’s not the case with Nikon’s Z9. This pro-grade mirrorless camera relies entirely on a super-fast, stacked imaging sensor that’s capable of shooting up to 30 fps at its full 45.7-megapixel resolution or up to 120 fps if you only need 11 megapixels. In making this switch, Nikon increased the camera’s overall speed and removed its biggest moving part, which tends to be the first piece that needs repair after heavy use. The Z9 can shoot detailed, high-res raw files for the studio, super-fast bursts of small jpegs for sports, and even 8K video for cinema shooters. And yes, it will shoot the fanciest selfies you’ve ever seen.

Archer Omni Router by TP-Link: A router that transforms to augment wireless connectivity

TP-Link

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Single-point routers have fallen out of fashion thanks to the popularity of mesh Wi-Fi systems, but TP-Link’s AXE200 Omni could change all that. At the push of a button, each of its four antennas move automatically to optimize its signal based on where you need the internet most in your home. Positioning router antennas has been annoying for nearly 20 years, so it’s refreshing to see a major networking company take the hassle out of it. The various arrangements can throw signals evenly around an area or divert the antennas in order to focus coverage in one specific direction. Under the hood, the AXE200 is a monster of a router. By adopting Wi-Fi 6e, the router can reach speeds of up to 11 Gbps, and its eight-core processor manages antenna movement and enables HomeShield, a built-in security system.

Matter Smart Home Platform by the Connectivity Standards Alliance: Sync your whole smart home

Matter

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Smart home gadgets are stubborn and territorial. Their refusal to play together nicely can throw a wrench in anyone’s plans to build an automated electronic utopia around the house. The Connectivity Standards Alliance aims to change that with Matter. It’s a set of standards that ensure smart devices—even those designed to work with specific smart assistants—can talk to each other during the setup process and forever after in regular use. The first iteration includes smart plugs, thermostats, lights, and just about anything else you control with Siri, Alexa, or whatever other assistant you’ve chosen. As devices evolve, so will the standards, so hopefully you’ll never have to struggle through a long setup or an unresponsive device again.

12S Ultra Smartphone by Xiaomi: A smartphone camera with evolved hardware

Xiaomi

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Smartphone cameras rely heavily on processing and AI to make their videos and images perform outside the bounds of the built-in hardware. Xiaomi has taken a different approach with its 12S Ultra Android phone, however. It has a truly impressive and relatively huge array of 1-inch and ½-inch sensors behind lenses designed by iconic German manufacturer Leica. It still provides the AI and computational capabilities you’d expect from a modern flagship phone camera, but it backs up the processing with hardware well beyond what you’ll find in a typical device. The 50-megapixel main camera takes full advantage of a 1-inch Sony sensor—similar to what you’d find in a dedicated camera. The ultra-wide and telephoto cameras both sport ½-inch chips that are also much bigger than most of their smartphone competition. That extra real estate allows for better light gathering and overall image capture before the computing hardware crunches a single pixel.

Phone (1) by Nothing: Light-based notifications help kick the screen habit

Nothing

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From the front, Nothing’s debut phone looks a lot like a typical flagship Android device. Flip the phone over, however, and you’ll find Nothing’s extremely clever light-based notification system, designed to let users know what’s happening on their device without having to look at the screen. Users can customize the lights (Nothing calls them glyphs) in a surprising number of ways. For instance, individual contacts can have their own light pattern that flashes whenever they call. A strip of LEDs at the bottom of the device can act as a battery charge indicator or give feedback from the built-in Google Assistant. The circular ring of lights around the center surround the Qi wireless charging pad, which can top up a pair of earbuds. Beyond the built-in functions, the lights are deeply customizable and will only gain more functionality in future updates. After all, anything that helps look at our phone screens less is OK with us.

Car Crash Detection by Apple: Smart sensors that can save a life in an accident

Apple

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One of the most advanced features of this year’s iPhone and Apple Watch models is one the company hopes you’ll never have to use. Car Crash detection uses an iPhone 14 Pro’s or Apple Watch 8’s upgraded gyroscope, which can measure up to 256 G of force, and checks for changes 3,000 times per second. This data, along with information collected by an accelerometer and the built-in barometer, can sense the change in a car’s cabin pressure caused by a deployed airbag. Once it detects a crash, the watch will automatically send emergency services to your location if you don’t respond to an alert within a few seconds. Your device will also give you the option to manually call emergency services if you’re conscious but need help. The feature is enabled by default, and the information your phone collects is never shared with Apple or a third party.

Health

Almost three years into the pandemic, the spotlight isn’t just on COVID medicine anymore. While booster shots and take-home antiviral pills gave us new tools to fight the infectious disease, health researchers and drug makers regained momentum in other crucial areas, like organ transplants, STI prevention, and white-whale therapies for alopecia and HIV. At the same time, AI deepened its role as a diagnostic aid, while mental health services got an accessibility boost across the US. We know the pandemic isn’t over—and other pathogens and illnesses are likely lurking undetected—but the progress we make in medical labs, factories, and care centers can help nurse societies back to health before the next storm hits.

Grand Award Winner

AuriNova by 3DBio Therapeutics: A replacement ear that’s made from ear cells

3DBio

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About 1,500 people in the US are born each year with absent or underdeveloped external ears. Traditional reconstruction techniques might fix the cosmetic issue, but a new 3D-printed ear transplant, called AuriNovo, offers a living substitute. The implant is made with proteins, hydrogel, and a patient’s own cells, giving it far more flexibility than any constructed with synthetic materials; plus, the procedure is less invasive than, say, transplanting tissue from a patient’s ribs. To build the replacement, a surgeon first takes a sample of an individual’s ear tissue to separate and culture the cartilage-making cells. Then, based on a 3D scan of the fully formed ear on the patient, the part is printed with collagen-based “bio ink” and surgically inserted above the jaw. A 20-year-old woman from Mexico was the first to get the implant this June. 3DBio Therapeutics, the New York-based regenerative medicine company behind AuriNovo, hopes to use the technology to one day create other replacement body parts, like noses, spinal discs, and larger organs. 

Paxlovid by Pfizer: The first take-home treatment for COVID-19

Pfizer

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COVID therapies have come a long way since the start of the pandemic, and now include several antiviral drugs and monoclonal antibodies. But Pfizer’s Paxlovid was the first oral treatment for the disease to receive emergency authorization from the FDA, meaning it can be obtained with a prescription. It’s also highly effective: Clinical trials show it reduces hospitalization and death from the virus up to 90 percent more than a placebo. The remedy is a combination of two pills: nirmatrelvir, which prevents the novel coronavirus from replicating, and ritonavir, which causes the body to metabolize nirmatrelvir more slowly. The drug does have downsides—it can interact with other medications and sometimes causes a foul aftertaste. Plus, rare cases of rebound COVID symptoms and positive tests have occurred in people following Paxlovid treatment, although research indicates that the latter might be related to the immune system responding to residual viral RNA. Still, it represents a crucial new safeguard for healthcare providers and the public.

EVO Visian Implantable Collamer Lenses by STAAR Surgical: Combining the perks of contacts and laser surgery

STAAR Surgical

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Most cases of nearsightedness and astigmatism, which is blurred vision caused by an irregularly shaped cornea, can be fixed with laser eye surgery. But the procedure requires some corneal tissue to be removed and often leaves recipients with lingering dry eyes. EVO ICL provides an alternative with a minimally invasive new way to correct or reduce both conditions. During the approximately hour-long procedure, a flexible collagen-containing lens is implanted between the iris and natural lens. The implant is meant to sit in the eye permanently, but can also be plucked out by an ophthalmologist if needed. In published clinical trial results, close to 88 percent of patients reported 20/20 or better and nearly all achieved 20/32 or better distance vision after six months. The lenses also block some UV rays for added protection.

Olumiant by Eli Lilly and Incyte: Long-term relief for severe alopecia

Eli Lilly and Incyte

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More than 300,000 people of all ages in the US live with severe alopecia areata, a condition that causes the immune system to attack hair follicles, leading to patchy baldness on the scalp and elsewhere. Hair loss in the nose and ears can affect patients’ hearing and allergies, and a lack of eyelashes can leave people vulnerable to eye irritation from dust. Olumiant, the first medication to secure the FDA’s approval for severe alopecia, can help hair grow back over the entire body. It belongs to a group of drugs called JAK inhibitors, which block certain inflammation-promoting enzymes. It was originally greenlit by the agency in 2018 to treat some forms of rheumatoid arthritis, but in clinical trials for alopecia, it helped roughly a third of participants to regrow up to 80 percent of their hair by 36 weeks, and nearly half after a year. Other JAK inhibitors in development could provide alternatives for patients who don’t fully respond to Olumiant.

AIR Recon DL by GE Healthcare: Sharper MRIs in half the time

GE Healthcare

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Laying motionless for an hour or longer in a magnetic scanner can be a claustrophobic and sometimes nauseating experience. A next-level neural network by GE Healthcare reduces the stress on patients, while filtering out visual noise from movement or faulty processing. The software combs through raw radio-wave data from MRI machines and turns the most accurate bits into high-resolution 3D images. Originally, the AI-reconstructed images had to be stitched together—but the updated tech, which received FDA approval this September, delivers in one go. The speedy precision can cut exam times in half, help hospitals and clinics serve more patients, and possibly improve the rate of diagnosis by giving radiologists a much cleaner view of tissues, bones, masses, and more.

ONE Male Condom by ONE: Latex that works for anal sex

ONE

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At first glance this condom isn’t all that different from those by other brands. It’s made from natural latex, comes in three thicknesses, and has a wide range of sizes for best fit. But the contraceptive is the first to also be clinically tested for STI protection during anal sex—and has proven to be extremely effective. In studies involving 252 male-male couples and 252 male-female couples, the condoms had a less than 2-percent chance of breakage, slippage, discomfort, and adverse events (which included urinary tract infections and bacteria and viruses spread during sex). With such a healthy showing, the company earned the FDA nod to label the product as “safe for anal sex.” With widespread availability, there’s hope that the condom can help beat back a record rise in chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, and other STIs.

Bivalent COVID-19 vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech: A one-shot-fits-all approach

Ringo Chiu, AFP via Getty Images

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One of the niftiest features of mRNA vaccines such as Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID shots is that they can be tweaked and scaled up quickly to keep up with an ever-changing virus. This August, the FDA authorized the first bivalent COVID boosters, modified with new genetic data to target both the original version of SARS-CoV-2 and the Omicron sub-variants BA.4 and BA.5. Just how much added protection the bivalent shots offer against the latest versions of COVID remains to be seen, although in early results, the Pfizer-BioNTech booster increased antibodies against the BA.4 and BA.5 sub-variants by up to 11 times, while the Moderna booster did so by up to 15 times. Experts anticipate that the bivalent COVID vaccines, which are available to all adults and children ages 5 and older in the US, could save thousands of lives if the virus surges again this winter. 

Umbilical cord blood transplant for HIV by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Weill Cornell Medicine: The right cells for viral resistance

NIH

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There are now three official cases of patients in long-term HIV remission—but this one might be the most promising for the millions around the world living with the virus. In 2017, an unidentified American received a blood transplant packed with genes that were resistant to the pathogen behind AIDS. More than four years later, her doctors at Weill Cornell Medicine confirmed that the procedure at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center had indeed made her free of the disease. The miraculous sample was specifically taken from a relative’s umbilical cord blood cells, which were still in the process of maturing and specializing, making it easier for the transplant to take. Previous attempts to cure the disease depended on bone marrow donations that carry a mutated gene only known in Northern Europeans. This alternative treatment makes transplants more accessible for patients from other ethnic backgrounds, so their bodies can fight HIV in the long run as well.

988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by SAMSHA: Streamlining the call for help 

SAMHSA

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When you have a general emergency, you might call 911. But for people experiencing a mental crisis, the number has been a lot less intuitive. This July, however, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, run by the US Department of Health and Human Services since 2005, fully switched over to a three-digit code that’s easy to punch in: 988. The shortcut was years in the making, but required major collaboration with the Federal Communication Commission to connect every phone service provider to the alternative number. Since it went live, officials have reported shorter hold times and a 45-percent increase in use compared to August 2021, including on a specialized veteran hotline. The service shakeup also came with $177 million for states and tribes to support the transition in different ways, like alleviating surcharges, setting up call centers, and integrating crisis relief with existing or new emergency responses.

eCoin Peripheral Neurostimulator by Valencia Technologies: A discreet implant for bladder control 

Valencia Technologies

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Pads, vaginal seals, and skin patches can be a burden for anyone who has to deal with urinary incontinence on a daily basis. A new electrode device, about as small as a nickel and implanted above the ankle, nips the issue in the bud in a more private and convenient way. Incontinence typically occurs when the muscles in and around the bladder contract too often or too much. To prevent leaks and constant trips to the toilet, the eCoin sends low-key shocks through the tibial nerve, targeting the pelvic organs and relaxing the bladder wall. A doctor can control the intensity of the pulses with a remote, making the device more customizable for a broad range of patients. Neurostimulators have become a vanguard treatment for different nervous system conditions, including chronic back pain and even paralysis—but few are so adaptable as this.

Entertainment

The entertainment category for Best of What’s New used to primarily contain devices meant for consuming content. But that’s changed. While our Grand Award Winner goes to a big-budget movie this year, you’ll find an increasing number of devices meant for actually making content. Self-flying drones, all-encompassing camera rigs, and even high-end monitors give people the opportunity to make their own content rather than simply consuming it. Other items on this list—primarily the earbuds—provide a reminder that content is a constant part of our lives. We’ve changed the content we consume for entertainment, but more than that, we’ve changed the way we interact with it. And these gadgets help shape that relationship.

Grand Award Winner

Top Gun: Maverick by Skydance Media/Paramount: A high-speed upgrade to practical filmmaking

Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films

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We’re all too used to watching computer-generated action sequences in movies. When Hulk smashes up the scene or aliens attack a city, we know it’s fake. The sequel to Top Gun, which arrived in May—36 years after the original—did it differently. Actors trained in real aircraft to prepare to climb into Navy F/A-18F Super Hornets, and when they did, they experienced crushing G forces as the jets maneuvered at speeds that ranged from about 250 mph to more than 400. To film it, the studio turned to custom cameras carefully mounted within the cockpits, and other aircraft like the L-39 CineJet shot while airborne, too. That approach, plus scenes shot on both the USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carriers, all add up to give the film a degree of excitement and verisimilitude that’s rare. While the film is still a product of Hollywood that made some use of CGI, and doubles as a recruiting vehicle for the Navy, we still salute its commitment to capturing the thrill and speed of Naval aviation.

Freestyle Projector by Samsung: An advanced projector that handles its own setup process

Samsung

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Samsung’s Freestyle fixes one of our biggest complaints with projectors: that moving them to find the perfect angle is a pain. The floating, tube-shaped all-in-one projector is attached to its frame on a pair of hinges, which lets it be tilted up or down with very little force. The Freestyle can be twisted a full 180 degrees, allowing it to be pointed forward for a traditional viewing experience, or vertically to play games on your ceiling. You can use your phone to enable “smart calibration,” which adjusts its brightness and color settings based on the color of your walls and the room’s lighting conditions. The Freestyle’s fun form factor and smart settings are complemented by impressive hardware features, like native 1080p resolution, stereo speakers, and an HDMI port for connecting external devices. There’s also a USB-C port in case you’d like to connect the Freestyle to a high-capacity power bank to take it on the go.

Frame TV Anti-Glare Matte Display by Samsung: A 4K TV that isn’t afraid of a bright room

Samsung

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A couple of years ago, Samsung imagined a creative way to make use of a large, borderless, high-resolution screen when you’re not using it to watch videos or play games: displaying famous artwork on your wall. The problem was the TV’s LCD panel, which reflected light and made older paintings look like they were displayed on a screen rather than a canvas. That changes with the second-generation Frame, which has an anti-reflective matte display. Despite the change in technologies, Samsung says you’ll still be able to see a billion colors on the screen, and that it’ll continue to automatically adjust its color balance based on your brightness preferences. If you can’t justify the cost of an original Rembrandt, Samsung’s new Frame will be the next best thing.

Linkbuds by Sony: Earbuds that mix your audio with the real world

Sony

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Sony created its LinkBuds to be the antithesis of noise-canceling headphones. They let outside sound in so you never need to take them out. The buds have a hard-shelled body, which means they won’t create a tight seal around your ear, and boast a circular cutout, which Sony calls an open ring. The ring gives LinkBuds their unique look, and is also where the earbuds’ driver is located. Sound is fed from the ring through the bud into your ear, along with some noise from the outside world. You’ll hear cars honking, airplane engines, and people on the street. But if you’re a runner who wants to hear a vehicle approach, this is a feature, not a bug.

QC II earbuds by Bose: Active noise cancellation that works across every frequency

Bose

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Typical noise-canceling headphones have trouble blocking out sound in the middle frequencies between roughly 120Hz and 400Hz. That allows sounds like voices to occasionally get through. Bose has totally reconfigured its noise-canceling algorithm and hardware setup in order to fill in that ANC gap without creating uncomfortable ear pressure or compromising audio quality. The company adjusted its noise cancellation and tuning to a user’s body by measuring the way a chime reflects off the inside of your ears back to the earbuds’ microphones. The attention to detail paid off, as outside noises are greatly reduced even if you’re not listening to music. Bose offers three listening modes by default, but you can create custom ones using the company’s app if you’d like to crank active noise cancellation all the way up, or mellow it out.

Ronin 4D by DJI: An all-encompassing cinema rig and steadicam for creators on a budget

DJI

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DJI’s Ronin 4D rig looks like a futuristic weapon pulled from a Star Wars flick. In reality, it’s a full-featured cinema rig that combines a number of essential movie-making tools into one compact and extremely stable camera rig. The modular system includes DJI’s flagship Zenmuse camera, which can capture 6K raw video at up to 60 fps or 4K video at up to 120 fps. It also boasts a full-frame sensor and interchangeable camera mounts. The whole imaging rig sits on a 4-axis gimbal that stabilizes footage so convincingly that it sometimes looks like it was shot on a dolly or a crane. Because the whole system is modular, you can swap parts like monitors, storage devices, batteries, and audio gear on the fly and customize it for your shooting needs.

Alienware AW3423DW QD-OLED Gaming Monitor by Dell: The first gaming monitor with a new brighter version of OLED tech

Dell

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OLED monitors typically provide unmatched contrast, image quality, and color reproduction, but they lack brightness. Quantum dot (or QLED) displays crank up the illumination, but lose some of the overall image impact found on an OLED. Enter QD-OLED. Like a typical OLED display, each pixel provides its own backlight. But the addition of quantum dots adds even more illumination, giving it a total peak brightness of 1,000 lumens while maintaining the certified HDR black levels to create ridiculous levels of contrast. And with its 175Hz native refresh rate, and super-fast 0.1-second response time, you can’t blame this pro-grade gaming monitor if you’re always getting eliminated mid-game.

Arctis Nova Pro Headset for Xbox by SteelSeries: A gaming headset that works across all of your machines

SteelSeries

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Gaming headsets typically require players to pick a platform for compatibility when you buy them. Some work with a console as well as a PC, but SteelSeries has given its Arctis Nova Pro headset the hardware it needs to work with Xbox, PS5, PC, and even the Nintendo Switch—all at the press of a button. Its secret lies in the GameDAC (short for digital audio converter), which connects to multiple systems and pumps out high-res certified sound with 360-degree spatial audio from whatever source you choose. Plush ear cups and a flexible suspension band ensure comfort, even during long, multi-platform gaming sessions.

Skydio 2+ drone by Skydio: A drone that follows commands or flies itself

Skydio

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Crashing a drone is bad for your footage—and your budget. But this high-end flying machine avoids obstacles with an advanced system that adjusts more than 500 times per second to prevent disaster. A fish-eye lens allows the drone to see 360 degrees around the craft. A dual-core Nvidia chipset generates a 3D-world model with more than 1 million data points per second to identify and avoid anything that might get in its way. With all those smarts, creatives can simply tell the drone to track them or program complex flight paths and the Skydio2+ will capture 4K video at 60 fps on its own. The drone also comes with more than 18 predetermined paths and programs that can make even basic action look worthy of a Mountain Dew commercial.

Dione soundbar by Devialet: True surround sound on a stick

Devialet

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Most soundbars allow buyers a chance to expand their audio system and add satellite speakers or at least a subwoofer. The Dione is different. It’s a totally stand-alone system that relies on nine 41mm drivers and eight built-in subwoofers in order to fulfill the entire sonic range you need to enjoy everything from high-pitched tire squeals to rumbling explosions. Thanks to its Dolby Atmos integration, it mimics a true 5.1.2 surround sound system. The sphere in the center of the bar contains one of the 41mm drivers; it rotates to allow the soundbar to achieve its spatial audio ambitions, whether it’s sitting on a TV stand or mounted somewhere around the television. Devialet’s Speaker Active Matching technology watches over the entire array to make sure none of the individual drivers surpass their optimal operating frequencies, and it even has a dynamic EQ mode that brings up dialog—so you can finally turn off the closed captioning and still understand what the actors are saying.

Personal Care

Our new pandemic normal made soothing stress and monitoring our health the main goals of most personal care products in 2021. But this year saw a flood of launches geared at leaving home and showing off: vibrant cosmetics, anti-aging formulas and gizmos, and skincare products designed to protect from outdoor pollutants. From a multi-dimensional hair dye that draws upon the iridescence of butterfly wings to an end-of-life solution that nourishes the Earth instead of polluting it, these 10 wellness and beauty products stood out above the rest, offering true innovations in a world too often flooded with trendy buzzwords and empty promises.

Grand Award Winner

AR Beauty Tutorials on TikTok by Grace Choi: Filters that aim to educate, not manipulate

Grace Choi

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Most TikTok filters let you play pretend and “try on” makeup—or, more insidiously, warp the shape of your face to fit an unattainable standard—but a new generation of augmented reality overlays aim to teach you something instead. Grace Choi, a Harvard MBA known for creating 2020 BOWN winner Mink’s makeup palette printer, changed the conversation this year with a digital brow stencil and contouring filter. While tutorials often assume the viewer shares the same face shape as the demonstrator, Choi notes that her filter can map out the slopes and dips of each user’s unique features and guide their makeup placement accordingly. The technique—which involves using contrasting light and dark pigment to subtly highlight some parts of your facial structure and minimize others—is notoriously tough to master using videos, as ideal pigment placement varies depending on bone structure. Choi’s filter instantly creates an easy-to-follow diagram, showing you exactly where to apply your makeup to make your cheekbones pop and your jaw look more defined.

YSL Beauté Rouge Sur Mesure by L’Oreal: Personalized lipstick, made on-demand

YSL

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Whether you want your lipstick to match the sunset or your blouse, the Yves Saint Laurent Beauté Rouge Sur Mesure can produce any hue with the touch of a few buttons. The handheld system uses color cartridges in swappable palettes of red, nude, orange, and pink to create thousands of personalized shades. The accompanying app lets you scan any object for reference, or peruse a color wheel for inspiration. You can even try the color on virtually before the gadget mixes it up for you. A hydrating lipstick packed with pigment emerges at the top of the device into a chic, removable YSL palette—perfect for on-the-go touch-ups.

Gro Ageless by Vegamour: A duo that keeps you from going gray

Vegamour

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Less than 30 percent of hair graying is dictated by your genes, according to a 2016 study in Nature. Instead, it’s predominantly driven by stress, excess UV exposure, diet, and smoking. Increased inflammation damages melanocytes, the pigment-producing cells in the hair, and saps them of their hue. Research suggests that maintaining healthy levels of B vitamins, copper, zinc, and selenium can safeguard melanocytes from damage. Vegamour’s Gro Ageless system includes oral supplements to combat those deficits from within, along with a serum that penetrates the hair follicle to stimulate melanocyte stem cells. The plant-based products add shine to strands, improve the texture of aging tresses, and can even help restore color as new hair grows in.

Smoke Alarm Drops by Pour Moi: A serum that shields your skin from wildfire smoke

Pour Moi

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It’s no secret that our planet is in trouble—and that means your skin is, too. Pour Moi Smoke Alarm Drops mark the first serum formulated specifically to protect skin when it’s exposed to smoke. Some skincare products that lock moisture in can also trap in pollutants. The resulting oxidative stress (an imbalance in a body’s ability to remove toxins or repair damage) can lead to sagging due to collagen loss, fine lines and wrinkles, and rough texture. Pour Moi’s drops address this by creating a shield within the skin’s surface layer, using hyaluronic acid, emollients, and soothing and repairing botanicals.

Dr. Harris Anti-Wrinkle Sleep Mask by CurrentBody: An eye mask that melts stress as you sleep

CurrentBody

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This mask aims to help you get your beauty sleep—literally and figuratively. The inside of the Dr. Harris Anti-Wrinkle Sleep Mask is lined with slightly raised silicone dots. Each presses imperceptibly against some of the 17,000-plus touch receptors in the skin of your face. Those receptors convert mechanical pressure into electrical signals for your autonomic nervous system, telling your brain to unfurrow your brow. Wearing the eye covering for just 15 minutes can help relax your muscles and make it easier to drift off to slumber. And since it smooths out your forehead, it also reduces the appearance of wrinkles between your eyebrows for up to five hours.

The Loop Cocoon by Loop Biotech: The world’s first living coffin

Loop Biotech

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It’s time to close the loop on the circle of life. Modern burial practices pump heaps of toxic chemicals into the ground and cremation pollutes the air with greenhouse gasses. Over the last several years, several solutions for greener burials have emerged—California has even given human composting the green light—but for most people, such alternatives have remained out of reach or even illegal. This year, Dutch company Loop Biotech became the first to offer a “living coffin” for sale to the general public. The Cocoon is made of dried mycelium, which is the cobweb-like filament that forms mushrooms and other fungi. This substance creates a sturdy coffin that breaks down once exposed to moist soil. In less than two months, it degrades entirely and seeds the burial site with mushrooms. The fungi then helps the corpse biodegrade more quickly, breaking down heavy metals and pollutants in its tissues so it can nourish surrounding plants instead of poisoning them.

TheraFace PRO by Therabody: The utility player of facial gadgets

Therabody

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There are nearly endless beauty gadgets you can buy to scrub, massage, and even electrify your face into submission. Some of them even work: Microcurrents can temporarily soften wrinkles, lymphatic drainage can briefly depuff swollen sinuses, and LED lights can kill acne-causing bacteria and stimulate skin-plumping collagen. But implementing an arsenal of such tools takes deep pockets (and a big medicine cabinet). Enter the TheraFace Pro. In addition to offering the percussive massage the brand is known for—appropriately toned down for the delicate bones of the face—the device’s suite of magnetic attachments also provide hot and cold compresses, microcurrent treatments, deep facial cleaning, and multi-hued LED light therapy. Whether you need to soothe a sore jaw muscle or induce a dewy glow for a special event, the TheraFace makes it downright sensible to own an absurd array of skincare gizmos.

Colour Alchemy by The Unseen and Schwarzkopf Professional: The world’s first holographic hair dye

The Unseen and Schwarzkopf Professional

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Most people who color their hair are looking for multi-faceted, prismatic hues—ones with slight variations that catch the light for a more interesting (and often more natural-looking) visual effect. That usually means lightening some pieces of hair, darkening others, and using multiple shades of toners and dyes. Colour Alchemy by The Unseen harnesses the power of physics to create a totally new kind of hair color: a temporary dye that turns hair strands into light-scattering prisms. The products rely on structural color—the same principle that gives beetle shells and butterfly wings iridescent hues using cellular shape instead of actual pigment. The result is hair that shifts across a spectrum of vibrant color when exposed to changes in temperature (like a blast of cool air) or light (like a camera flash). Unlike most temporary dyes, Colour Alchemy shows up on dark tresses without any bleaching. In fact, dark hair provides the best base for its sun-scattering holographic crystals.

Venom Go by Hyperice: A pocket-sized recovery tool that melts sore muscles in a flash 

Hyperice

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Recovery brand Hyperice has designed a super-portable gadget that melts muscle tension fast. The company’s Venom line, which combines vibration and targeted heat to create not-your-grandpa’s-heating-pad wearables, first launched a few years ago. But this update gave the fitness community something to buzz about. The electronic portion of the Venom Go is small enough to fit in a pocket, and you can use the simple button interface anywhere. Just slap one of the reusable adhesive patches onto the place you want to treat, snap the magnetic device into place, and turn it on for instant heat and soothing vibration.

Super Stay Vinyl Ink Longwear Liquid Lipcolor by Maybelline: A lipstick that truly lasts for hours

Maybelline

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Many lipsticks claim to be transfer-proof, but tell-tale signs prove otherwise—ruby stains on a coffee cup, pink smudges inside a face mask, berry splotches after a smooch. Products that truly offer longevity usually manage the feat by drying with a plaster-like finish, leaving your lips feeling like drywall (and sometimes flaking as badly, too). Maybelline Vinyl Ink promises 16 hours of wear without any of those pitfalls. Seven years of research involving some 100 scientists are behind its dual-phase formula, which combines a long-wear pigment with an emollient silicone resin for moisture and shine. The two components purposefully stay separated until application, when the user shakes the tube to combine them—a process that borrows the trick protein shaker bottles use to blend powder and water on the go.

Emergency Services and Defense

The past year has been marked by serious challenges, from the ongoing climate emergency, a subsequent increase in extreme forest fire frequency, and the devastating war in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. But we’ve also seen true innovation in the field of crisis response. More exact location systems will help emergency services find people in trouble quicker. Better respirator technology is rolling out, designed to help wildland firefighters breathe a little easier. And fire trucks are finally starting to go electric. This year’s best emergency services and defense innovations offer paths out of tight spots, aiming to create a safer future—or at least a better way to handle its myriad disasters.

Grand Award Winner 

Wildland Firefighter Respirator by TDA Research: A lightweight, field-rechargeable respirator for forest firefighters

TDA

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Forest fire fighters need a lightweight wearable respirator to protect them from inhaling smoke. The Wildland Firefighter Respirator, by TDA Research, uses a hip-mounted pump to pull air through a HEPA filter, channeling it to a secure but loose-fitting half-mask (a helpful feature for people who haven’t had the chance to shave while in the field). A sensor in the system detects air flow direction, letting the pump only blow at full strength when the user inhales. Importantly, the device weighs just 2.3 pounds, which is only about 10 percent the weight of a typical urban firefighting Self Contained Breathing Apparatus. About the size of a 1-liter water bottle, the respirator is powered by a lithium-ion battery pack. To recharge in the field or away from a generator, that pack can also draw power from 6 AA batteries. Bonus: Even though it was designed for safety professionals, the device could also become civilian protective gear in fire season.

Connect AED by Avive: Connecting defibrillators to those in need, faster

Avive

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Avive’s Connect AED (Automated External Defibrillator) is designed to be a life-saving device that’s also smart. The devices can automatically do daily maintenance checks to ensure they can perform as needed, thanks to WiFi, cellular, bluetooth, and GPS. Plus, with that connectivity, 911 operators could alert nearby Connect AED holders to respond to a called-in cardiac arrest, saving time and possibly someone’s life. Once a person has been defibrillated, Connect’s connectivity also lets emergency room doctors see data the device collected, such as the patient’s heart rhythm, as well as the device’s shock history, complete with timestamps. The Connect AED also has a backpack-like form factor and touch screen for intuitive use.

Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations by Ames Research Center: Letting drone pilots clear skies for aerial emergency vehicles 

Ames Research Center

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The sky above a forest fire can be a dangerous, crowded place, and that was before forest fire fighters added drones joined the mix. Developed by NASA, the Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations project (STEReO) is developing tools for managing the complicated airspace above an emergency. In the spring of 2023, a NASA team field-tested a STEReO’s suitcase-sized prototype device, called the UASP-Kit, to monitor drones safely in the open airspace around prescribed burns. By tracking transponders on crewed aircraft, the UASP-Kit can play a sound through tablet speakers, alerting drone operators when helicopters and planes fly close to where they are operating. That hopefully lets drone pilots get their equipment to safety without risking aerial collision.

Locate Before Route by AT&T: Pinpointing the emergency 

AT&T

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When a person in an emergency calls 911 for help, that call is routed, based on its location, to the closest 911 operator. For cell phones, that meant matching the call to the nearest tower and hoping it sent the call to dispatch in the right county. But in May 2022, AT&T announced the nationwide rollout of a better system. Leaning on the improved location services on iOS and Android phones, AT&T’s Locate Before Route feature can pinpoint the location of the emergency call within 50 meters, sometimes even as precisely as 15 meters. This better location information should allow the call to be routed to the best dispatch center, ideally helping responders arrive faster. That data can only be used for 911 purposes, and helps first responders get where they’re needed quickly, nationwide.

GridStar Flow by Lockheed Martin: Helping to power defense with renewable energy

Lockheed Martin

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The US military is a massive consumer of fossil fuels, but if it wants to use more renewable energy, it needs a way to store that electricity to power vital functions. GridStar Flow, developed by Lockheed Martin for the US Army, is a massive battery complex that takes advantage of the space of Colorado’s Fort Carson to go big. It will store up to 10 megawatt-hours of juice, thanks to tanks of charged electrolytes and other equipment. Construction at Fort Carson broke ground on November 3, but the company has already tested out a smaller flow battery in Andover, Massachusetts. Using electrolytes that can be derived from commodity chemicals, GridStar Flow offers a power storage and release system that can help smooth the energy flow from renewable sources.

Volterra Electric Firetruck by Pierce: A more sustainable, quieter fire truck

Pierce

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Fire trucks are big, powerful vehicles, but they run on diesel, a polluting fossil fuel. The Pierce Volterra truck can deliver all that power on an electric charge, and it can also run on diesel fuel if need be. Already in use with the Madison, Wisconsin fire department, but with contracts to expand to Portland, Oregon and Gilbert, Arizona underway this year, the Volterra has enough battery power for a full day as an electric vehicle. The electric power helps complement a transition to renewable energy, but it also comes with immediate benefit to the firefighters: the vehicle doesn’t spew exhaust into the station. The quiet of the electric engine also lets firefighters coordinate better on the drive, and can help cries for help be heard when the responders arrive on site.

Vampire Drone by L3Harris: Taking down drones from kilometers away

L3Harris

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Drones are increasingly a part of modern battles, seen in wars across the globe but especially with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with both countries using a range of uncrewed aircraft to scout and fight. In August 2022, the Department of Defense announced it would send a new tool to aid Ukrainian forces as a way to counter Russian drones. Made by L3Harris, the Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE) system is a rocket launcher and sensor kit that can be mounted to a range of vehicles, providing a means to damage and destroy drones at a range of at least three miles. The laser-guided rockets, directed by a human operator, explode with a proximity fuse, making near misses into effective takedowns. 

Emergency SOS via satellite by Apple: Locating lost hikers with satellites

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For hikers lost in remote parts of the United States and Canada, calling for help means hoping for cell phone coverage, or waiting for a serendipitous rescue. But Apple’s Emergency SOS via Satellite, announced September 2022, will let people with an iPhone 14 transmit emergency messages via satellite, provided they can’t first establish a cellular connection. Texters will have a tap-through menu to create an information-dense but data-light report, and provided trees or mountains don’t block the signal, they can transmit crucial information, like what kind of injuries someone has sustained. With a clear view of the sky and fifteen seconds, a cry for help can reach space and then, even better, rescuers on Earth.

Automotive

We may be decades away from replacing fossil-fuel-powered vehicles with a fully electric fleet, but at the same time, EVs have continued their impressive gains on US roadways. But the most innovative companies in the automotive industry are looking beyond just batteries and charging infrastructure. They’re making the most of what we’ve got while doing the heavy lifting that goes unnoticed: Making vehicles lighter, more aerodynamic, more useful, and less wasteful. They’re also giving us faster and extremely entertaining cars—and we’re here to honor their technical brilliance.

Grand Award Winner

Vision EQXX by Mercedes-Benz: The slipperiest EV

Mercedes

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This year, Mercedes-Benz introduced a one-off, world-beating car with an altruistic purpose: To make the most out of the heavy batteries at the core of the growing EV fleet. The numbers for the Vision EQXX are otherworldly for an EV: 3,900 pounds of car and 747 miles on a single charge. It’s slow by EV and gasoline standards, yet modesty was the mission. So how did they do it? Here’s one trick: Its body can extend its sweptback tail at speed another eight inches, helping cut drag by half that of a normal sedan or crossover. To further augment efficiency, Mercedes-Benz opted for a Formula 1 subframe, magnesium wheels, tiny side-view mirrors, and a 100-kWh battery that the company claims is half the size and almost a third lighter than the powerpack in their production EQS sedan. Reducing mass and improving efficiency are old mechanical concepts that all manufacturers need to revisit if EVs are to succeed in the gasoline era. For that to happen, however, the breakthroughs must be this dramatic. Though it’s only a concept, the Vision EQXX may be the spark that ignites that reality.

Uconnect 5 by Jeep: Putting the passenger in command

Jeep

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Large SUVs typically allow the people in the back to zone out and watch whatever’s on the screens in front of them. But in the Jeep Grand Wagoneer, all the fun is in the shotgun seat—and won’t distract the driver. The Uconnect 5 infotainment system can run up to eight independent displays, including a 10.3-inch touchscreen built into the passenger-side dash. To reduce distraction, Jeep tints the display so it’s a faint glow to the driver while still looking bright to the passenger. You can connect an Xbox to the HDMI port, stream a ton of titles with the built-in Amazon Fire TV, control the 360 cameras, and set the navigation system by sending a chosen route to three of the driver displays. Best of all, there’s no ugly screen-mounting hardware to clutter the polished black dash.

Pilot Sport EV by Michelin: When tires go electric

Michelin

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Electric vehicles—performance models especially—put the strain of extra mass and torque onto their tires. The Pilot Sport EV is the first of a growing segment of EV-specific treads designed to improve both range and grip. Typically, a manufacturer can increase range by reducing the rolling resistance—the slowing effects of friction—at the expense of grip. These Michelins find balance by putting different parts of the tire in charge of handling torque and mass: The center of the tire has a grippier compound to take the brunt of an EV’s torque, while the shoulders are optimized for lower rolling resistance. It’s a mix they honed over the last eight years on Formula E racers. Compared to the company’s gold standard, the Pilot Sport 4S, the Pilot Sport EV increases range by as much as 20 percent with nearly the same level of traction. 

Android Automotive OS by Google: A car OS from an OS company

Google

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Google’s suite of car-specific software has been mediocre for the past several years. Android Auto projects a limited array of Android apps onto a car’s infotainment display; then there’s regular old Android, which is tablet software that many automakers modify for their vehicles. In either instance, their interfaces feel half-baked. Enter Android Automotive OS, which is Google’s first operating system developed specifically and only for cars. Through it, the voice assistant, maps, keyboards, and the Play store run faster and function more intuitively than a smartphone connected to Android Auto or Apple CarPlay ever could. Thanks to it, the experience on the latest Volvo, Polestar, and Chevrolet vehicles is dramatically better than anything those automakers had ever coded themselves.

GR Corolla by Toyota: A three-cylinder powerhouse

Toyota

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In 2022, it’s rare to see automakers develop all-new gasoline engines. To see Toyota craft an engine with as much output per liter as a Bugatti Chiron? That’s a cosmic event. The G16E-GTS spews 300 turbocharged ponies from three tiny cylinders displacing only 1.6 liters. This is the ferocious heart of the 2023 GR Corolla, an ordinary-looking hatchback. On the Morizo Edition, the turbocharger pumps 26.3 PSI of air through the intake—a monstrous amount that the fortified engine block can handle. First offered overseas in the smaller GR Yaris, this engine transforms the humdrum Corolla—the world’s best-selling car of all time—into an everyday sports car. It’s comfortable, practical, gets 28 mpg on the highway, and will absolutely embarrass a Porsche on a twisty road. 

FC1-X by Nitro: Rally racing at its most extreme

Nitro

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The FC1-X is what happens when motorcycle stuntman and record-breaking rally driver Travis Pastrana and a Swedish race team agree that Red Bull’s Rallycross is too slow. The FC1-X is a custom, 1000-horsepower electric car that zaps to 60 mph in 1.5 seconds and can land a 100-foot jump. A major reason: The car’s silicon carbide inverter is a fraction of the size and weight of a typical EV’s inverter—the device that converts the battery’s DC output to AC for the motors—and the battery can handle major power draws without overheating. It’s unique to Pastrana’s Nitro Rallycross series. As it evolves, FC1-X stands to influence the next generation of EVs—for both the track and the road.

Super Cruise by General Motors: Best hands-free system

GM

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General Motors’ Super Cruise strikes an ideal balance between hands-free driving assistance—giving the human operator a break—and safety. Using a network of laser-scanned highways at 10 times the accuracy of a GPS map with a full suite of ultrasonic, radar, and infrared cameras, Super Cruise can operate on more than 400,000 miles of marked US highways, including executing automatic lane changes. Most important, however, is when it won’t operate: Super Cruise will disable the system for the entire drive if the driver looks away for too long, a road is unmapped, the vehicle’s data connection goes dark, or any number of failure points to keep the person behind the wheel engaged. Next up is Ultra Cruise, which promises “door-to-door” hands-free driving, but that may be years away.

Hummer EV by GMC: A maneuverable behemoth

GMC

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Let’s get this out of the way. From the standpoint of energy consumption, the GMC Hummer EV is wasteful—and, at nearly 10,000 pounds, it’s a behemoth. Its battery pack is twice the capacity of the best Tesla Model S but delivers 80 percent of the EPA-estimated range compared to that vehicle. But underneath this super truck’s extravagance is a mind-blowing method of four-wheel steering. CrabWalk sounds too ridiculous and motion sickness-inducing to be true, but it is: All four wheels can steer the truck diagonally. The rear rims steer in tandem with the front at up to 10 degrees, enough to let this massive vehicle dance sideways like a crustacean that needs to parallel park, moving up to 25 mph. 

Nevera by Rimac: The most powerful production car

Rimac

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A Croatian scientist who converted his broken BMW to run on electricity is now, at age 34, the CEO of a hypercar company that’s fresh off a merger with Bugatti. Mate Rimac’s dream machine, the 1877-horsepower Nevera, has four electric motors and the stiffest carbon fiber monocoque—that’s a combination of the car’s frame and body—around. It’s the world’s fastest EV: 258 mph. Car enthusiasts with $2.4 million to blow will soon show us the evidence. But more importantly, Rimac’s other partners, which include Hyundai and Porsche, will benefit from the company’s EV expertise in future cars costing a fraction of that price.

MotoE by Ducati: The hottest electric racing bike

Ducati

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The heavy batteries that can be packaged easily in a car are harder to incorporate into a motorcycle that needs to balance. Instead of allowing a bulky, off-the-shelf battery pack to dictate the bike’s design, Ducati designed the battery on its MotoE—which the entire field of the 2023 FIM MotoE World Cup will ride—so that it functions as an integral part of the bike’s central frame instead of a bulky add-on. Two separate cooling systems (one for the 18-kWh battery, the other for the 150-hp motor and inverter) ensure the MotoE can sustain 171 mph and then pit for a recharge without needing to cool down. It might not be the first electric racing bike, but it is the first such bike that customers will ultimately want to ride on the road. 

Sports and Outdoors

This year’s sports and outdoor innovations make our adrenaline-filled adventures smarter, while going easier on the Earth. On land, a bike helmet can be broken down and recycled at the end of its life. In the snow, a ski that helps you tear down the mountain can also be similarly repurposed. But the best sports and outdoor tech this year helps us communicate better—whether that be a new system for catchers to relay plays to pitchers, or a satellite safety beacon that keeps you connected to family and friends. One winner represents both: an electric joy ride that makes careening through the water easy, fun, and carbon-neutral.

Grand Award Winner

Orca Carbon by Taiga: A silent, safer emission-free joy ride

Taiga

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Personal watercraft like Jet Skis are fun to ride, but this year’s winner makes them greener. Historically, personal watercrafts—or PWCs—operate on fossil fuel, emit noise up to 115 decibels, and leak unburned gasoline into the water. Enter the Taiga Orca Carbon, which takes electric vehicles aquatic. (The company built upon what it learned from its line of electric snowmobiles.) This PWC replaces the gas tank with lithium-ion batteries, which power the jet-drive impeller, creating an electric vessel that is silent and emission-free. The powertrain is located in the bottom of the hull for better handling and performance, which creates a safer ride. The Taiga Orca Carbon broadens the accessibility of on-water exploration, and shows that ditching the engine doesn’t have to decrease the fun.

Canyon Packs by Slot: Gear designed for desert rappelling

Slot

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Adventurers who go canyoneering squeeze through narrow sandstone passages, sometimes while walking in or swimming through a river, and nearly always must also manage technical gear like ropes and belay devices. Slot’s Guide 50L and Rapide 38L canyoneering packs are specifically designed with these desert conditions in mind, with an innovative rope management system. A divider separates rope from gear and allows users to feed out only the amount of line they need—from 15 to 200 feet—for each rappel. The bag keeps the rest of the rope organized inside, along with the rest of your equipment. The result is a more efficient and safer system that eliminates the need to uncoil and recoil rope for each rappel.

Stealth driver by TaylorMade: A club that’s one tough cookie

TaylorMade

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Drivers suffer the most damage compared to other golf clubs, experiencing 30,000 Gs of force in one swing. Carbon fiber—a lightweight, strong material—usually cracks under that amount of power, which led clubmakers to use flexible titanium faces for their drivers. But TaylorMade changes the golf club game with its new StealthDriver, finding a way to use carbon after all. Its light face can handle plenty of strokes, higher ball speeds, and longer drives, thanks to its 60 layers of carbon, reduced weight, and aerodynamic shape. Despite the changes, it still gives off the satisfying thwack golfers love from a club with an all-metal head.  

Piston Pro X by Kuat: An easy-loading and safe bike rack

Kuat

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Bike racks are notoriously difficult and annoying to load. Most require two hands, which makes securing a bicycle while holding the rack open almost impossible if you’re flying solo. But Kuat’s Piston Pro features smooth-opening, hydro-pneumatic arms that you can operate with just one hand and let you fasten a bike by the tires without touching the frame. The company also incorporates brake lights into the bike rack. The sleek, eye-catching piece of gear holds ebikes too; a separate ramp for electric bikes assists with loading. And a 12mm lock keeps everything secure.

Myelin Helmet by POC Sports: A lid that’s recyclable

POC Sports

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Bike helmets are typically in service for five to 10 years, then they head for the landfill. But the POC Myelin helmet gets a new life when its time protecting a rider’s head is over. The headpiece may look like a regular cycling helmet at first, but inside its clean design hides a host of advanced technical details, such as adhesive-free assembly, a recycled fabric outer shell, and cutaway fasteners. These allow the helmet to be separated into individual pieces at the end of its life for easy recycling in your home’s blue bin, or at your local recycling center.

Fuel EXe by Trek Bikes: An electric mountain bike with a no-engine feel

Trek Bikes

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Typical ebikes deliver a whiny hum and noticeable surge when you pedal with the assist they offer. Other riders can find the noise obnoxious, too. But the Trek Fuel EXe is the best new “SL,” or superlight ebike, blurring the line between purely human-powered and pedal-assist bikes. Trek partnered with German robotics manufacturer TQ to develop the new HPR50 motor, which forgoes noisy belts and gears in favor of a refined system; it’s smaller, quieter, and more durable than traditional ebike motors. The result is a sleek, powerful ride with a smooth boost that’s hard to distinguish from your own pedaling power.

The ePE membrane by Gore: A new type of waterproof tech from an old-school company

Gore

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Gore, the company that invented the waterproof but breathable GORE-TEX membrane in 1968, is back with a new material that aims to take planet-polluting chemicals out of outerwear. After more than seven years of development and rigorous testing, Gore built upon its experience with expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (ePTFE), polymer processing, and materials science to create an expanded polyethylene (ePE) membrane that’s thin, light, and strong. The new material is also free of environmentally damaging perfluorochemicals (PFCs) and made with recycled nylon and polyester, resulting in a reduced carbon footprint. You can find the new ePE membrane—which has set a new standard in waterproofing—in GORE-TEX products like the Patagonia Storm Shift jacket and pants.

PitchCom by PitchCom Sports: A 150-year baseball problem, solved

PitchCom Sports

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Signs in baseball vary from team to team and player to player: Catchers flash two fingers so the pitcher knows to hurl a fastball; coaches use signs to tell a baserunner if they should bat or bunt. However, the opposing team can read these signs and use them to their own advantage, making sign-stealing a 150-year-old problem. Now PitchCom Sports—which created a wrist transmitter for catchers and a receiver for inside the pitcher’s hat—has relieved professional players of the threat of intercepted signals. Phrases like “fastball” and “good job!” are pre-loaded as .mp3 files onto the PitchCom device and played when the catcher or coach presses the button. Only the people wearing the PitchCom receiver can hear the play. And, the commands can be played in any language, so all players on the team know the play.

Salem Dyneema Down Parka by Foehn: A puffy jacket that doesn’t wear down

Foehn

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Down jackets are known for their warmth—and their short life span. Sportswear company Foehn solves inevitable wear and tear by incorporating Dyneema, an incredibly strong synthetic fiber previously used in backpacks and other outdoor gear. The tough new garment combines high-performance insulation with the practically indestructible Dyneema to create a jacket that won’t rip while out on tundra escapades or be slashed by a dog’s untrimmed nails. It’s a lifetime investment for outdoor enthusiasts and those just looking for a tough, stylish, warm piece of kit.

The inReach Messenger by Garmin: A gadget for staying always connected

Garmin

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Satellite communicators can be expensive, tricky to connect to a signal when you need it, and are typically used for extreme outdoor adventures or emergencies only. (Or they require the newest iPhone, as we highlight in our Emergency Services and Defense category.) The Garmin inReach Messenger is designed for more everyday pursuits: when entering a deadzone during a road trip or staying connected while hiking far from cell towers. This 4-ounce  personal safety device lets you text anyone from anywhere over satellite, through pairing it to your phone and with the Garmin Messenger app, by using its virtual keyboard, or utilizing preset messages on the device itself. In case of emergency, the inReach Messenger connects the user to the Garmin Response Center. And should your phone die, the inReach Messenger’s Safety Charging gives your phone a partial charge for continued use.

Essential Ski by Rossignol: Reducing waste, one set of skis at a time

Rossignol

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The Essential Ski is a first—and a feat—for Rossignol: It’s made from 62 percent recycled, certified natural, and bio-sourced materials, including aluminum, steel, and wood. The design process uses no solvents or water. Plus, the ski can be recycled through a partnership with MTB Recycling that will repurpose the ski’s materials to the automotive, garden, or construction industries. And it’s produced using renewable energy. But don’t let its Earth-friendliness fool you: It’s a real-deal ski that lives up to Rossignol’s performance and durability standards. Plus, they’re not even guarding the secret of how they made it, so that others can make greener skis, too.

Home

Renters, homeowners, and DIY-ers don’t always have the time, money, or skills to accomplish the home improvement tasks on their lists. We get it. Fortunately, one of the benefits of living in a time of rapid innovation is that technology can easily step in where our brains, brawn, and bank accounts fall short. This year, you can upgrade your living space with an easy-install smart showerhead, use spray paint that doesn’t drip, or even consider the most compact in-home water recycling system we’ve ever seen—and that’s just the tip of the screw.

Grand Award Winner

Smart water recycling by Hydraloop: A compact, easy-to-use gray water recycling system

Hydraloop

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Gray water is the stuff that spirals down your shower and sink drains, and it’s mostly clean, usable H2O that goes to immediate waste. Recycling this wastewater is doable, but the required systems are frequently large, maintenance-intensive, and involve a complicated jumble of pipes and valves. Hydraloop founder Arthur Valkieser changed that by redesigning existing water treatment technology to eliminate filters, and shrinking his device into something that looks a lot more like a modern household appliance. As water fills the Hydraloop’s tank, sediment sinks to the bottom and lighter grime like soap and hair floats to the top, where it foams up and over as waste. Then, a torrent of air bubbles grabs any free-floating solids and removes them, too. The gray water then enters an aerobic bioreactor where live bacteria feast on any remaining organic material and soap. Every four hours after that, UV-C light disinfects the stored water to kill any remaining bacteria, and the non-potable (but sanitized) water is ready to go back into your washing machine, toilet tank, or garden.

Timberline Solar shingles by GAF Energy: Roofing and renewable energy in one

GAF Energy

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Installing traditional rack-mounted solar panels requires drilling through your existing roof, creating holes that can lead to leaks and water damage if they’re improperly sealed. GAF Energy’s Timberline Solar shingles, however, nail down just like regular asphalt roofing, thanks to a flexible thermoplastic polymer backing. With that supporting a durable photovoltaic surface, they’ll hang tight in the rain, hail, and winds up to 130 mph. Even brighter: These shingles have serious curb appeal and you won’t have to choose between spending on a roof replacement or investing in solar—you can do both at the same time.

3-in-1 Digital Laser Measurer by Dremel: Precise measurements of uneven surfaces

Dremel

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Anyone who’s tried to measure an odd-shaped object knows the struggle of fumbling with a flexible tape, laboring through numerous calculations, or painstakingly determining the length of a string that once followed the contours of the piece in question. Dremel’s 3-in-1 digital laser measurer makes this job easier with a snap-on wheel you can roll for up to 65 feet along any surface. On top of that, it’s got a laser measurer that’s accurate within an eighth of an inch, and a 5-foot tape for all your in-home measuring needs.

757 PowerHouse by Anker: A longer-lasting portable power station

Anker

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Whether you need portable outdoor power or are trying to sustain your home through a blackout, the lithium iron phosphate cells inside the Anker 757 PowerHouse will keep your devices juiced for more than 3,000 cycles. That means if you dispense and refill its full 1,500-watt output once a day, this picnic-cooler-sized hub will last for more than eight years. It’s got one car outlet, two USB-C ports, four USB-A connections, and six standard household AC plugs. Bonus: Its flat top allows it to double as a sturdy off-grid table.

Glidden Max-Flex Spray Paint by PPG: Drip-proof spray paint

PPG

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Few things are more disheartening to a DIY-er than completing a project, shaking up a can of spray paint, and then seeing your first coat start dripping all over your masterpiece. Applying a smooth sheen of color takes practice, and PPG seems to understand that not everyone has the time to learn the fine points of pigment application. The company’s Glidden Max-Flex all-surface paint eschews the traditional conical spray for a unique wide-fan pattern that not only refuses to drip, but dries in minutes. The lacquer-based formulation works on wood, glass, and metal and is available in 16 matte shades ranging from “In the Buff” to “Black Elegance.”

M18 18V Cordless Tire Inflator by Milwaukee: Faster, cooler roadside assistance

Milwaukee

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It goes without saying that cordless inflators produce lots of air, but they also generate a bunch of heat. That’s a problem when your pump conks out after 5 minutes and you have to wait for it to cool down before you can keep filling your tires. Not only will Milwaukee’s M18 cordless tire inflator push out 1.41 standard cubic feet of air per minute—making it the fastest 18-volt cordless tire inflator around—but its internal fan will keep it chugging along for up to 20 minutes. You might not even need to use it that long, either: It’ll top off a 33-inch light duty truck tire in less than a minute.

Smart Showerhead by hai: No plumber necessary

hai

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Smart showerheads frequently require skilled experts to install, and some even feature components that are built into the wall of your bathroom. That’s not accessible for the everyday homeowner. You don’t need tools or special skills to hook up hai’s smart Bluetooth showerhead, though. Just unscrew the old head, twist on the new one, connect the app, and you’ve got immediate control over both temperature and flow. Use the adjustable spray slider on the head to go from a high-pressure stream to a light mist, and choose your preferred heat level from the app. Plus, customizable LED lights will let you know when you’ve reached your self-imposed limit, saving water.

Credits:

Package Editor: Rob Verger

Judging Panel: Corinne Iozzio, Stan Horaczek, Rob Verger

Category Editors: Rachel Feltman, Stan Horaczek, Charlotte Hu, Corinne Iozzio, John Kennedy, Jen McCaffery, Amanda Reed, Purbita Saha, Rob Verger

Researchers: Kelsey Atherton, Clifford Atiyeh, Kate Baggaley, Berne Broudy, Rahul Rao, Andrew Rosenblum, Celia Shatzman, Terri Williams

Design Director: Russ Smith

The post The 100 greatest innovations of 2022 appeared first on Popular Science.

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Some 450 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Hercules lies a galaxy named Markarian 501. In the visible-light images we have of it, Markarian 501 looks like a simple, uninteresting blob.

But looks can be deceiving, especially in space. Markarian 501 is a launchpad for charged particles traveling near the speed of light. From the galaxy’s heart erupts a bright jet of high-energy particles and radiation, rushing right in Earth’s direction. That makes it a perfect natural laboratory to study those accelerating particles—if only scientists could understand what causes them.

In a paper published in the journal Nature today, astronomers have been able to take a never-before-seen look deep into the heart of one of those jets and see what drives those particles out in the first place. “This is the first time we are able to directly test models of particle acceleration,” says Yannis Liodakis, an astronomer at the University of Turku in Finland and the paper’s lead author.

Markarian 501 is a literally shining example of a special class of galaxy called a blazar. What makes this galaxy so bright is the supermassive black hole at its center. The gravity-dense region spews a colossal wellspring of high-energy particles, forming a jet that travels very near the speed of light and stretches over hundreds of millions of light-years.

Many galaxies have supermassive black holes spew out jets like this—they’re what astronomers call active galactic nuclei. But blazars like Markarian 501 are defined by the fact that their jets are pointed right in Earth’s general direction. Astronomers can use telescopes trained at it to look upstream and get a clear view of a constant torrent of particles riding through waves of every part of the electromagnetic spectrum, from bright radio waves to visible light to blazing gamma rays.

[Related: You’ve probably never heard of terahertz waves, but they could change your life]

A blazar can spread its influence far beyond its own corner of the universe. For instance, a detector buried under the Antarctic ice caught a neutrino—a ghostly, low-mass particle that does its best to elude physicists—coming from a blazar called TXS 0506+56. It was the first time researchers had ever picked up a neutrino alighting on Earth from a point of origin outside the solar system (and from 5 billion light-years away, at that).

But what actually causes a supermassive black hole to form light and other electromagnetic waves? What happens inside that jet? If you were surfing inside of it, what exactly would you feel and see?

Scientists want to know these answers, too, and not just because they make for a fun, extreme thought experiment. Blazars are natural particle accelerators, and they’re far larger and more powerful than any accelerator we can currently hope to build on Earth. By analyzing the dynamics of a blazar jet, they can learn what natural processes can accelerate matter to near the speed of light. What’s more, Markarian 501 is one of the more desirable blazars to study, given that it’s relatively close to the Earth, at least compared to other blazars that can be many billions of light-years farther still.

[Related: What would happen if you fell into a black hole?]

So, Liodakis and dozens of colleagues from around the world took to observing it. They used the Imaging X-ray Polarization Explorer (IXPE), a jellyfish-like telescope launched by NASA in December 2021, to look down the length of that jet. In particular, IXPE studied if distant X-rays were polarized, and how their electromagnetic waves are oriented in space. The waves from a light bulb, for instance, aren’t polarized—they wiggle every which way. The waves from an LCD screen, on the other hand, are polarized and only wiggle in one direction, which is why you can pull tricks like making your screen invisible to everyone else. 

Back to the sky, if astronomers know the polarization of a source like a black hole, they might be able to reconstruct what happened at it. Liodakis and his colleagues had some idea of what to expect, because experts in their field had previously spent years modeling and simulating jets on their computers. “This was the first time we were able to directly test the predictions from those models,” he explains.

They found that the culprits were shockwaves: fronts of fast-moving particles crashing into slower-moving particles, speeding them along like flotsam pushed by rushing water. The violent crashes created the X-rays that the astronomers saw in IXPE’s readings.

It’s the first time that astronomers have used the X-ray polarization method to see results. “This is really a breakthrough in our understanding of these sources,” says Liodakis.

In an accompanying perspective in Nature, Lea Marcotulli, an astrophysicist at Yale University who wasn’t an author on the paper, called the result “dazzling.” “This huge leap forward brings us yet another step closer to understanding these extreme particle accelerators,” she wrote.

Of course, there are still many unanswered questions surrounding the jets. Do these shockwaves account for all the particles accelerating from Markarian 501’s black hole? And do other blazars and galaxies have shockwaves like them?

Liodakis says his group will continue to study the X-rays from Markarian 501, at least into 2023. With an object this dazzling, it’s hard to look away.

The post Astronomers now know how supermassive black holes blast us with energy appeared first on Popular Science.

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In the past few decades, astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets around other stars. Many of those worlds look nothing like the planets in our own solar system. One curious type of exoplanet is the Hot Jupiter, a planet similar in size to our own Jupiter–but, unlike our neighborhood gas giant, these are extremely close to their home stars.

A team of Japanese astronomers recently discovered one of the hottest Jupiters to date, around a star known as HD 167768, as part of their long-running Okayama Planet Search Program that began in 2001. To make the situation even weirder, this planet is around an old, dying star—a place no one would have expected a planet to survive. 

Huanyu Teng, astronomer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and lead author of this discovery, considers this planet “a relatively lucky find” and “a rare case.”

This new planet, named HD 167768 b, is so close to its parent star that one year there is only 20 Earth days long. This planet is technically considered a warm Jupiter, since Hot Jupiters are defined as having a year shorter than 10 Earth days. But HD 167768 b is a whopping 3,000°F, about the temperature of a jet engine, which is hotter than nearly all other known Hot Jupiters, the study authors say. 

Although it takes a little longer than typical for this Hot Jupiter to complete a circle around its sun, this star has inflated, shortening the distance from its blazing surface to the planet. If most Hot Jupiters orbited stars the size of M&Ms, HD 167768 b’s star is something like a golf ball. The distance between the gas planet and its sun is one-and-a-half times the star’s diameter—for context, you could fit almost 108 of our sun’s lengths within Earth’s orbit. 

[Related: A deep-space telescope spied an exoplanet so hot it can vaporize iron]

Teng and co-authors published the discovery in November 2022 as what’s called a preprint paper, a way for scientists to share work before the expert review required for publication in a journal. In this case, the Hot Jupiter study has been accepted in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

Astronomers previously thought the aging process of a star would be “fatal to close-orbiting exoplanets” like HD 167768 b, says University of Kansas astronomer Jonathan Brande, who wasn’t involved in the new report. As stars run out of the fuel that sustains their nuclear fusion, they puff up, expanding their outer layers and often engulfing the closest planets—or so astronomers think. There are still many outstanding questions about what happens at the end of a solar system’s life, including whether planets survive or change as their stars die.

“There have been tens of planets discovered around evolved giant stars, but almost all of these planets are at large distances from their host stars,” says Aurora Kesseli, research scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. HD 167768 b “helps to answer some of these questions about what happens to planets when their host stars become giants.”

[Related: Newly discovered exoplanet may be a ‘Super Earth’ covered in water]

There are other curiosities about HD 167768 b, too—it’s in a strange part of the galaxy for a planet to exist. Our Milky Way is shaped like a crepe stuffed within a fluffy pancake, where the crepe is known as the thin disk and the pancake is the thick disk. The stars in the thick disk tend to be much older, and are thought to be less favorable environments for planets to grow up around. We’re in the thin disk–but HD 167768 b was found in the thicker one.

This curious world also shows signs that it’s not alone. HD 167768 b was discovered via the tried-and-true radial velocity method, where astronomers measure the movement of a star to infer hidden planets. The team noticed two more possible planet signals in the data, hinting at neighboring planets orbiting a bit further away from the star—they would have years 41 and 95 Earth-days long. To find out if these neighbors are real, astronomers will need to take a closer look at this system, such as with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Further observations of the new planet will allow astronomers to dig deeper into questions about old planets, now that they have this excellent specimen to analyze.

We don’t have forever to watch HD 167768 b, though. Teng and collaborators calculate that this planet will only exist for 150 million more years—an absolute blink of the eye for the timescales of the universe. (Earth, meanwhile, should stick around for at least another 5 billion years.) This is an exciting opportunity to see a planet so close to the end of its existence.

“Cosmically, this is just about the last possible time we’ll be able to study the planet,” says Brande. “As the host star is continuing to expand, eventually it will totally eat this planet for dinner.”

The post Ridiculously hot gas giant exoplanet is about to be swallowed by its dying sun appeared first on Popular Science.

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Following an investigation by NASA into James Webb’s career, NASA will not be renaming the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) which launched on December 25, 2021. From 1941-1968, Webb, a government official and Marine Corps pilot, held high-ranking government positions at the Department of State and was NASA’s second administrator. During this time, a panic about the sexual orientation of government employees led to mass firings and discriminatory policies during what is called the Lavender Scare.

LGBTQI+ scientists and astronomers have protested the name, saying it glorifies a hateful period in American history.

[Related: After years of delays, the James Webb telescope is finally in space.]

The telescope was named in 2002, when it was still in its planning stages, by former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe. The name is meant to recognize Webb’s contributions to government service, including running NASA as it developed the Apollo program from 1961 to 1968. However, the fact that Webb held high positions of power during a time of such rampant discrimination should be enough for his name to not be on the telescope, says a group of astronomers working to get it renamed.

“It is hypocritical of NASA to insist on giving Webb credit for the exciting things that happened under his leadership — activities that were actually conducted by other people — but refuse to accept his culpability for the problems,” four astronomers wrote in a petition to rename the telescope in 2021. “NASA’s top leadership is engaging in historical cherry picking, which is deeply unscientific in our view.”

Additionally, NASA has struggled with the politics surrounding the decision based on internal e-mails and pressure from NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee (APAC). Lucianne Walkowicz, one of the authors of the petition, resigned from this committee after the agency first declined to change the telescope’s name.

Brian C. Odom, NASA’s chief historian published a report on November 18 into Webb’s career, particularly his time at the Department of State from 1949 to 1950 and then his time at NASA from 1961 to 1968. The State Department fired hundreds of employees for alleged homosexuality throughout the course of the 1940s and 1950s.

“For decades, discrimination against LGBTQI+ federal employees was not merely tolerated, it was shamefully promoted by federal policies. The Lavender Scare that took place following World War II is a painful part of America’s story and the struggle for LGBTQI+ rights,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson SAID in a statement following the release of the report. “NASA’s core values of equality and inclusivity are in part what makes this agency so great, and we remain committed to ensuring those values are lived out throughout the workplace.”

[Related: As PopSci turns 150, we reflect on the highs and lows of our long history.]

According to NASA, the historical investigation examined two particular meetings during June 1950 in which Webb appears relation to the Lavender Scare. In the first meeting, President Harry Truman and Webb discussed whether or not to cooperate with investigators from Congress who were seeking records and information on State Department employees. After the meeting, Webb met with North Carolina Senator Clyde Hoey and several of President Truman advisers and gave Hoey “some material on the subject” of homosexuality one of Webb’s colleagues had prepared. The NASA report says, “To date, no available evidence directly links Webb to any actions emerging from this discussion. Other employees at the state department had responsibility for following up. Because of this, it is a sound conjecture that Webb played little role in the matter.”

The report also looked into whether Webb was aware of the firing of NASA GS-14 budget analyst Clifford J. Norton in 1963. Norton was fired based on a civil service policy against homosexuality, after being arrested by Washington, DC police in October 1963 for having made a “homosexual advance.” He sued the Civil Service Commission, and and won the 1969 federal case Norton v. Macy, which is one several cases that helped overturn the civil service’s policy in 1975. NASA did not find any evidence that Webb knew about the firing.

The name and other issues dealing with past discrimination will likely continue to be debated as the scientific community continues to examine the more shameful parts of its past.

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While most space cadets were understandably busy re-watching Orion’s successful launch yesterday, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was putting on a stellar show of its own.

According to NASA, a new image taken by the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) is giving astronomers a better look at some of the previously unseen features of the protostar hidden in a dark cloud named L1527. The blazing occlusions are located within the Taurus star-forming region (about 430 light years away from Earth) and are only visible in infrared light. NIRCam can see in infrared light, so it can process images that previous space telescopes couldn’t and is giving insight into the humble beginnings of young stars.

[Related: JWST give a new look at the Pillars of Creation’s majestic explosion of young stars.]

At about 100,000 years old, the protostar within L1527 is pretty young by star standards, and is considered a class 0 protostar due to its age and its brightness. This is the earliest stage of star formation, and protostars like this one are still cocooned in a dark cloud of dust and gas. The protostar doesn’t have one of the most essential characteristics of stars: the ability to generate its own energy through nuclear fusion of hydrogen. It has a mostly spherical shape, but is also unstable, which makes it take the form of a small, hot, and puffy clump of gas.

In the new image, the protostar is hidden from view within the narrow “neck” of this hourglass shape. The dark line across the middle of the neck is an edge-on protoplanetary disk. Light from L1527 leaks above and below the disk which illuminates the cavities within the surrounding gas and dust clouds.

NIRCam shows these clouds in blue and orange and outline the cavities that are formed when material shoots away from the protostar and collides with surrounding matter. The blue areas show where the dust is thinnest and the orange pockets are the thicker layers of dust that keep the blue light from shining through.

The image from JWST also shows filaments of molecular hydrogen that have been shocked as the protostar ejects material away from it. These shocks and turbulence can inhibit the formation of new stars, which would otherwise form throughout the cloud. Due to this, L1527 is a bit greedy, and is taking all of the material for itself.

[Related: New James Webb Space Telescope image shows a secluded galaxy in stellar detail.]

The dramatic space scene JWST captured in this image reveals L1527 continuing to gobble up mass. The protostar’s core will gradually compress and it will inch closer to creating the stable nuclear fusion needed to bring it to the next stage of star life.

Dense dust and gas make up a molecular cloud that is being drawn into the center of the protostar. When the gas and dust falls inward, it spirals around the center, creating a dense disk of material called an accretion disk. This disk feeds material to the protostar and is the dark band in front of the bright center, and is roughly the size of our solar system (over 13 billion miles).

As L1527 gains more mass and keeps compressing, the temperature of its core will rise and it will eventually teach the threshold for nuclear fusion to being (about 100 million degrees Kelvin).

This new view takes astronomers back through time and shows what the sun and our solar system may have looked like in their earliest days over four billion years ago.

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NASA engineers devote lots of time and effort to make sure spacecraft are durable enough to survive the hazards of space. Sometimes, though, rockets or probes are designed to crash on purpose!

In 2022, there have been a number of notable space crashes, both planned and unplanned. While unexpected events can be dangerous, planned crashes can provide important information about our solar system—revealing features as diverse as a planet’s atmosphere or the chemicals in an asteroid’s surface. They pave the way for future space missions by testing new technologies, too. And crashing a machine into a space rock can even give data that could one day be used to protect Earth from a threatening asteroid.

The history of space exploration is rich with crashes—humanity’s early voyages to the moon relied on impacts to study the lunar surface in detail, like the Russian Luna 2 that became the first spacecraft to touch the surface of the moon in 1959, and the NASA Ranger program that returned the first close-up images of the moon in the 1960s. This decades-old tradition is carried on by modern missions, from Deep Impact smashing into a comet in 2005 to DART knocking around an asteroid in 2022. It’s very likely there will be more deliberate crashes in the future, too.

The NASA lander designed to crash

One of the riskiest parts of a mission to Mars is the landing. Many mechanical parts and software programs have to work properly to avoid such a situation—a computer glitch caused a European Mars lander to catastrophically crash in 2016. So far, NASA has dealt with this through a variety of technologies: giant bouncing airbags, parachutes designed to slow down the craft in the thin Martian atmosphere, and even their complicated sky crane system—essentially a jetpack that gently lowers a lander to the surface—that the Perseverance rover used.

As successful as these technologies are, they’re also expensive. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) are working on a new technique that may reduce costs—a device intended to crash, known as SHIELD. They call it an impact attenuator, something that’s made to absorb all the force of the crash and protect the sensitive electronics inside. It’s made of steel, with the shape of an upside-down wedding cake. When it hits the ground, it crumples, absorbing the shock of the impact just like the “crumple zone” of modern cars.

While the largest and most ambitious missions will always need traditional landing gear, they also take a long time to prepare. SHIELD’s tech allows for smaller, more frequent missions in addition to those. Lou Giersch, a mechanical engineer at JPL and leader of the SHIELD project, says this device could “increase the rate of scientific discovery” by making missions to Mars speedier and cheaper. “It’s sort of a complement to the more conventional Mars landing,” Giersch adds. 

The team tested SHIELD at full Mars-landing speed–a whopping 110 miles per hour–for the first time in August 2022, strapping a smartphone to it. The smartphone survived and remained fully functional, even after hitting a two-inch-thick steel plate, which is much harder than actual Martian dirt. 

NASA hopes this sort of tech will allow it to send more small missions to Mars, maybe even establishing a network of probes across the Red Planet. These could be like the local weather stations we use on Earth. One day, atmospheric scientists might tell you the local daily forecasts for Olympus Mons or Schiaparelli Crater. Being able to monitor the whole globe at once could reveal more about Mars’ dust, its atmosphere, and even marsquakes—and it all may happen after repeated successful crash landings.

A mysterious rocket on the moon

Astronomers puzzled over a surprise crash this year, when a piece of rocket debris smashed into the moon on March 4. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) later spotted a strange double crater created by the impact. Although some astronomers hoped this impact may be able to give them new information about the lunar surface, nothing much came of it besides a hunt for the wayward rocket’s culprit.

Astronomer Bill Gray first identified it as a SpaceX part, but later realized it was actually part of a 2014 Chinese test mission, called Chang’e 5-T1. Chinese officials deny this was their booster, though, so its origin remains somewhat of a mystery. The biggest takeaway here is how alarming it is that no one was sure exactly what this piece was, or where it came from—and that there are many other lost hunks of space debris just like it.

[Related: What happens when a rocket hits the moon? It’s not always what astronomers predict.]

Although this crash was a loss for lunar scientists, there have been intentional impacts on the moon before—notably  LCROSS, a mission to hit a permanently shadowed crater on the moon’s south pole in 2009. NASA astronomers sent one spacecraft to strike the surface, followed shortly after by a probe containing scientific instruments to measure the materials stirred up by the impact. This mission helped confirm a fact we now take for granted—the existence of water ice on the lunar surface. 

University of Hawaii planetary scientist Chiara Ferrari-Wong notes that LCROSS data is still keeping scientists busy—the materials it revealed on the moon are strikingly different from those on Mercury, which is similarly cratered. “We are working to untangle what happened in each planet’s unique history that makes them similar yet different,” she says.

Knocking around asteroids

A clear highlight of this year in space crashes comes from DART, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, a spacecraft that smacked an asteroid to nudge its orbit. This was the first test of  planetary defense technology meant to protect Earth in the event we find an asteroid hurtling toward us.

“Thankfully, no known asteroid big enough to penetrate our atmosphere is a threat to impact Earth at any time in the next century,” says Angela Stickle, planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and DART team member. But if an as-yet undiscovered asteroid is on a collision course with Earth, she adds, “we want to be prepared.” 

DART targeted an asteroid known as Dimorphos, which orbits another bigger asteroid called Didymos. By measuring the change in the time it takes for Dimorphos to orbit Didymos, before and after the impact, astronomers could determine how big of a punch their impacting spacecraft packed. The spacecraft changed the asteroid’s orbital period by 32 minutes, more than 25 times the goal time NASA set for a successful mission. “This was incredibly exciting and the team is still working on the details of why and how,” Stickle says.

This mission taught scientists about Didymos itself, which is actually a loose collection of rocks known as a rubble pile, showing how diverse the population of asteroids really is. For future asteroid diversions to be successful, astronomers need to know what each asteroid is made of, so they know how big of a push it needs.

[Related: NASA’s first attempt to smack an asteroid was picture perfect]

This isn’t the first time scientists have hit an asteroid, though—the Japanese Hayabusa2 mission shot a small cannon into the asteroid Ryugu in 2019, blowing up the surface just enough to expose the lower layers of dirt and to fling debris toward the main spacecraft for sample collection. But that impact was on a much smaller scale than DART, and meant for a totally different purpose. 

Now, Hayabusa2 is beginning a new mission, one that will contribute to DART’s goals of planetary protection. It’s hurtling toward a little-studied asteroid named 2001 CC21. They won’t collide; instead, the spacecraft is going to experiment with precision navigation around a fairly unknown target, a crucial skill for an asteroid-targeting planetary defense mission.

“My ideal next mission would be a spacecraft hitting an asteroid with one spacecraft watching the whole thing happen,” Stickle said about DART’s impact. “The more times we can test this technology, the better we will get.”

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In the vastness of space, galaxies can get a little isolated. That’s the case for a dwarf galaxy called Wolf–Lundmark–Melotte (WLM), which is one-tenth the size of our home Milky Way galaxy and pretty close by space standards at 3 million light years away. According to NASA, WLM can be seen in the constellation Cetus.

Lonesome or not, WLM is ready for its close-up. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) took an incredibly detailed image of WLM using its near-infrared spotting tech to reveal a deep glimpse into the stars of the galaxy. The images were released to the public on November 9 and the data from this image could help astronomers study the early days of the universe since WLM’s seclusion has helped it maintain a chemical make-up that is similar to those of the galaxies in the early universe.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope’s first image shows the universe in a new light.]

“We think WLM hasn’t interacted with other systems, which makes it really nice for testing our theories of galaxy formation and evolution,” Kristen McQuinn of Rutgers University, one of the lead scientists on Webb Early Release Science (ERS) program 1334, said in a NASA blog post. “Many of the other nearby galaxies are intertwined and entangled with the Milky Way, which makes them harder to study.”

The Early Release Science programs were designed to highlight JWST’s capabilities and help astronomers prepare for future observations.

The WLM galaxy has also been imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope and the now-decommissioned Spitzer Space Telescope, but JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captured the galaxy in stunning detail.

“We can see a myriad of individual stars of different colors, sizes, temperatures, ages, and stages of evolution; interesting clouds of nebular gas within the galaxy; foreground stars with Webb’s diffraction spikes; and background galaxies with neat features like tidal tails,” McQuinn added. “And, of course, the view is far deeper and better than our eyes could possibly see. Even if you were looking out from a planet in the middle of this galaxy, and even if you could see infrared light, you would need bionic eyes to be able to see what Webb sees.”

[Related: X-ray vision adds a whole new layer to James Webb Space Telescope images.]

With this new data, that still has to undergo peer review, astronomers are looking to reconstruct the star formation history of the WLM galaxy. Since low-mass stars can live for billions of years, some of the stars that are present in WLM likely formed during the early universe.

“By determining the properties of these low-mass stars (like their ages), we can gain insight into what was happening in the very distant past,” said McQuinn. “It’s very complementary to what we learn about the early formation of galaxies by looking at high-redshift systems, where we see the galaxies as they existed when they first formed.

JWST was launched into space on December 25, 2021 and is a joint effort by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and Canadian Space Agency (CSA). It is the universe’s most powerful space observatory and can detect the faint light of incredibly distant galaxies that are invisible to the human eye.

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Back in 2018, astronomers examining the ruins of two collided neutron stars in Hubble Space Telescope images noticed something peculiar: a stream of bright high-energy ions, jetting away from the merger in Earth’s direction at seven times the speed of light.

That didn’t seem right, so the team recalculated with observations from a different radio telescope. In those observations, the stream was flying past at only four times the speed of light.

That still didn’t seem right. Nothing in the universe can go faster than the speed of light. As it happens, it was an illusion, a study published in the journal Nature explained earlier this month.

[Related: Have we been measuring gravity wrong this whole time?]

The phenomenon that makes particles in space appear to travel faster than light is called superluminal motion. The phrase fits the illusion: It means “more than light,” but actually describes a trick where an object moving toward you appears much faster than its actual speed. There are high-energy streams out in space there that can pretend to move faster than light—today, astronomers are seeing a growing number of them.

“They look like they’re moving across the sky, crazy fast, but it’s just that they’re moving toward you and across the sky at the same time,” says Jay Anderson, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland who has worked extensively with Hubble and helped author the Nature paper.

To get their jet’s true speed, Anderson and his collaborates compared Hubble and radio telescope observations. Ultimately, they estimated that the jet was zooming directly at Earth at around 99.95 percent the speed of light. That’s very close to the speed of light, but not quite faster than it.

Indeed, to our knowledge so far, nothing on or off our planet can travel faster than the speed of light. This has been proven time and time again through the laws of special relativity, put on paper by Albert Einstein a century ago. Light, which moves at about 670 million miles per hour, is the ultimate cosmic speed limit. Not only that, special relativity holds that the speed of light is a constant no matter who or what is observing it.

But special relativity doesn’t limit things from traveling super close to the speed of light (cosmic rays and the particles from solar flares are some examples). That’s where superluminal motion kicks in. As something moves toward you, the distance that its light and image needs to reach you decreases. In everyday life, that’s not really a factor: Even seemingly speedy things, like a plane moving through the sky above you, don’t move anywhere near the speed of light. 

[Related: Check out the latest version of Boom’s supersonic plane]

But when something is moving at high speeds at hundreds of millions of miles per hour in the proper direction, the distance between the object and the perceiver (whether it be a person or a camera lens) drops very quickly. This gives the illusion that something is approaching more rapidly than it actually is. Neither our eyes nor our telescopes can tell the difference, which means astronomers have to calculate an object’s actual speed from data collected in images.

The researchers behind the new Nature paper weren’t the first to grapple with superluminal motion. In fact, they’re more than a century late. In 1901, astronomers scanning the night sky caught a glimpse of a nova in the direction of the constellation Perseus. It was the remnants of a white dwarf that ate the outer shells of a nearby gas giant, briefly lighting up bright enough to see with the naked eye. Astronomers caught a bubble inflating from the nova at breakneck speed. But because there was no theory of general relativity at the time, the event quickly faded from memory.

The phenomenon gained buzz again by the 1970s and 1980s. By then, astronomers were finding all sorts of odd high-energy objects in distant corners of the universe: quasars and active galaxies, all of which could shoot out jets of material. Most of the time, these objects were powered by black holes that spewed out high-energy jets almost moving at the speed of the light. Depending on the mass and strength of the black hole they come from, they could stretch for thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of light-years to reach Earth.

Around the same time, scientists studying radio waves began seeing enough faux-speeders to raise alarms. They even found a jet from one distant galaxy that appeared to be racing at nearly 10 times the speed of light. The observations garnered a fair amount of alarm among astronomers, though by then the mechanisms were well-understood.

In the decades since, observations of superluminal motion have added up. Astronomers are seeing an ever-increasing number of jets through telescopes, particularly ones that are floating through space like Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope. When light doesn’t have to pass through Earth’s atmosphere, their captures can be much higher in resolution. This helps teams find more jets that are farther away (such as from ancient, distant galaxies), and it helps them view closer jets in more detail. “Things stand out much better in Hubble images than they do in ground-based images,” says Anderson. 

[Related: This image wiggles when you scroll—or does it?]

Take, for instance, the distant galaxy M87, whose gargantuan central black hole launched a jet that apparently clocked in at between 4 and 6 times the speed of light. By the 1990s, Hubble could actually peer into the stream of energy and reveal that parts it were traveling at different speeds. “You could actually see features in the jet moving, and you could measure the locations of those features,” Anderson explains.

There are good reasons for astronomers to be interested in such breakneck jets, especially now. In the case of the smashing neutron stars from the Nature study, the crash caused a gamma-ray burst, a type of high-energy explosion that remains poorly understood. The event also stirred up a storm of gravitational waves, causing rippled in space-time that researchers can now pick up and observe. But until they uncover some strange new physics in the matter flying through space, the speed of light remains the hard limit.

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The Kuiper Belt, the donut-shaped ring of icy bodies that stretches far beyond Neptune’s orbit, is home to some of the strangest objects in our solar system. Inside this icy region, there are trillions of comets, asteroids, and heavenly remnants leftover from the earliest days of our solar system, some of which many humans may already be familiar with, like Pluto, Eris, and Makemake. 

Yet one of its most interesting oddities is the dwarf planet, Haumea.

Though it was discovered less than two decades ago, information about the dwarf planet is sparse as Earth-based telescopes have a hard time making precise measurements because of how distant it is. But the little we do know about Haumea suggests that it is an extremely strange and important entity. Shaped almost like a deflated football, the planet spins faster than anything else of its size, whirling on its axis in only four hours. Besides having two moons, Haumea also has a very faint ring system and is covered almost exclusively in crystalline water ice, making it an excellent candidate to investigate whether it might have once hosted life. 

“From an astrobiological perspective, there are a lot of things we don’t yet know about how life got started, even on Earth, and we live here,” says Jessica Noviello, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We’re still trying to figure out exactly what kinds of ingredients need to go into creating life in the first place, and we know that one of the most important is water.”

[Related: NASA’s first attempt to smack an asteroid was picture perfect]

Another reason researchers are so interested in learning more about Haumea is because it’s the largest of a dozen “sibling” water-rich objects that appear to have similar orbits to each other. To date, it’s the only such “family” system in the Kuiper Belt, but scientists like Noviello say one of the area’s biggest mysteries is how this unique system came together—including its intriguing configuration. 

To try and piece together a sharper picture of the planet’s origins and evolution, Noviello and a team of researchers used computer simulations to model billions of years of its past history to see what kind of conditions may have led a “baby Haumea” to the system’s mature modern-day incarnation.

By plugging Haumea’s estimated size, mass, and rotational rate into their model, the researchers were able to use these simulations to break the planet down and build it up from scratch to investigate many of the chemical and physical processes that helped its development. Once they had all three of these aspects, they calculated the object’s angular momentum (its ability to continue to spin) throughout history with the assumption that it stayed constant. After running dozens of simulations filled with different variables and small changes to test how each variable would affect its evolution, they came up with a few results that seemed to be on the right track. 

“One of the leading ideas is that these family members were knocked off by a big collision,” says Steven Desch, a professor of earth and space exploration at Arizona State University. If pieces of Haumea were bumped due to some clumsy meet-cute with another object, there would be considerably more fragments, and many of them would have differences in their orbits. But that isn’t the case, Desch notes. Instead, their models posit that when planets were still forming, Haumea did collide with another object, but the pieces that flew off back then are not what’s seen in today’s Haumean family, as other researchers have suggested. 

The family instead came much later, when the planet’s dense rocky structure settled in the center and became its core, while lighter density ice rose to its outer layers. “The effect of having all that water percolate through the core and react with rock and turn dense rock into a less dense clay is it swells up the core,” says Desch. In effect, some of the mass on the outside of Haumea was flung off, and those pieces created the Haumean family scientists study today. 

[Related: What’s hiding in the outer solar system?]

Their model was also able to make predictions about the amount of ice on Haumea, as well as the planet’s volume. With the help of another code called IcyDwarf, researchers even concluded that at one point Haumea was warm enough to sustain a liquid water ocean in its interior for about 250 million years. Though that ocean has since frozen over, Noviello says it’s invaluable discovering what the origins of another planet might have looked like, if only to help humans discover more icy and ocean worlds in the future. 

“Knowing about the diversity of ocean worlds and their potential for life in the solar system helps us put everything into context and focus on the best targets for more extensive observations for detecting any kind of bio signatures in the future,” she says. “On Mars, the phrase is to follow the water and it’s no different with exoplanets.”

Correction (October 20, 2022): This story has been updated to correct the amount of time the Haumea spins on its axis. One of the references of Jessica Noviello‘s name was previously misspelled. We regret the error.

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For the first time, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured an image of one of space’s most iconic images—the Pillars of Creation. This part of the Eagle Nebula roughly 6,500 light years away from Earth is where new stars are forming within dense clouds of dust and gas. To some, the pillars look like majestic rock formations—but they are more like a massive, permeable cloud of dusty fog.

The Pillars of Creation were first made famous by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope back in 1995. Aside from being exceptionally beautiful, the new JWST image will help researchers identify more precise counts of newly formed stars within the nebula, as well as how much gas and dust is in the region. The goal over time is to build a more clear understanding the dusty clouds and the stars that burst from them.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope is almost ready to start blowing our minds.]

The young up-and-coming stars in this image are shown as bright red orbs, usually with diffraction spikes. These stars lie outside one of the dusty pillars, according to NASA. “When knots with sufficient mass form within the pillars of gas and dust, they begin to collapse under their own gravity, slowly heat up, and eventually form new stars,” writes NASA.

The image was taken using Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), which can see space objects on a different light spectrum called the near-infrared range to create more detailed images like this one.

The wavy lava-looking lines are are ejections from the stars that are still forming within the dust and gas. From time to time, young stars shoot out supersonic jets which collide with clouds like these thick pillars. “This sometimes also results in bow shocks, which can form wavy patterns like a boat does as it moves through water. The crimson glow comes from the energetic hydrogen molecules that result from jets and shocks,” NASA writes in a recent release. This can be seen in the second and third pillars from the top. The young stars in this image are estimated to be only a few hundred thousand years old, which is young compared to stars like the red giant Betelgeuse, aged about 10 million years-old, and Methusula, the oldest star in the universe at a ripe 16 billion years old.

[Related: The James Webb telescope could help solve the mystery of dark matter.]

There aren’t any galaxies present in this view of the Pillars. A mix of of translucent gas and dust called the interstellar medium in the densest part of our Milky Way galaxy’s disk blocks our view of the deeper universe, according to NASA.

Launched into space on Christmas Day 2021, the JWST is an international partnership between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). It has been sending back some beautiful images since July, including a tarantula shaped nebula, exoplanets, and the planet Neptune’s rings.

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“There’s not actually a dinosaur constellation, right?” I asked aloud to no one as I peered up at the stars sparkling in the dark. 

Moments earlier I’d driven through the town of Dinosaur, Colorado. Now, as darkness settled around my car, I thought I spotted a sauropod in the stars through my driver’s side window. I chuckled to myself, feeling silly for seeing dinosaurs where there certainly were none, and chalked it up to the power of suggestion.

But, it turns out, I wasn’t just being silly. I was participating in a human tradition that extends back millennia, says Daniel Brown, associate professor in astronomy and science communication at Nottingham Trent University in England. The night sky, he says, is “an ideal canvas” for viewers to interpret and find visualizations of something that is relevant to their lives. “This is how we normally would start referring to constellations.”

But constellations aren’t just a sketch of every individual’s fanciful ideas. The way that the stars are splashed across the sky invites humans to see certain patterns. In fact, despite viewing the sky from distinct angles, many cultures around the world have identified groupings of stars in remarkably similar ways. Those parallels, and differences, offer a reflection of the astronomical dynamics playing out over the night sky, as well as the values and mindsets of the people who look up at it. 

One constellation, two stories

Constellations have long served as maps for navigation, canvases for storytelling, calendars for seasonal changes, and charts by which to impart knowledge and meaning. 

“Up until recently in human history, we didn’t have structured, written languages. Language was communicated orally,” says Duane Hamacher, associate professor of cultural astronomy at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “But the human brain evolved to be able to memorize enormous quantities of information. One of the ways that is done is through associating a memory to place, called the method of loci—which, he explains, includes the stars.

[Related: What would happen if the Milky Way died?]

By passing on knowledge of the constellations, deep cultural memories persist. Today, researchers have noticed a pattern: Many of the brightest stars are grouped together in strikingly similar constellations across cultures that historically had no known contact with each other. Western stargazers might know some of those star groupings as the Big Dipper, Orion, the Pleiades, and the Southern Cross.

These particular star groupings draw the eye with their brightness and proximity to each other in the night sky, attracting stargazers from both hemispheres, according to a team of researchers from the University of Melbourne. The researchers used a mathematical model to systematically group stars by their prominence and proximity, and compare those groupings against constellations from 27 different cultures around the world. This process tested what is considered a principle of how human visual perception works: The Gestalt law of proximity, which states that objects that are close together are perceived as unified groups, regardless of how different those objects may be individually. In a paper published earlier this year in the journal Psychological Science, the University of Melbourne experts found that those perception principles likely explain why so many different cultures have grouped the same stars together into constellations.

But the similarities don’t stop at which stars people visually group together. Humans have often mapped familiar images and stories over those pinpricks of light. And even those stories are often strikingly similar, despite being influenced more by cultural context than the characteristics of the stars themselves. 

For example, says Hamacher, who is an author on the Psychological Science paper, the male figure of Orion is often seen as a man or men pursuing a group of girls or women, whom the ancient Greeks called the Pleiades. A V-shaped grouping of stars, the Hyades, stands between them and Orion. There are subtle differences, he says, in cultural interpretations of this guardian constellation. The Greek version has the Hyades appearing as Taurus the bull preventing Orion from reaching the girls. Meanwhile, some Australian Aboriginal traditions tend to depict Orion as a womanizer who falls in love with the sisters—but their older sibling stands in his way. 

In many of the versions of the story, the details of this pursuit and defense reflect the motion and dynamics of the stars themselves. Because of the Earth’s rotation, these constellations move across the sky throughout the night, with Orion appearing to chase the Pleiades. Some Aboriginal cultures see Orion as upside-down with the red of the star Betelgeuse in his right hand as fire magic that the warrior creates to battle the elder sister, Hamacher says. Meanwhile, the red star Aldebaran in her left foot (often seen as the red eye of the bull in Greek traditions) is about to kick sand in his face. The fire magic flickers and grows as they face-off, reflecting how Betelgeuse, which is a variable star, dims and brightens over 400 days. 

From legends to machines

The period of time when people created stories about shapes in the sky also matters. For example, Brown says, many of the Western culture’s constellations as seen from the Northern Hemisphere are more mystical creatures and tales, based on Greek mythology. Those constellations were described in an anthropology of constellation stories written in the third century BCE, so many were likely identified long before that. Thousands of years later, Western explorers into the Southern Hemisphere documented the patterns they saw in the stars on their travels to include more technical tools, particularly instruments for navigation, like a sextant or a compass. 

“You’ll find loads of things that are far more associated with the Age of Discovery,” Brown says. “That’s not surprising because our cultural group started to explore the Southern Hemisphere at a time when all of these clocks and things would have been far more prominent.”

[Related: Dark energy camera gives a tasty view of a lobster-shaped nebula]

But what those Western explorers didn’t consider, Brown says, was those groups of stars that had been identified and named thousands of years earlier in the Southern Hemisphere night sky by the people who were already living there—with very different interpretations.

“This is why I always stress that the Western, Greek constellations are just one way in which these patterns can be interpreted,” Brown notes. Listening to the ways people around the world make sense of the patterns they see in the stars can illuminate aspects of their culture and what is relevant to them.

Hamacher and his colleagues are conducting experiments to see what kinds of constellations people make up on their own. In a planetarium, they present audiences with a simulated night sky with stars in fake positions. When modern viewers connect the dots to make shapes, he says, it reflects their culture and geography. “You’re not going to get a lot of Australians who are going to see a squirrel in the stars, and Americans are not going to see a koala,” Hamacher says. 

Constellations without stars

Stars aren’t the only thing visible in the night sky, Hamacher adds: There are also nebulae planets and the moon. And in some parts of the world, the night sky gets dark enough to see the dark voids where starlight is absent in the Milky Way.

In the Southern Hemisphere, those spaces are often traced into what are called dark constellations. Because the air is much less humid in Australia than many other parts of the world, the continent is a particularly good place to see some of the darkest night skies.

Some cultures also see similar patterns in dark constellations, too. For example, Hamacher says, Aboriginal cultures see an emu in the dark space of the Milky Way between the Southern Cross and Sagittarius. In South America, some people also see a large flightless bird called a rhea.

Many stellar patterns only appear during certain times of the year (others, that linger near the poles, are visible all year long). In Australia, the emu starts becoming visible in the evening during the same time of year when the birds are breeding, building their nests, and laying their eggs. Because people would typically go out and forage those eggs, Hamacher says, the seasonal appearance of the dark emu constellation also served as a sort of harvest calendar for people. 

[Related on PopSci+: This Colorado community fought to save its darkness]

Light pollution can be another factor in how different people view the stars. Today, the artificial bulbs that illuminate the night also interfere with starlight, washing out the Milky Way and all but the brightest stars for millions of residents in urban, suburban, and adjacent areas.

“But they don’t fade away entirely. I just need to look into my Stellarium app,” Brown says, referencing one app to help users identify constellations. “We still have access and knowledge about what’s in the sky. We engage with the sky now in a completely different manner, in this kind of virtual way.”

Constellation apps also offer viewers access to night sky knowledge from across the globe. Users can see the various cultural interpretations of the patterns in the stars splayed across their screens as they peer at the night sky. 

“You can learn about so many other cultures because you can look into the sky. You’re straightaway in touch with something that somebody in the depths of the Amazon might see, and that somebody might have seen when they were building the pyramids,” Brown says. “That’s our shared heritage.”

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When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sent back images in July, a photo of a distant star known as WR140 sparked some interesting conversation. Some on the internet speculated that the concentric, somewhat rectangular ripples spilling out from the star could be evidence of an alien megastructure.

Two new papers published in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy are throwing some some cold water on that theory. In the new papers, Australian astronomers explain that the 17 concentric rings that look a bit like a spider web are a series of dust shells. These shells are created by the circular interaction between a pair of hot stars locked together in a tight orbit. 

[Related: X-ray vision adds a whole new layer to James Webb Space Telescope images.]

“Like clockwork, WR140 puffs out a sculpted smoke ring every eight years, which is then inflated in the stellar wind like a balloon,” Peter Tuthill from the Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney, a co-author in both papers, said in a press release. “Eight years later, as the binary returns in its orbit, another ring appears, the same as the one before, streaming out into space inside the bubble of the previous one, like a set of giant nested Russian dolls.” 

The WR140 binary is made up of one huge Wolf-Rayet star and an even bigger blue supergiant star. The two are gravitationally bound in an eight-year orbit around each other. All stars generate stellar winds, but the gusts from a Wolf-Rayt star are more like a hurricane. Some of the elements in the wind condense out as soot, which remains hot enough to glow bright when captured using infrared cameras like those on the JWST. The telescopes can follow their flow.

Because the two stars are in elliptical orbit (more oval shaped) rather than a circular orbit, dust production turns on and off as WR140’s binary companion gets closer to it. Using data collected from other telescopes since 2006, Tuthill and his former student Yinuo Han created a 3D model of the dust plume’s geometry. That model is featured in the Nature paper and explains the bizarre image obtained by the JWST back in July.

[Related: After the big bang, light and electricity shaped the early universe.]

Han and Tuthill’s work also shows the first direct evidence of intense starlight driving into matter and accelerating it, after tracking the huge plumes of dust generated by the violent interactions between these two colossal stars over the course of 16 years. 

“It’s hard to see starlight causing acceleration because the force fades with distance, and other forces quickly take over,” Han said in a press release. “To witness acceleration at the level that it becomes  measurable, the material needs to be reasonably close to the star or the source of the radiation  pressure needs to be extra strong. WR140 is a binary star whose ferocious radiation field  supercharges these effects, placing them within reach of our high-precision data.” 

With JWST now in operation, researchers will be able to learn much more about WR140 and similar systems. “The Webb telescope offers new extremes of stability and sensitivity,” Ryan Lau, assistant astronomer at the U.S. National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory and lead author of the Nature Astronomy study, said in a press release. “We’ll now be able to make observations like this much more easily than from the ground, opening a new window into the world of Wolf-Rayet physics.”

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At a celebratory news conference today, NASA announced that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully altered the asteroid Dimorphos’ orbit.

Before DART smashed into it on September 26, it took Dimorphos 11 hours and 55 minutes to circle its larger parent asteroid, Didymos. Astronomers have been using telescopes on Earth to measure how much that time has changed. The data shows that the impact from the small spacecraft shortened Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos by 32 minutes, with a margin of uncertainty of about plus or minus 2 minutes. Shortening an asteroid system’s trajectory like this could help us deflect a massive space rock if it were to threaten Earth.

“All of us have a responsibility to protect our home planet. After all, it’s the only one we have,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a press release. “This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us. NASA has proven we are serious as a defender of the planet.”

[Related: NASA’s first attempt to smack an asteroid was picture perfect.]

Before the collision, the agency defined the minimum successful orbit period change of Dimorphos as change of 73 seconds or more. This early data shows DART surpassed this minimum benchmark by more than 25 times. Data is still being collected by ground-based telescopes from around the world and radar facilities at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Goldstone facility in California and the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.

According to NASA, the focus is now shifting toward measuring the efficiency of momentum transfer from DART’s roughly 14,000-mile per hour collision with Dimorphos. There will be further analysis of the asteroidal rock that was launched into space after impact called ejecta. The recoil from the blast enhanced DART’s push against the asteroid; NASA experts described it is a little like a jet of air streaming out of a balloon, sending it in the opposite direction.

More information on of the asteroid’s physical properties will be needed to better understand how much impact the ejecta had. To project the mass and shape of the asteroid, astronomer will continue to study imagery of Dimorphos from DART’s terminal approach and from the Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids, provided by the Italian Space Agency.

“DART has given us some fascinating data about both asteroid properties and the effectiveness of a kinetic impactor as a planetary defense technology,” said Nancy Chabot, the project’s coordination lead from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, in a press release. “The DART team is continuing to work on this rich dataset to fully understand this first planetary defense test of asteroid deflection.”

[Related: What NASA’s successful DART mission means for the future of planetary defense.]

During the media briefing, Chabot also stressed that early detection of threatening asteroids will be key in employing kinetic impactor techniques in the future. “This was a 4 percent change in the orbital period of Dimorphos around Didymos. It just gave it a small nudge,” she said. “If you wanted to do this in the future, it would potentially work, but you’d want to do this years in advance. Warning time is really key here in order to enable this sort of asteroid deflection to be used as part of a larger planetary defense strategy.”

The $325-million NASA test began with DART’s launch in November 2021. On September 26th, the car-sized spacecraft made kinetic impact with Dimorphos at 14,000 mph and around 7 million miles away from Earth. The goal was for the spacecraft to nudge the 525-foot-wide asteroid into a tighter orbit around its parent rock. Dimorphos is a smaller companion to the 2,500-foot-wide Didymos, and is a moonlet orbiting the larger body at at less than a mile apart. The two make up a binary asteroid system, and were partially selected because there is zero chance that either object or their ejecta would ever threaten Earth, according to NASA.

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Death is little more than a foregone conclusion for all natural matter, but an ever-expanding universe always tends to put our seemingly inconsequential lives into perspective. For instance, by the time the Milky Way winks out of existence, any evidence that humans ever existed is guaranteed to be long gone. 

In the cosmos, the physics involved in death and dying are a little more subjective than it is here on Earth. For instance, when the sun begins the process of sputtering out, the star will redden and swell up to more than a hundred times its current size. In its final throes, the star will devour the inner planets, leaving Earth to either burn up with it, or freeze over from the cold abyss without a star to keep it warm. Continuing the theme of cosmic devastation, some have predicted that the galaxy as we know it will disappear in another five billion years or so, when the Milky Way collides with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy 2.5 million light-years away to form one mega-entity.

[Related: There’s a chance the black hole at the center of our galaxy is actually a wormhole]

But similarly to how bones can persist years after humans and animals meet their demise, our slice of the cosmos will leave behind a corpse of its own. Though it will be billions of years before such a fate becomes reality, a new study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, details where stars in our beloved Milky Way will end up: the galactic underworld.  

Essentially a graveyard, this celestial Tartarus is home to a ghostly distribution of dead neutron stars and black holes that were formed when exploding supernovae exhausted the life cycles of what were once massive suns. Though invisible to the naked eye, astronomers used digital simulations as well as their knowledge of galactic history to model ancient stellar distributions, paving the way to chart the first map of the Milky Way’s final resting place. “Astronomers have come up with these sorts of super sophisticated simulations of the galaxy and what it looks like,” says David Sweeney, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at the University of Sydney. “So we ran one of these simulations, and looked at where all the stars vanished.” 

Peering past the veil, what they found was certainly surprising. While this galactic cemetery only contains about 1 percent of our galaxy’s overall mass, it exhibits a vastly different distribution and structure than its visible counterpart. This means that unlike a true shadow, they aren’t perfectly in line with each other, and their structures look much different when viewed at different angles. Strangely enough, this cemetery is much bigger than its living twin. In fact it’s so large, it far exceeds that of our own Milky Way.  

“It’s a really bizarre shape,” says Sweeney. “It’s sort of three times the height of our normal galaxy, which means it’s sort of much more puffed up, and it might make it harder to observe.” Puffed up, in this case, means that its form resembles more of a spherical cloud than the spiral arms that our current “living” galaxy is known for. 

[Related: Astronomers just caught a ‘micronova’—a small but mighty star explosion]

It’s natural to ask when exactly the death of the Milky Way is due. Unfortunately, whether or not our galaxy has an expiration date humans can foresee, it’s hard to say, explains Peter Tuthill, co-author of the study and professor of astronomy at the University of Sydney. But, as Tuthill points out, the Milky Way isn’t exactly a spring chicken anymore. 

“The golden age of the universe is behind us,” Tuthill says. “The galaxy we’re in today, is past what astronomers think of as the big epochs of star formation.” Though it’s still forming new stars, the rate at which they’re spawning is steadily decreasing, a sure sign that we may be slowly but surely, on our way out. Either way, scientists are sure at least some pieces of our original galaxy could live on. About 30 percent of the dead neutron stars in the Milky Way’s galactic underworld will eventually be ejected into intergalactic space, flying off to brand new systems, Sweeney says. 

Tuthill adds that the present map astronomers created is purely a statistical one; it can only give astronomers an idea of where to find these dead stars, but it isn’t yet able to assist scientists in identifying individual objects and their exact locations inside of the underworld. As he puts it, “We found a map of the graveyard but we don’t know where the graves are.”

As new research explores these graves in more detail, updated data could begin to alter their perceptions of the initial map. Still, the team is looking forward to seeing what kind of breakthroughs will rise from the dead. 

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In New York City’s ONX Studio, bits and pieces of the universe, as seen through the eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), are on display. It’s a new exhibit that opened last week from Mozilla Hubs, artist Ashley Zelinskie, and NASA called “Unfolding the Universe: A NASA Webb VR Experience.” It was created to commemorate the launch of the space telescope last December.  

Dispersed throughout the exhibition space are rooms with projected movies, desktop computers for users to try the online experience, silk prints, fake fog and laser lights (emulating the birth of stars), and conceptual sculptures inspired by interstellar travel.

At the center of the exhibit’s main room is a spot reserved for the virtual reality aspects of the experience—a digital gallery modeled after the images of galaxies and other celestial bodies from JWST. 

Last Wednesday night, former astronaut Mike Massimino was decked out in a VR headset, headphones, and hand controllers, and ambled around an area whose virtual and physical boundaries have been marked out in the gallery with an outline of white masking tape. (Viewers at home can also join in this part of the exhibition from browsers on their phones, laptop, or desktop here.)

“I’m an astronaut but I’m not a young person who does a lot of virtual reality gaming. I don’t know if I controlled it as well as it could be controlled,” Massimino tells PopSci. Massimino, who once went on spacewalking missions to repair and update the various elements on the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002 and 2009, has a special type of appreciation for the engineering it takes to collect the information needed to make science discoveries in space. ”I worked on Hubble. I can appreciate the images. What [Zelinskie] has been able to do is apply an artistic interpretation of that wonder and discovery to it,” he says.

The virtual experience runs kind of like an online game. Viewers can navigate around a series of corridors in outer space and visit animated artworks or interactive avatars of scientists that Zelinskie interviewed in the process. 

“She kept a lot of the details. What she made here is true to the science behind it and the way that the telescope works,” Massimino adds. “What I like in general about all of this stuff is that it’s taking very technical scientific discovery and it shows the beauty of images, and the beauty of the science behind it, but in a very artistic way so you can engage it at a different level.” 

The James Webb Space Telescope in VR

Zelinskie’s collaboration with NASA and the JWST team started around seven years ago. Since COVID, they had been brainstorming creative ways to engage the public, and landed on the idea of creating a VR experience. They enlisted London-based virtual architects Metaxu Studios and Mozilla Hubs to develop the concept they had in mind. 

[Related: Dive into the wonderful and wistful world of video game design]

“We were able to host a viewing party of the James Webb telescope launch on Christmas with a bunch of scientists and the public and we watched NASA Live TV in our Hubs space. We had each of the scientists in VR as avatars, and we streamed it to YouTube,” Zelinskie, a conceptual and mixed media artist, tells PopSci. 

When the JWST images were released by NASA in July, she wanted to incorporate some of the updated visual elements into an exhibit. 

She added a window of aurora borealis based on the spectroscopy graphs and data from JWST’s first images of exoplanets. There’s also a recurring motif of hexagons that appears in multiple installations, both in person and online. “The reason that they’re hexagons is because they had to fold up into the space capsule. That’s why the show is called ‘Unfolding the Universe,’ because the telescope had to unfold,” Zelinskie explains. “The cool thing about the hexagonal shape of mirrors is it makes this six-pointed star. You’re going to know it’s a Webb image because the stars in that image are going to have the same shape. It’s kind of like an artist signing its work.” 

Zelinskie also conducted interviews with several scientists and engineers, asking them about their career journeys, and their experiences working with JWST. 

“I wanted to house different portraits of the scientists; we did all the sound mapping so when you walk up to them, you can hear the sound of the interview, but then when you walk away, you’re not hearing it,” Zelinskie says. There’s a soundscape running across the virtual gallery that changes depending on where you are in the space. “That’s what [Mozilla] Hubs is really good at—sound tracking.”

Building out the virtual space

John Shaughnessy, Mozilla Hubs’ senior ecosystem and engineering manager, attests that enabling this kind of spatial audio in a device-agnostic browser setting is definitely challenging work. 

There are lots of features to consider, like distance-based fall-off of sound, so conversations close to users are loud, and those further away are quieter. There are also considerations around how sound propagates in the real world. Sounds are different in a room with curtains on the walls versus in a room that has solid metal surfaces. “In fact, we’ve had blind users in Mozilla Hubs who have built add-ons for themselves, customizing the code so they can send audio pings out into the world and listen to how sound bounces off of virtual surfaces to navigate the 3D space without the use of eyesight,” Shaughnessy says. Plus, they have to consider the different qualities of microphones from different users, and noise from things like keyboard typing sounds. 

But it’s part of a larger effort to build the tech backbone that will one day power all types of immersive virtual and metaverse interactions. And these are problems that all metaverse and virtual reality platforms face.

“I think groups of people are going to want to meet in virtual spaces with one another, and we’re going to take that for granted. What we’re trying to do is build the bare bones, basic necessities so that it happens in an open and decentralized way,” Shaughnessy says. “For that we need two things. We need people to have a shared spatial awareness. The second one is a shared sense of presence.”

To this end, Shaughnessy says that they have been borrowing 3D graphics tricks used in game rendering to give the illusion of realism. For example, they use baked lighting to calculate shadows and reflections for fixed objects in the scene ahead of time, so that math doesn’t need to be done in real-time. They also use “level of detail” to keep objects close to the user high-definition while conserving overall memory. 

In this project specifically, Shaughnessy and Mozilla Hubs built the technology that renders the 3D scene of the meeting space and virtual gallery that Zelinskie and the JWST team came up with. “We gave them a tool where they can customize the look, the avatars that are in there, and how they can present this experience. We don’t control who comes and goes. We don’t monitor what you’re doing in that space,” says Shaughnessy.

The sound of the universe cannot travel through the actual vacuum that is outer space. “Inside your space suit, when you’re space walking, it’s really quiet. You can bang with a hammer, and they’ll hear it inside the spaceship because the sound can travel within the structure, but you can’t hear anything,” Massimino notes. “You can hear yourself breathing inside. You can hear people talking to you in your headset. But what you always hear in the background is the whirring of a fan, which tells you your space suit is working, that air is being circulated, that you have power.”

While the soundscape broadcasted inside his VR headset uses a bit of artistic license, he can just pick up the faint, yet familiar whirring of equipment in the background during his virtual space walk. “It’s a comforting sound.”

Unfolding the Universe: First light will be on display at ONX studio in Manhattan, New York through October 23, 2022. Join the VR space from a browser here.

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When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sent back its first images this summer, many of us were gobsmacked at the clarity and beauty of the pictures. But even space telescopes work best with a little support, and JWST has been designed to work with many other telescopes and facilities. Four of JWST’s first images are now getting a little jolt from x-ray vision thanks to NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. These re-mixes of the original images from JWST are composites, meaning they are layered to include data from multiple telescopes. The stellar snapshots show how much more powerful telescopes are when they work together and reveal some feature’s that weren’t visible to JWST alone, according to NASA.

Stephan’s Quintet

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope’s first glimpses into deep space reveal 4 mind-blowing finds.]

Four galaxies within Stephan’s Quintet (about 620,000 lightyears across) are doing an intricate dance with gravity. The fifth galaxy is merely an observer, watching from a distance. The images of the quintet taken by JWST (which have red, orange, yellow, green, and blue colors) shows never-seen-before features and details of the, “results of these interactions, including sweeping tails of gas and bursts of star formation,” according to NASA. The Chandra data (in light blue) of this same system shows a shock wave heating up gas to tens of millions of degrees, while one of the galaxies passes through at about 2 million miles per hour. Infrared data from NASA’s now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope (shown in red, green, and blue) as also included.

Cartwheel Galaxy

The acrobatic Cartwheel galaxy is shaped this way due to a a collision with another smaller galaxy roughly 100 million years ago. Star formation on its outer ring and other places in the galaxy was triggered when the smaller galaxy punched the Cartwheel. Chandra X-rays, shown in blue and purple, are due to, “superheated gas, individual exploded stars, and neutron stars and black holes pulling material from companion stars,” said NASA in a statement. JWST offers an infrared view in red, orange, yellow, green, and blue shows the Cartwheel galaxy and two smaller companion galaxies that were not involved in the 100 million year old collision.

SMACS 0723.3–7327

Located about 4.2 billion light-years away from Earth, JWST’s data shows that the galaxy cluster SMACS J0723 actually contains hundreds of individual galaxies. These galaxy clusters more than their galaxies—they’re some of the biggest structures in the universe. These clusters are, “filled with vast reservoirs of superheated gas that is seen only in X-ray light,” according to NASA. The Chandra data (shown in blue) shows really hot gas. This gas is roughly tens of millions of degrees and has a total mass of about 100 trillion times that of our sun, several times higher than the mass of all of the galaxies in the cluster. A larger fraction of the mass in this cluster is made up by individual dark matter.

[Related: This kilonova could have created the first-ever extragalactic ‘sonic boom.’]

NGC 3324, The Cosmic Cliffs of the Carina Nebula

Cliffs are not just for climbing back on Earth. Chandra’s data of the “Cosmic Cliffs” (shown in pink) in the Carina Nebula reveals over a dozen individual X-ray sources. These stars on the nebula’s outer region are between 1 and 2 million years old, quite young in stellar terms. Typically, young stars are much brighter in X-rays than older stars, so X-ray studies are an, “ideal way to distinguish stars in the Carina Nebula from the many stars of different ages from our Milky Way galaxy along our line of sight to the nebula,” said NASA. The JWST data uses red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, and blue in this image as well.

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Scorching heat, pillars of darkened ash, gushing lava fountains. Volcanic eruptions on Earth are paradoxes of life and death, though they are nothing compared to entire planets embalmed in such a nightmare. 

Lava worlds and other volcanically active bodies are some of the most enthralling cosmic destinations astronomers have ever discovered, and still some of the most scientifically elusive. The James Webb Space Telescope’s first batch of findings could reveal their secrets in greater detail, when paired with research already in the works. In an upcoming issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of scientists at Cornell University took existing atmospheric and surface composition data to understand the mantles—or the interior—of 16 different exoplanets by modeling and synthesizing them here on Earth. They were able to create and cool artificial lava from other distant locales in our universe inside the lab, no volcanic eruption required.

Given that exoplanets are difficult to reach by even our farthest traveling space probes, there have rarely been experimental studies done on these faraway worlds, says Esteban Gazel, lead author of the study and engineering professor at Cornell University who studies geochemistry and volcanology. His team’s new research is the first to provide a “library of composition” for potential exotic exoplanet surfaces—a rolodex of building blocks that exoplanet hunters can reference in their search for faraway planets and fiery space environments. In their lab, Gazel and his colleagues meticulously combined star metallicity data, thermodynamic modeling algorithms, and physical experiments to whip up their synthetic lava batches using different measurements of starting chemicals like magnesium oxide, iron oxide, and silicon dioxide. The final result were several porous igneous rocks, crystallized magma with glass and minerals you can touch without burning your limbs off.  

[Related: Volcanoes, not alien life, might explain Venus’s weird atmosphere]

Eventually, astronomers could use the team’s data from the lava experiments to interpret the inner-makings of different exoplanets. In the future this interplanetary brochure could even be used to shed light on Earth’s red-hot beginnings. “There are so many exoplanets out there in different evolutionary stages,” says Gazel. “If we can figure out their composition, it will give us a lot of information about how our planet evolved.”

Before the dawn of its glittering blue oceans and towering green forests, Earth too was a lava planet—molten and uninhabitable. At one point in its 4.5 billion-year lifetime, the planet might have resembled the hellish landscape of other super-sized Earths, like 55 Cancri e residing some 41 light years away. Today, we know that volcanoes are vital to spawning and sustaining life, as these volatile processes help with atmospheric cooling, land formation, and turning dead dirt into fertile flesh once more. 

While using other planets to investigate our hot origins is hardly a new approach, it would be natural to expect alien planets to possess foreign elements—chemical compounds or materials that we would be unable to replicate on Earth. Yet Lisa Kaltenegger, co-author of the study and the director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell and associate professor in astronomy, says that isn’t the case. She explains that while they may look different to the naked eye, many planets and stars in our celestial neighborhood actually hold the same celestial ingredients, just arranged in different ways. 

“When we look at other stars, we see the disks around them that make the planets,” she says. “And so far in those disks, we haven’t found anything we can’t explain.” That means that their team was able to create all 16 synthetic surfaces with chemical materials easily found here on Earth. Kaltenegger says their work is only just beginning to create a larger picture of the cosmos, and will only continue to improve. They plan to pull in exoplanet data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which will become more precise over time.

[Related: Astronomers are already using James Webb Space Telescope data to hunt down cryptic galaxies]

Despite some calibration issues since the telescope’s initial data release, Karl Gordon, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, says that such small setbacks are expected of any mission. The only difference this time, he says, is how quickly scientists are jumping on the data. “The best way to describe calibration is it’s an exponential,” he says. “Right at the beginning, it’s not so good, and then it quickly gets better and better.” 

Kaltenegger agrees that the calibration issues are mere “stepping stones,” that will begin to clear up as JWST’s mission continues.  

“I think the more time we have with the data, the better we’re going to be in actually finding out nuances that we don’t even see yet,” she says. 

Correction (October 5, 2022): Information in the story originally implied that the new study used data from the JWST. We updated the language to clarify that the team plans to use JWST data in future experiments. An earlier version of this story misspelled Esteban Gazel’s name. We regret the error.

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The Hubble Space Telescope has sent back dazzling images and critical data back to Earth for 32 years, but nothing lasts forever, even space telescopes. In an effort to give the telescope a longer lifespan, NASA and SpaceX signed an unfunded Space Act Agreement. They will be studying the feasibility of a SpaceX and Polaris Program idea to use SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to boost the Hubble into a higher orbit at no cost to the government.

The study is designed to help NASA understand the commercial possibilities of missions like this, but there currently aren’t any plans for NASA to conduct or fund a servicing mission to the telescope or commercially compete in this space, according to NASA.

In partnership with the Polaris Program (a planned human space flight company), SpaceX proposed this study as a way to better understand the technical challenges associated with servicing missions in space. The Polaris Program is funded by billionaire Jason Isaacman, who bought three flights to space on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft earlier this year. SpaceX was founded in 2002 by billionaire Elon Musk with the goal of reducing the costs of space exploration and one day colonize Mars. In 2020, Dragon became the first private spacecraft to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.

[Related: Space tourism is on the rise. Can NASA keep up with it?]

This study is non-exclusive, so other space exploration companies may propose similar studies with different rockets or spacecraft as their model. It’s expected to take six months, and will look at technical data from both the Hubble and the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to determine whether it is possible to safely rendezvous, dock, and move the telescope into a more stable orbit.

“This study is an exciting example of the innovative approaches NASA is exploring through private-public partnerships,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, in a press release. “As our fleet grows, we want to explore a wide range of opportunities to support the most robust, superlative science missions possible.”

[Related: This glittery Hubble image shows how far we’ve come in studying distant stars.]

The Hubble and Dragon will be the test models in this study, but portions of the mission concept may be applicable to other spacecraft. It could be particularly applicable to those in near-Earth orbit like the Hubble, according to NASA. Hubble operates about 335 miles (539 kilometers) above the Earth in an orbit that is slowly decaying over time. Orbital decay like this leads to the gradual decrease of the distance between two orbiting bodies. Hubble has now brushed against the outer edges of Earth’s atmosphere and is now about 18 miles (30 kilometers) closer to Earth than it was in 2009. Re-boosting Hubble into a higher, and more stable orbit could add multiple years of operations to its life.

“SpaceX and the Polaris Program want to expand the boundaries of current technology and explore how commercial partnerships can creatively solve challenging, complex problems,” said Jessica Jensen, vice president of Customer Operations & Integration at SpaceX, in a press release. “Missions such as servicing Hubble would help us expand space capabilities to ultimately help all of us achieve our goals of becoming a space-faring, multiplanetary civilization.”

NASA plans to safely de-orbit or dispose of Hubble at the end of its lifetime.

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Some skeletons are more sparkly than scary. A new image of a far-off galaxy shows us that what lurks underneath a spiral galaxy can be just as spectacular as what our eyes can see. The new images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) show IC 5332, a spiral galaxy over 29 million light years away from the Earth in the constellation Sculptor. It has a diameter of roughly 66,000 light years, making it slightly larger than our Milky Way galaxy.

The MIRI aboard the new telescope observes the furthest reaches of the universe and can see infrared light, so it’s able to peer through the galaxy’s clouds of dust and into the “skeleton” of stars and gas underneath its signature arms. MIRI basically was able to take an x-ray of a galaxy, revealing IC 5332’s bones and a world that looks different, yet somewhat the same.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope’s first image shows the universe in a new light.]

The dust between the arms of the galaxy virtually disappear in this new image, and it also shows some blood-red stars that were missed or blocked in previous pictures taken by the three-decade old, but still kicking, Hubble Space Telescope. Comparing and contrasting these the two images will help astronomers learn more about how stars, dust, and gas interact within swirly spiral galaxies and the specific properties of IC 5332.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), obtaining observations in the mid-infrared range like the scale that the JWST can see, is incredibly challenging from Earth, partially because Earth’s atmosphere absorbs most of the light. The heat from the atmosphere also complicates things. The Hubble can’t observe the mid-infrared region because as its mirrors weren’t cold enough, meaning the “infrared radiation from the mirrors themselves would have dominated any attempted observations,” writes the ESA.

[Related: Neptune’s faint rings glimmer in new James Webb Space Telescope image.]

MIRI operates colder than the rest of the observatory aboard the JWST at a chilly -447 degrees Fahrenheit. That means that MIRI operates in an environment only around a few degrees warmer than absolute zero (-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit), or the lowest possible temperature based on the laws of thermodynamics. This super cold environment is needed for MIRI’s highly specialized detectors to function correctly.

IC 5332 shows up as a pristine image of a spiral galaxy in the wavelengths of light that are visible to the human eye, but this new image shows just how much goes into those dreamy swirls. This galaxy is also notable because it is almost perfectly face-on with respect to Earth, which allows us to better see the symmetrical sweep of its spiral arms from our corner of the universe.

CORRECTION October 3, 2022: A previous version of this article said 29,000 light years when IC 5332 is 29 million light years away. We regret the error.

CORRECTION October 12, 2022: Conversions between Celsius and Fahrenheit have since been updated.

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Etiamophobia is the fear of an asteroid hitting the Earth, presumably ending all life as we know it. While improbable before, we now have a means to protect humanity from the whims of an unpredictable universe. 

On Monday evening, about seven million miles away, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), at last made contact with the asteroid Didymos and its football stadium-sized moonlet, a particularly small natural satellite, Dimorphus. The spacecraft journeyed for a little over 10 months to test if it would be possible to save Earth from future hazardous asteroids or comets by booting them off course. 

“We only have one home so we ought to take care of it,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson during a DART mission overview briefing on Monday afternoon before the mission collision. He went on to note that DART is “the world’s first mission to test the technology for defending Earth against an incoming killer asteroid.” 

While Earth is bombarded by asteroids and smaller meteors on a fairly regular basis, not many are noticed or pose any danger to life on the planet. While humans (so far) have been luckier than the dinosaurs, there’s no telling if Earth’s good fortune will hold up. In fact, the largest recorded asteroid impact to date happened only 115 years ago, when an asteroid the size of a 25 story-building flattened about 800 square miles of forest in an uninhabited area of Siberia, Russia. Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer, told Popular Science that if a similar impact were ever to occur in a metropolitan area, it would most certainly be on the scale of a natural disaster. Johnson says that DART is a “significant milestone” in humanity’s capabilities to protect the planet from such a dark outcome.

“This is the first time that humankind acquired the knowledge and the technology to start to rearrange things a little bit in the solar system, if you will, and make it a more hospitable place for life,” Johnson says.

[Related: NASA’s first attempt to smack an asteroid was picture perfect]

In the minutes before impact, DART hurled toward the moonlet at more than 14,000 miles per hour, before striking 17 meters from the craggy center and utterly destroying itself around 7:14pm EDT. By crashing the more than $3 million probe into the Didymos’ satellite, scientists expect the hit to have shaved at least a fraction of a millimeter per second off Dimorphus’ orbital speed. As DART is about 11 billion pounds smaller than its target, the craft aimed to alter the asteroid’s course, which takes less energy than trying to completely obliterate it, says Johnson. Ultimately, pushing the asteroid away is a safer and altogether surer protective maneuver. “You can never really be assured that you’re going to completely break up an asteroid or destroy it,” he says. “If you’ve done nothing to change its orbit, then you’ve just got a bunch of pieces that are headed at you.” It also saves what could be a precious amount of time before planet impact and maintains more control over the object. 

While the data from the collision is still being collected and processed, humanity’s first attempt at moving a celestial object and its first planetary defense test seems to have been a success: Along with the loss of camera visuals, the spacecraft’s impact was confirmed by a loss of signal. Although it could take anywhere from weeks to a few months before NASA knows just how far the mission was able to push the asteroid out of orbit, the spacecraft’s ability to nail its target has catapulted the concept of planetary defense out of the realm of doomsday-esque movie plots and into a real-life solution. Yet what does this triumphant first step mean for the advancement of other precautionary measures?

While the DART spacecraft met its valiant end, NASA scientists say that the real science of the mission has only just begun. Telescopes on Earth have spent years studying and measuring the Didymos-Dimorphus system, and those same telescopes will now be trained on the system to make new measurements on its orbit relative to what it was before. Other missions that survey the vast sky, like the James Webb Space Telescope, will also soon point towards the asteroid system, said Elena Adams, DART missions systems engineer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, during a post-impact panel on Monday night. NASA and the public could also get images of the system from other active crafts like LICIACube, LUCY, as well as the Hubble Space Telescope. 

[Related: When Voyager 1 goes dark, what comes next?]

And the US isn’t the only nation investing in our planet’s defenses. In October 2024, the European Space Agency will send another probe, HERA, to examine the aftermath of the DART mission, making a detailed impact survey that will give scientists information they need to understand the experiment well enough to do again, with even more success. DART is only the beginning, but it marks the dawn of a universe where humans aren’t just passive residents, but where we can be assured of our place among the inconstant cosmos.  

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This article originally published on September 26, 2022 at 11 a.m. Eastern.

Tonight, the world got to see if NASA’s attempt to redirect the asteroid Dimorphos would be a smashing success. While it’s too early to know if the test fulfilled all of its goals, the first leg went exactly as planned.

Around 7:16 p.m. Eastern, the car-sized spacecraft made kinetic impact with its target. After getting visual confirmation from the vehicle’s cameras, the operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland announced, “All right we got it.” Then the signal from the beat-up spacecraft went dead.

“Now is when the science starts. Now that we’ve impacted, we’re going to see how effective we were,” Lori Glazer, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. said during the live broadcast. “We’re embarking on a new era of humankind. An era in which we potentially have the capability to protect ourselves from something like a dangerous asteroid impact … What an amazing thing.

As a dry run for future asteroid forecasting and deflection, the spacecraft named Double Asteroid Redirection Test (or DART) slammed itself into an asteroid at 14,000 mph tonight around 7 million miles away from Earth. Space telescopes and cameras watched the crash, but it will take days or possibly weeks to find out if DART actually changed the orbit of the rock. “This is stuff of science-fiction books and really corny episodes of ‘StarTrek’ from when I was a kid, and now it’s real,” said NASA program scientist Tom Statler last week at a media briefing.

The $325 million planetary defense test began with DART’s launch in November 2021. The goal is for the spacecraft to nudge the 525-foot-wide asteroid into a tighter orbit around its parent rock (Didymos, the Greek word for “twin”). Dimorphos is a smaller companion to the 2,500-foot-wide Didymos, and is a moonlet orbiting the larger rock at at less than a mile apart. The two make up a binary asteroid system—meaning that the the small moon (Dimorphos) orbits the larger body (Didymos). This pair of asteroids was partially selected because there is absolutely zero chance that either asteroid will threaten Earth, according to NASA.

[Related on PopSci+: The inside story of NASA’s mission to Psyche]

“This really is about asteroid deflection, not disruption,” said Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist and mission team leader at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, at last week’s briefing. “This isn’t going to blow up the asteroid. It isn’t going to put it into lots of pieces.” The impact will dig out a crater tens of yards in size and hurl some 2 million pounds of rocks and dirt into space.

DART weighs in at 1,260 pounds, but punched way above its weight when it slammed into the 11-billion-pound asteroid. “Sometimes we describe it as running a golf cart into a Great Pyramid,” said Chabot. The spacecraft did not survive the impact, and its pieces will slowly spread apart in the asteroid system’s low-gravity field.

The DART spacecraft was built by APL, at the direction of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO). APL is operating the mission which aims to demonstrate that an asteroid large enough to be destructive (or any that are just a few hundred feet wide) can be deflected when a spacecraft is intentionally crashed into it. This method is called kinetic impact deflection, and it is just one of several proposed ways to redirect potentially hazardous asteroids.

[Related: An asteroid the size of a blue whale is speeding past Earth today]

The impact of the collisions was only be visible from a small part of the Earth, passing over Reunion Island, an island in the Indian Ocean, and the South African Large Telescope in Namibia, according to the European Space Agency.

NASA put the odds of DART missing the asteroid at less than 10 percent. While the crash itself was inevitably exciting, the mission isn’t just about smashing into space rocks to see if we can do it. It will also help scientists improve forecasting models to prepare for destructive asteroids. After tonight, the investigation team will measure how much the asteroid is deflected using telescopes back on Earth.

DART is one of multiple asteroid-related space missions. Nearly a pound of space rubble from the distant rock Bennu is currently headed to Earth for further study, and should arrive via NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft in September 2023. Japan was the first to retrieve asteroid samples, and China hopes to follow with a mission planned for 2025. Additionally, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is exploring the Trojan asteroids near Jupiter, and the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout is loaded into NASA’s new moon rocket awaiting liftoff as part of the Artemis I mission.

See the full video of the countdown and moment of impact below:

Correction 10/03/22: Lori Glazer’s quote was incorrectly attributed to Laurie Leshin. We regret the error.

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Known as one of the most complex nebulae in the universe, NGC 6543 , also known as the Cat’s Eye Nebula, is slightly more than 3,000 light-years away from Earth. Astronomers are a bit closer to understanding the 1,000 year old star factory, thanks to a the first three-dimensional model of the Cat’s Eye Nebula.

The study was is published in the October 2022 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and details the building of this stellar new model that reveals a pair of symmetric rings circling the nebula’s outer shell.

The Cat’s Eye Nebula can be seen in the constellation Draco located in the far northern sky. In addition to this new model, The Cat’s Eye Nebula was imaged by the famed Hubble Space Telescope in 1994. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), “it’s a visual ‘fossil record’ of the dynamics and late evolution of a dying star.” A planetary nebula like this one forms when a dying star releases an outer layer of gas, which creates a the colorful, shell-like structure that sets planetary nebulae apart. The telescope allowed astronomers to see the nebula’s complicated structure of knots, spherical shells, and arc-like filaments.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope opens spooky season with stunning images of Tarantula nebula.]

This unusual structure confounded astrophysicists for years because it could not be explained by previously accepted theories for planetary nebula formation.

According to the study, the symmetry of the rings suggests that they were formed by a precessing jet. The precession is similar to the wobbling motion of a spinning top. As the jet, a stream of gas and dust, wobbled (or precessed), it outlined a circle that created the rings around the Cat’s Eye. The new data indicates the the rings are only partial, which means that the precessing jet never completed a full 360-degree rotation, so the emergence of these jets was short lived. The authors say that these findings are strong evidence that this kind of set up is at the core of the Cat’s Eye, since only binary stars can power a precessing jet in a planetary nebula like this one.

Cat’s Eye’s jets and knots were likely formed as the angle and direction of the jet changed over time. The 3D model also allowed the researchers to calculate the tilt and opening angle of the precessing jet based on the rings orientation.

[Related: Dark energy camera gives a tasty view of a lobster-shaped nebula.]

“When I first saw the Cat’s Eye Nebula, I was astounded by its beautiful, perfectly symmetric structure. I was even more surprised that its 3D structure was not fully understood,” said lead author Ryan Clairmont, in a press release. “It was very rewarding to be able to do astrophysical research of my own that actually has an impact in the field. Precessing jets in planetary nebulae are relatively rare, so it’s important to understand how they contribute to the shaping of more complex systems like the Cat’s Eye. Ultimately, understanding how they form provides insight into the eventual fate of our Sun, which will itself one day become a planetary nebula.”

According to the Royal Astronomical Society, Clairmont is an astronomy enthusiast and prospective undergraduate at Stanford who sought to establish the detailed 3D structure of the Cat’s Eye to discover more about what mechanism is giving it such an intricate shape. He sought out the help of Wolfgang Steffen of The National Autonomous University of Mexico and Nico Koning from the University of Calgary, who developed an astrophysical modeling software particularly suitable for planetary nebulae called SHAPE.

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There are strange radio signals that ping us here on Earth. It’s possible to sense them thousands of times every day, if astronomers know where to find them.

These most likely aren’t aliens’ attempts to contact us. Astronomers call them fast radio bursts (FRBs), and they’re some of today’s most vexing space mysteries. We’re starting to get a picture of where they might come from, but we’re not certain what exactly causes them.

Astronomers are working on that. Researchers from Nanjing University and Hong Kong University have modelled what might be shaping one of them, in a paper published in Nature Communications on September 21, studying the rapidly repeating burst named FRB 20201124A.

Fast radio bursts are brief: Most last a second or two, or even less. They are bursts: When they’re created, they’re thought to be as energetic as our sun. That said, by the time the signals reach us, they’ve generally far weaker than our terrestrial radio waves—which partly explains why they’ve taken so long to find.

Astronomers have been observing these little blips in their radio telescopes for more than a decade. In 2007, astronomers combing through six-year-old data found a short, brief pulse from an unknown origin. It was the first of hundreds, so far.

Signals from the unknown

What causes FRBs, if they have a single explanation at all, remains murky. Astrophysicists have suggested links to black holes, neutron stars, gamma ray bursts, supernovae, and all sorts of other distant phenomena (yes, even aliens). 

One popular culprit is a magnetar: a certain type of high-energy neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field, as much as a trillion times the strength of Earth’s. In 2020, astronomers spotted an FRB emanating from a magnetar in our own galaxy. 

[Related: Astronomers caught a potent radio burst blasting at us from a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away]

Even then, what exactly makes a magnetar generate an FRB isn’t known. Some astronomers suspect it’s to do with how magnetars spin, which could create the predictable beats of certain FRBs—somewhat like the clockwork-precise timings of a rotating pulsar. Astronomers call this attribute “periodicity.” Yet, in many cases, there’s no evidence of it. (Another theory is that some FRBs come from discs of gas and dust that build up around black holes.)

Making matters more complex is that every one of those hundreds of FRBs is a different beast. Some flash once, never to be seen again. Some flash a few times. Some stay silent for days, then light up randomly for a short period, then go silent again. And some flash dozens hundreds of times in rapid succession. FRB 20201124A is firmly in the latter category. 

Hunting for FRB 20201124A 

Astronomers first saw it in November 2020 (hence the numbering of its name). They caught a glimpse of its chimes with, well, CHIME—a radio telescope in British Columbia that’s now tasked with scouring for FRBs’ fingerprints. Every day, CHIME sweeps across the sky, pausing in a spot for a few minutes at a time. It was during one of those pauses that the scope found FRB 20201124A.

At first, it seemed like just another FRB. “We didn’t announce it right away,” says Adam Lanman, a postdoctoral astrophysicist at McGill University who was involved with the CHIME finding. That would soon change.

In April 2021, CHIME spotted FRB 20201124A metaphorically lighting up, sending out repeating pulses. CHIME’s astronomers alerted the world’s astronomy community. “Following that, a bunch of other observatories started seeing a lot of events from it,” says Lanman.

[Related: Astronomers just made one giant leap in solving a bizarre cosmic mystery]

One of those observatories was FAST: the world’s largest radio telescope, nestled in the mountains of Guizhou province in southwestern China. In another paper published in Nature on the same day, scientists using FAST reported seeing nearly 2,000 more blasts from FRB 20201124A before the source went silent again.

“This large sample can help us to shed light on the origins of FRBs,” says Wang Fayin, an astrophysicist at Nanjing University.

Repeating FRBs aren’t new, but FAST’s observations saw a number of unique fingerprints in the radio waves that suggested something was playing with them. “There are some unique characteristics of FRB 20201124A, which motivates us to create a model for it,” says Wang.

A model star system

Wang and his colleagues tried their hand at a model. Theirs suggests that FRB 20201124A does hail from a magnetar—but not a magnetar alone. As radio waves burst from the magnetar, they pass through the skirt of the star that the magnetar orbits. It’s a particular kind of star called a Be star, a very bright star shrouded within a disc of plasma and gas. The radio waves from an FRB would pass through that disc, explaining their unique characters. 

“All completely speculative, but none of it’s impossible,” says Jonathan Katz, astrophysicist at Washington University in St Louis, who wasn’t an author.

“I haven’t seen any other papers that go into quite as much detail as this,” says Lanman, who also wasn’t an author.

But this model isn’t a perfect fit to the FAST data—there’s a fair bit of variation it doesn’t fully explain. “Whatever is going on, it might have their model at the core, but there’s a lot more going on than that,” says Katz.

Modelling FRBs in this way isn’t isn’t new. Astronomers have often thought that repeating FRBs are thanks to a neutron star or black hole orbiting another star. On the other hand, it’s not yet clear how, exactly, FRB 20201124A repeats. Katz says outside groups haven’t yet been able to scour the FAST data for evidence of periodicity.

Still, if it’s a magnetar orbiting another star that astronomers are looking for, then they also know where to find it. The same observations that produced the model have helped narrow down FRB 20201124A’s source to a particular galaxy, which can help astronomers find it later. They might do that by searching in other wavelengths: X-rays, for instance, or gamma rays.

Astronomers have tried to scour that galaxy with X-rays before. But the model might help them narrow their search attempts, and that’s what Lanman recommends after this work: “Certainly, further searches for X-ray counterparts going forward” are in order, says Lanman.

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When you think of planets with rings, Saturn normally takes the cake for its iconic icy spirals. But, Saturn isn’t the only planet in our solar system that the universe put a ring on. As a matter of fact, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) just capture the clearest view of Neptune’s rings in over 30 years.

“It has been three decades since we last saw these faint, dusty rings, and this is the first time we’ve seen them in the infrared,” said Heidi Hammel, a Neptune system expert and interdisciplinary scientist for Webb, in a press release.

In 1989, NASA’s Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to observe Neptune during its late 80’s flyby. Now, JWST has taken this crisp image of the planet’s rings—some of which have not been detected since that mission over three decades ago. The photo clearly shows Neptunes finer bands of dust, in addition to the bright and narrow rings.

[Related: The outer solar system awaits—but getting there may not be as easy as we’d like.]

Neptune is an ice giant due to the chemical make-up of the planet’s interior. When compared with the solar system’s gas giants (Jupiter and the more famously ringed Saturn), Neptune is much richer in elements that are heavier than hydrogen and helium.

JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) can see space objects on a different light spectrum called the near-infrared range. This means that Neptune doesn’t appear blue in the pictures the NIRCam takes. “The planet’s methane gas so strongly absorbs red and infrared light that the planet is quite dark at these near-infrared wavelengths, except where high-altitude clouds are present,” according to NASA. These methane-ice clouds show up as bright streaks and spots, which reflect sunlight before begin absorbed by the methane gas. The Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory have also recorded these rapidly changing cloud features.

Astronomers suspect that the thin line of brightness circling the planet’s equator could be a sign that there is atmospheric circulation that fuels Neptune’s winds and storms. It glows at infrared wavelengths more than the surrounding cooler gases because the atmosphere drops down and warms at Neptune’s equator.

It takes Neptune 164 Earth-years to orbit the sun, so its northern pole is just out of view for astronomers. However, the JWST images show a possible brightness up there. JWST can see a previously-known vortex at Neptune’s southern pole, but a continuous band of high-latitude clouds surrounding it was revealed for the first time in these images.

[Related: Neptune is already an ice giant, but it might be having a cold snap.]

JWST also captured pictures of seven of Neptune’s 14 known moons (Galatea, Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Proteus, Larissa, and Triton). Neptune’s large and “unusual” moon Triton is dominating this portrait of the planet, creating a point with diffraction spikes that make it look like a star. Triton is covered in a frozen sheen of condensed nitrogen and it reflects 70 percent of the sunlight that hits it. It is much brighter than Neptune in this image because the planet’s atmosphere is darkened by methane absorption when seen at at these near-infrared wavelengths. Since Triton orbits Neptune in an unusual retrograde orbit (aka backwards), astronomers believe that this moon may have originally been a Kuiper belt object that Neptune used its gravity to capture. Studies of both Triton and Neptune by JWST are planned in the coming year.

Since the first documented discovery of Neptune in 1846, Neptune has long fascinated scientists. Compared to Earth, it 30 times farther from the sun. It orbits in the remote, dark region of the outer solar system, where the sun is so small and faint that high noon on Neptune is similar to a dim twilight on Earth.

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From cities in the sky to robot butlers, futuristic visions fill the history of PopSci. In the Are we there yet? column we check in on progress towards our most ambitious promises. Read the series and explore all our 150th anniversary coverage here.

Lately, all eyes are turned towards the moon. NASA has another launch attempt tentatively scheduled next week for the highly-anticipated Artemis 1 uncrewed mission to orbit Earth’s satellite, one of the first steps to set up an outpost on the lunar surface. But humans—and science fiction writers—have long imagined a moon base, one that would be a fixture of future deep space exploration. About five years before Sputnik and 17 years before the Apollo missions, the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, Arthur C. Clarke, penned a story for the 1952 April issue of Popular Science describing what he thought a settlement on the moon could look like. Clarke, who would go on to write 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, envisioned novel off-Earth systems, including spacesuits that would “resemble suits of armor,” glass-domed hydroponic farms, water mining and oxygen extraction for fuel, igloo-shaped huts, and even railways. 

“The human race is remarkably fortunate in having so near at hand a full-sized world with which to experiment,” Clarke wrote. “Before we aim at the planets, we will have had a chance of perfecting our techniques on our satellite.” 

Since Clarke’s detailed moon base musings, PopSci has frequently covered the latest prospects in lunar stations, yet the last time anyone even set foot on the moon was December 1972. Despite past false starts, like the Constellation Program in the early 2000s, NASA’s Artemis program aims to change moon base calculus. This time, experts say that the air—and attitude—surrounding NASA’s latest bid for the moon is charged with a different kind of determination. 

“You can talk to anyone in the [space] community,” says Adrienne Dove, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida. “You can talk to the folks who have been around for 50 years, or the new folks, but it just feels real this time.” Dove’s optimism doesn’t just come from the Artemis 1 rocket poised for liftoff at Kennedy Space Center. She sees myriad differentiating factors this time, including the collaboration between private companies and NASA, the growing international support for the space governance framework, the Artemis Accords, and the competition from rival nations like China and Russia to stake out a lunar presence. Perhaps one of the biggest arguments from moon base supporters is the need for a stepping stone to send humans even deeper into space. “We want to learn how to live on the moon so we can go to Mars,” Dove says.  

[Related: How Tiangong station will make China a force in the space race]

Mark Vande Hei, a NASA astronaut who returned to Earth in March 2022 after spending a US record-breaking 355 consecutive days on the International Space Station (ISS), underscores the opportunity. “We’ve got this planetary object, the moon, not too far away. And we can buy down the huge risk of going to Mars by learning how to live for long durations on another planetary object that’s relatively close.”

Ever since Sputnik made its debut as the first artificial satellite in 1957, the Soviet Union deployed several short-lived space stations; NASA’s Apollo Missions enabled humans to walk on the moon; NASA’s space shuttle fleet (now retired) flew 135 missions; the ISS has been orbiting the Earth for more than two decades; more than 4,500 artificial satellites now sweep through the sky; and a series of private companies, like SpaceX and Blue Origin, have begun launching rockets and delivering payloads into space. 

But no moon base. 

That’s because exploring the moon is not like exploring the Earth. Besides being 240,000 miles away on a trajectory that requires slicing through dense atmosphere while escaping our planet’s gravitational grip, and then traversing the vacuum of space, once on the moon, daily temperatures range between 250°F during the day and -208°F at night. Although there may be water in the form of ice, it will have to be mined and extracted to be useful. The oxygen deprived atmosphere is so thin it can’t shield human inhabitants from meteor impacts of all sizes or solar radiation. There’s no source of food. Plus, lunar soil, or regolith, is so fine, sharp, and electrostatically charged, it not only clogs machinery and lungs but can also cut through clothes and flesh. 

“It’s a very hostile environment,” says Dove, whose specialty is lunar dust. She’s currently working on multiple lunar missions, like Commercial Lunar Payload Services or CLPS, which will deploy robotic landers to explore the moon in advance of humans arriving on the future crewed Artemis missions. While Dove acknowledges the habitability challenges, she’s quick to cite a range of solutions, starting with the initial tent-pitching location: the moon’s south pole. “That region seems to be rich with resources in terms of ice, which can be used as water or as fuel,” Dove says. Plus, there’s abundant sunlight on mountain peaks, where solar panels could be stationed. She adds that “there might be some rare earth elements that can be really useful.” Rare earth elements—there are 17 metals in that category—are, well, rare on Earth, yet they’re essential to electronics manufacturing. Finding them on the moon would be a boon.

A PopSci story in July 1985 detailed elaborate plans proposed by various space visionaries to colonize the moon and make use of its resources. Among the potential technologies were laboratory and habitat modules, a factory to extract water and oxygen for subsistence and fuel, and mining operations for raw moon minerals—a precious resource that could come in handy and provide income for settlers. While NASA may provide the needed boost to get a moon base going, it’s the promise of an off-world gold rush for these rare, potentially precious elements that could solidify and expand it. 

“My hope is that this is just the beginning of a commercial venture on the Moon,” Vande Hei says. He’s looking forward to seeing how businesses will find ways to be profitable by making use of resources on the moon. “At some point, we’ve got to be able to travel and not rely on the logistics chain starting from Earth,” Vande Hei adds, taking the long view. “We’ve got to be able to travel places and use the resources.”

[Related: Space tourism is on the rise. Can NASA keep up with it?]

And space is lucrative. In 2020, the global space industry generated roughly $370 billion in revenues, a figure based mostly on building rockets and satellites, along with the supporting hardware and software. Morgan Stanley, the US investment bank, estimates that the industry could generate $1 trillion in revenue in less than two decades, a growth rate predicted to be driven in no small part by the US military’s new Space Command branch. But those rising numbers mostly reflect economic activity in Earth’s orbit and what it might take to get set up on the moon—but they do not reflect the potential to begin converting the moon into an economic powerhouse. What happens next is anyone’s guess. The big dollar signs are one reason, no doubt, that the tech moguls behind private ventures like SpaceX and Blue Origin are investing heavily in space now.

The progress towards deeper space travel—and potential long-term human colonization on the moon or beyond—begs for larger ethical and moral conversations. “It’s a little bit Wild West-y,” says Dove. Although the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the more recent Artemis Accords strive “to create a safe and transparent environment which facilitates exploration, science, and commercial activities for all of humanity to enjoy,” according to NASA’s website, there are no rules or regulations, for instance, to govern activities like mining or extracting from the moon valuable rare earth elements for private profit. “There’s a number of people looking at the policy implications and figuring out how we start putting in place policies and ethics rules before all of this happens,” Dove adds. But, if the moon does not cough up its own version of unobtanium—the priceless element mined in the film Avatar—or if regulations are too draconian, it will be difficult for a nascent moon-economy to sustain itself before larger and more promising planetary outposts, like Mars, come to fruition and utilize its resources. After all, the building and sustainability costs and effort have been leading obstacles of establishing a moon base ever since the Apollo program spurred interest in more concrete plans.

Dove’s not really worried that private companies will pull out of the space sector—there’s little doubt they will find a way to profit. Rather, she views politics as the moon base program’s chief vulnerability. “Politics always concerns me with any of these big endeavors,” she adds. Not only domestic politics but international politics will be at play. “We see that with the ISS.”

As a retired military officer who was living on the ISS with Russian cosmonauts when Russia invaded Ukraine, Vande Hei also worries about international conflicts derailing space programs. “If we have a world war in Europe, if we’re just struggling to exist [on Earth], exploring space is not going to be at the top of the priority list.” But he also sees a bright side. He views international competition—or a moon base race—as a healthy way to create a sense of urgency. Vande Hei estimates that “a moon base is something we could do within [this] generation.”

Dove also sees the opportunities that laboratory facilities on the moon could open up for future space research—including her own. “The moon is very interesting in terms of understanding the history of Earth,” she says. “I would love to go do science on the moon.”

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When the first stars and galaxies formed, they didn’t just illuminate the cosmos. These bright structures also fundamentally changed the chemistry of the universe. 

During that time, the hydrogen gas that makes up most of the material in the space between galaxies today became electrically charged. That epoch of reionization, as it’s called, was “one of the last major changes in the universe,” says Brant Robertson, who leads the Computational Astrophysics Research Group at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It was the dawn of the universe as we know it.

But scientists haven’t been able to observe in detail what occurred during the epoch of reionization—until now. NASA’s newly active James Webb Space Telescope offers eyes that can pierce the veil on this formative time. Astrophysicists like Robertson are already poring over JWST data looking for answers to fundamental questions about that electric cosmic dawn, and what it can tell us about the dynamics that shape the universe today.

What happened after the big bang?

The epoch of reionization wasn’t the first time that the universe was filled with electricity. Right after the big bang, the cosmos were dark and hot; there were no stars, galaxies, and planets. Instead, electrons and protons roamed free, as it was too steamy for them to pair up. 

But as the universe cooled down, the protons began to capture the electrons to form the first atoms—hydrogen, specifically—in a period called “recombination,” explains Anne Hutter, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cosmic Dawn Center, a research collaboration between the University of Copenhagen and the National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark. That process neutralized the charged material.

Any material held in the universe was spread out relatively evenly at that time, and there was very little structure. But there were small fluctuations in density, and over millions of years, the changes drew early atoms together to eventually form stars. The gravity of early stars drew more gases, particles, and other components to coalesce into more stars and then galaxies. 

[Related: How old is the universe? Our answer keeps getting better.]

Once the beginnings of galaxies lit up, the cosmic dark age, as astrophysicists call it, was over. These stellar bodies were especially bright, Robertson says: They were more massive than our sun and burned hot, shining in the ultraviolet spectrum. 

“Ultraviolet light, if it’s energetic enough, can actually ionize hydrogen,” Robertson says. All it takes is a single, especially energetic particle of light, called a photon, to strip away the electron on a hydrogen atom and leave it with a positive electrical charge. 

As the galaxies started coming together, they would first ionize the regions around them, leaving bubbles of charged hydrogen gas across the universe. As the light-emitting clusters grew, more stars formed to make them even brighter and full of photons. Additional new galaxies began to develop, too. As they became luminous, the ionized bubbles began to overlap. That allowed a photon from one galaxy to “travel a much larger distance because it didn’t run into a hydrogen atom as it crossed through this network,” Robertson explains.

At that point, the rest of the intergalactic medium in the universe—even in regions far from galaxies—quickly becomes ionized. That’s when the epoch of reionization ended and the universe as we know it began.

“This was the last time whole properties of the universe were changed,” Robertson says. “It also was the first time that galaxies actually had an impact beyond their local region.”

The James Webb Space Telescope’s hunt for ionized clues

With all of the hydrogen between galaxies charged the universe entered a new phase of formation. This ionization had a ripple effect on galaxy formation: Any star-studded structures that formed after the cosmic dawn were likely affected. 

“If you ionize a gas, you also heat it up,” explains Hutter. Remember, high temperatures it difficult for material to coalesce and form new stars and planets—and can even destroy gases that are already present. As a result, small galaxies forming in an ionized region might have trouble gaining enough gas to make more stars. “That really has an impact on how many stars the galaxies are forming,” Hutter says. “It affects their entire history.”

Although scientists have a sense of the broad strokes of the story of reionization, some big questions remain. For instance, while they know roughly that the epoch ended about a billion years after the big bang, they’re not quite sure when reionization—and therefore the first galaxy formation—began. 

That’s where JWST comes in. The new space telescope is designed to be able to search out the oldest bits of the universe that are invisible to human eyes, and gather data on the first glimmers of starlight that ionized the intergalactic medium. Astronomers largely detect celestial objects by the radiation they emit. The ones farther away from us tend to appear in the infrared, as the distance distorts their wavelengths to be longer. With the universe expanding, the light can take billions of years to reach JWST’s detectors. 

[Related: Astronomers are already using James Webb Space Telescope data to hunt down cryptic galaxies]

That, in a nutshell, is how scientists are using JWST to peer at the first galaxies in the process of ionizing the universe. While older tools like the Hubble Space Telescope could spot the occasional early galaxy, the new space observatory can gather finer details to place the groups of stars in time.

“Now, we can very precisely work out how many galaxies were around, you know, 900 million years after the big bang, 800, 700, 600, all the way back to 300 million years after the big bang,” Robertson says. Using that information, astrophysicists can calculate how many ionizing photons were around at each age, and how the particles might have affected their surroundings.

Painting a picture of the cosmic dawn isn’t just about understanding the large-scale structure in the universe: It also explains when the elements that made us, like carbon and oxygen, became available as they formed inside the first stars. “[The question] really is,” Hutter says, “where do we come from?” 

Correction (September 21, 2022): The fluctuations in the early universe’s density took place over millions of years, not billions as previously written. This was an editing error.

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Decades after Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, went their separate ways to explore the universe, the probe has lasted far longer than NASA ever expected—both have sent back discoveries of active volcanoes and new moons among the Jovian and Saturnian systems. Yet even for a spacecraft, getting older comes with its own set of problems. 

This year, without any known interference in its previously spotless record, the probe experienced a glitch in its attitude articulation and control system (AACS), the system which keeps its antennae pointed towards Earth. Confused about its position in space, the muddled probe began sending back inaccurate telemetry data through an onboard computer that had ceased functioning years earlier, corrupting the correct data. 

Although NASA engineers were recently able to fix the issue by commanding the system to revert back to its previous computer, Voyager’s slip begs the question: Is it time to retire one of the agency’s oldest, farthest-traveling space probes? Although the agency notes that the error isn’t a threat to the long-term health of the mission, some scientists have already been looking into creating Voyager’s heir-apparent. 

“We’ve gotten incredibly lucky with the Voyagers and so the fact that the things are still working as well as they are, is really a combination of technological miracle and some luck,“ says Ralph McNutt, the chief scientist for space science at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “So if things go wrong, it’s not surprising.”

McNutt, who was lucky enough to be present at Cape Canaveral, Florida during Voyager 1’s launch in 1977, is the principal investigator of a team at the Applied Physics Laboratory that has recently submitted a detailed proposal to NASA for a mission concept that could far exceed Voyager’s limits. Dubbed the “Interstellar Probe,’‘ their craft would be able to travel even farther than the Voyager missions, while still seeking answers about the heliosphere, or the bubble-like region of space that shields our solar system from galactic radiation. 

[Related: How the most distant object ever made by humans is spending its dying days]

With the right technology, McNutt’s probe concept could be ready to launch between 2036 to 2042, depending on when it’s able to get a gravity assist from Jupiter, where the craft’s orbit would use the planet’s gravitational pull to slingshot itself into space’s outer reaches. If Interstellar Probe does come to fruition, the mission could end up breaking its predecessor’s record as the most distant human-made object in the universe. And unlike the 45-year-old Voyager, which has succeeded its original mission lifetime by a factor of 10, says McNutt, Interstellar Probe would be reliable enough to last for at least 50 years. 

But a potential launch would still be some years away. Although NASA did fund the initial study, the concept is still in its early stages, and won’t be turned into an official mission until it’s been reviewed and chosen by a decadal survey committee, whose decisions could take another two years to be finalized. 

But why exactly do we need probes when astronomers now have access to powerful telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope and the long-awaited dark matter hunter, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope? The simple answer is that the missions often have different priorities and contrasting capabilities. Probes like Voyager and the Parker Solar Probe, are heliophysics missions that study the sun’s influence in space, whereas JWST and Roman are astrophysics missions that study objects like exoplanets and faraway galaxies. Despite their differences, probes and bigger survey telescopes like JWST are also two sides of the same coin. Their discoveries are both needed to create an accurate, more comprehensive picture of our cosmic surroundings. 

[Related: What we learn from noisy signals from deep space]

While Voyager isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, some experts are appreciative of the fact that many in the scientific community are planning for the day Voyager might go dark. 

“Around 2030 is probably the last time that any of the instruments on Voyager will work,“ says Merav Opher, a professor of astronomy at Boston University, who has long been involved with the Voyager team. She says it’s encouraging that so many of her colleagues are working on next-generation projects that could eventually utilize Voyager’s knowledge to the fullest. 

“This long-term mission needs diversity,” she says. “Attention to diversity in teams is not just good diversity, but it’s good to make discoveries.” 

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At 8,000 light years away from Earth, nebula NGC 6357 (aka the Lobster Nebula) is pretty safe from being drenched with drawn butter and service with a a side of corn on the cob and coleslaw at a New England restaurant.

The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) atop the Víctor M. Blanco Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile captured the stellar image as part of The Dark Energy Survey, a project searching the universe for evidence of dark energy.

Astronomers believe that dark energy is the force accelerating the expansion of the universe. They look for evidence of it in images like this one by studying how distant objects move in space. According to NASA, astronomers know how much dark energy is present in the universe because we know how affects universe’s expansion. Beyond that, it’s a mystery. “It turns out that roughly 68 percent of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27 percent. The rest—everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter—adds up to less than 5 percent of the universe,” writes NASA.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope opens spooky season with stunning images of Tarantula nebula.]

The Lobster Nebula fittingly is in the constellation Scorpius. The image released yesterday shows a region about 400 light-years across, with bright young stars scattered across clouds of dust and gas. An open star cluster, or a loose group of very big and young stars is at its center.

Protostars are still wrapped in tight shrouds of gas and dust are some of the brith dots that surround the cluster that will eventually become fully-formed stars. There are also interstellar winds, galactic radiation, and powerful magnetic fields battering the nebula, crushing the gas and dust inside of it into braids and twisting streams.

[Related: Astronomers may have found a galaxy that formed without dark matter.]

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) NOIRLab operates the camera and is a center for “ground-based optical-infrared astronomy, enabling breakthrough discoveries in astrophysics by developing and operating state-of-the-art ground-based observatories and providing data products and services for a diverse and inclusive community.” According to the NOIRLab, DECam is one of the highest-performance wide-field charged-coupled device cameras in the world. It can capture very faint sources of light, deliver 400 to 500 images per night, and recently reached a milestone of 1 million individual exposures.

The images was unveiled during the DECam at 10 years—Looking Back, Looking Forward conference, celebrating a decade of DECam operations. Some of DECam’s other highlights include images of stellar steams that confirm the “melting pot” history of the galaxy and the giant Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein on the outskirts of our Solar System.

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What could be better than one gleaming, spiral galaxy? Two. A new image of a “galactic overlap” from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project appears to show two dueling galaxies more than one billion light years away from Earth. For a closer look, there is a zoomable version of the image.

While it looks like the galaxies SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461 might collide with one another, they are just aligned by chance and ESA likened them to two ships passing in the night. Hubble has captured similar galaxies that appear to be hanging out together in the past, such as NGC 1512 and NGC 1510 in 2017 and NGC 6285 and NGC 6286 in 2019.

[Related: Hubble image captures stars forming in a far-off phantom galaxy.]

This is one of many Hubble galaxy observations where the Galaxy Zoo project has played a big role. Since 2007, the citizen science project and its successors, including Galaxy Zoo 2 and Galaxy Zoo: CANDELS, have crowdsourced galaxy classifications from almost 90,000 volunteer astronomers. The citizen scientists classify galaxies imaged by robotic telescopes and are often the first to ever set eyes on an astronomical object, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). To date, Galaxy Zoo has classified 5,134,932 galaxies. Galaxy Zoo volunteers have also discovered a “menagerie of weird and wonderful galaxies,” such as unusual 3-armed spiral galaxies and colliding ring galaxies.

From our perspective on Earth, it’s not uncommon for galaxies to overlap like this. The new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured a 150-million-pixel shot a group of five galaxies that appear to swirl together called Stephan’s Quintet in July. In this group of five, only a few of galaxies in the group are interacting. According to NASA, images like this, “provide new insights into how galactic interactions may have driven galaxy evolution in the early universe.”

[Related: Behold six galactic collisions, masterfully captured by Hubble.]

Galaxies are classified into three major categories: elliptical, spiral and irregular. Ellipticals make up about one-third of all galaxies and can vary from nearly circular to more elongated. The largest and rarest are called giant ellipticals, and are about 300,000 light-years across.

Spiral galaxies are very colorful. They typically appear as flat, blue-white disks of stars, gas and dust with yellow looking bulges in the middle. There are two types of spiral galaxies, normal and barred. Barred spirals have a bar of stars running through the central bulge and the arms usually start at the end of the bar instead off from a bulge. Normal spirals have arms that extend from a center, that look like a hurricane’s eye.

Irregular galaxies are (as the name suggests) the most unusual galaxy. They’re neither disk-like nor elliptical and contain very little dust. These are often seen by astronomers as they gaze deeper into the universe. Looking that deep is like looking back in time, and irregular galaxies are abundant in the early universe, before spirals and ellipticals even developed.

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Astronomers typically divide the planets in our solar system into two types: Rocky worlds and gas giants. But, according to a new study of planets in other star systems in our galaxy, there’s a third kind of world, which is made up of about 50 percent water and 50 percent rock. And such a water-rich world is a tantalizing place for astronomers to test their hypotheses about what makes a planet capable of supporting life. 

“Within our lifetimes, we may, for the first time, be able to say something scientifically proven about habitability on other planets,” says Rafael Luque, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago who is the first author on the new study published Thursday in the journal Science. “And that’s a major, major step.”

In recent years, astronomers have been rapidly detecting new planets orbiting stars beyond our own, called exoplanets. To date, more than 5,000 exoplanets have been discovered and confirmed. But figuring out exactly what those worlds look like—and therefore whether or not they might be habitable—from light years away is a difficult feat. 

Most exoplanets have been discovered using what is called the transit method, which identifies a planet indirectly by observing how its star’s light dims slightly when the planet passes in front of it. Astronomers can also infer the radius of an exoplanet by how much starlight it blocks. Scientists have used that information to compare these alien worlds with the planets in our own solar system as a way of hypothesizing what they might look like. A planet with the same radius as Earth, for example, is thought to be quite rocky.

But in orbit around many red dwarf stars, which are by far the most common stars in our galaxy, there’s a kind of planet that doesn’t have an analog in our solar system. Based on their radii, these worlds fit in the gap in size between Earth and Neptune. 

[Related: Newly discovered exoplanet may be a ‘Super Earth’ covered in water]

The thinking among astronomers has long been that those small planets fit into two categories: some were thought to be “super-Earths” and some were “mini-Neptunes.” This idea was bolstered by the observation of a dearth of exoplanets that had a radius around 1.6 times that of Earth, which is called a “radius valley,” explains Ravi Kopparapu, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who was not involved in the new study. The way that a star’s radiation erodes a planet’s atmosphere, he says, has been thought to explain that gap in radii.  

By that logic, “super Earths,” which were on the smaller side of that radius valley, were left with very thin atmospheres and a largely exposed rocky surface. “Mini-Neptunes,” on the other hand, had retained thick, puffy atmospheres and therefore these gassy planets had larger radii. 

But there could be other ways to build an exoplanet to have those radii. Because they have no analogues in our solar system, these worlds could be truly alien. So to figure out what materials might make up these distant planets, Luque and his collaborator Enric Pallé sought to determine their density.

Density isn’t something that can be measured directly from so far away, but with a planet’s mass and radius, it’s a simple calculation (mass divided by volume equals density). The researchers used the radius and mass measurements from 34 planets newly detected by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which launched in 2018, to gather a sample of densities for these mysterious small exoplanets.

[Related: We may be underestimating how many cold, giant planets are habitable]

Based on their calculations, the radius valley is not what separates the different types of planets in orbit around red dwarf stars. It’s density. And they extrapolated that those exoplanets can be one of three types of world: rocky, gaseous, or, the new type, water-rich. 

“We may think of Earth as a water-rich planet, but the water on Earth is just 0.02 percent of its total weight,” Luque says. The density of these distant water worlds, meanwhile, indicates that about half of their mass is water. 

But don’t start picturing a world with a rocky core and a deep ocean of water sloshing around on top of it, exposed to space, Luque says. “What we’ve seen in our sample is that this water cannot be on the surface,” he says. “The water may be trapped below the surface or maybe mixed with the magma, but it is not going to be in the form of deep, deep oceans–at least not at the surface.”

The closest analogues that we have in our own solar system to such water-rich worlds are the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. For example, Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, has a deep ocean sloshing around under a global water ice shell. 

It’s unlikely that these exoplanets have a water ice shell, Luque says, because they are much closer to their star–any water on the surface would evaporate. That is, at least, on the sun-facing side of the planet. These worlds do not turn on their axis to have a day and night cycle like Earth does. Instead, there is a permanent light and dark side. However, Luque says, perhaps there is a region where the light and dark side meet, in a sort of a perpetual twilight, where the temperature on the surface might be just right for liquid water to be stable. 

In the search for habitable worlds, astronomers typically use liquid water as a guide. That’s because it is essential for life as we know it (that is, life on Earth, because it is the only life we know of so far). 

“We only have one template of life in this universe, so we use that as a template to find life elsewhere,” Kopparapu says. But stable liquid water isn’t the only thing needed to make a place habitable by that definition, and just because a place is capable of supporting life doesn’t mean that something lives there, he adds. 

To investigate the habitability of these distant worlds, astronomers will turn to tools like the newly-launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which can peer into the chemistry of exoplanet atmospheres to reveal more details about their composition. With telescopes like JWST, astronomers will look for water vapor to confirm the presence of H2O as well as gases like methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and more that are found in Earth’s atmosphere. 

“We are finding more and more evidence that there are a lot of potentially habitable worlds. Our Earth is not unique,” Kopparapu says. He uses an analogy: “If you move into a new neighborhood, and you want to introduce yourself to your neighbors, you may see a lot of houses but you don’t see many people. So we are finding lots of houses. Now we just need to find people.”

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It’s certainly been an exciting few months for telescopes. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has just released stellar new images of the sun’s face, courtesy of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawaii. The images show the chromosphere, the middle layer of the sun’s atmosphere, which can reach over 13,000 degrees Farenheit. The pictures vaguely resemble the bright yellow flowers in Vincent van Gogh’s painting, “Sunflowers.”

Hairs of fiery plasma flow into the corona, the suns outermost atmospheric level, from a pattern of pores. The sun’s chromosphere sits below the corona, which is usually invisible and historically has only been seen during a total solar eclipse. But new technology like this telescope has changed that.

The blistering blobs are called granules and are about 994 miles wide. Each of these portraits shows an area about 51,260 miles wide, only a small percentage of the sun’s total diameter.

[Related: NASA’s solar probe reveals stunning results after swooping in close to the sun.]

The images were taken on June 3 and released to the public this week. Named for the late Hawaiian Senator Daniel K. Inouye, the DKIST is currently the largest solar telescope in the world. The 13 feet-wide telescope rests on the peak of the mountain and volcano Haleakalā (or “House of the Sun”) on the island of Maui. It’s focused on understanding the explosive behavior of the sun and observing its magnetic fields. It will also help scientists predict and prepare for solar storms called coronal mass ejections (CME). CME bursts send hot plasma from the sun’s corona to Earth and interfere with electricity and internet connections. It is part of the NSF’s National Solar Observatory.

“With the world’s largest solar telescope now in science operations, we are grateful for all who make this remarkable facility possible,” said Matt Mountain, AURA President, in a press release. “In particular we thank the people of Hawai‘i for the privilege of operating from this remarkable site, to the National Science Foundation and the US Congress for their consistent support, and to our Inouye Solar Telescope Team, many of whom have tirelessly devoted over a decade to this transformational project. A new era of Solar Physics is beginning!”

[Related: What happens when the sun burns out?]

This telescope is not free from controversy since its location is in a sacred spot of Native Hawaiians. Mountain tops likes this one are regarded as wao akua, (realm of the gods), places where both deities and demigods existed on Earth. They are still sacred places of reverence, where many Native Hawaiians visit to honor ancestors and practice other spiritual traditions.

In a 2017 interview with Science, Kaleikoa Kaeo, a Hawaiian-language educator at the University of Hawaii Maui College in Kahului and a leader in opposition to the telescope said, “As a people, we don’t have control of some of our most sacred spaces. They say it’s Hawaiian culture versus science. I say, ‘No, it’s Hawaiian culture versus white supremacy.'”

Following protests in 2015 and 2017, the telescope’s officials began to meet with working groups of Native Hawaiians, who have since gained more authority over the site. The peak also remains open to native Hawaiians and a sun-centered middle-school curricula that highlights Hawaii’s long history of studying astronomy has been developed.

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As the leaves in the Northern Hemisphere begin to change colors and Halloween decorations begin to emerge from dusty attics, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) appears to be embracing “spooky season.” The powerful NASA/ESA/CSA space telescope released chilling new images of 30 Doradus aka the Tarantula Nebula yesterday. The nebula’s arachnid inspired nickname comes from its similar appearance to a burrowing tarantula’s silk-lined home, according to NASA.

The Tarantula Nebula is about 161,000 light-years away from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy and is home to some of the hottest and and biggest stars known to astronomers. It is also the biggest and brightest star-forming region in the Local Group, or the galaxies located closest to our own Milky Way. In addition to the baby stars, the images captured by JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) reveal distant background galaxies and a closer look at the detailed structure and composition of the nebula’s gas and dust.

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope’s first glimpses into deep space reveal 4 mind-blowing finds.]

The nebula’s cavity was hollowed out like a jack-o-lantern by blistering radiation from a cluster of young stars that sparkle pale blue in the new image. Only the densest surrounding areas of the nebula can resist erosion by the powerful stellar winds blown by young stars, forming the pillars that appear to point back toward the cluster. The pillars contain forming protostars, very young stars that are still gathering mass from a molecular cloud. The protostars will eventually emerge like a caterpillar from a cocoon and further shaping the nebula. JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) caught a very young star doing just that, adding new knowledge to this stellar process.

“Astronomers previously thought this star might be a bit older and already in the process of clearing out a bubble around itself,” wrote NASA. “However, NIRSpec showed that the star was only just beginning to emerge from its pillar and still maintained an insulating cloud of dust around itself. Without Webb’s high-resolution spectra at infrared wavelengths, this episode of star formation in action could not have been revealed.”

[Related: NASA releases Hubble images of cotton candy-colored clouds in Orion Nebula.]

Astronomers are also reaping the benefits of JWST’s Mid-infrared Instrument (MIRI), which can detect longer infrared wavelengths and see through the stellar dust in a nebula. MIRI peered into a previously unseen cosmic environment, where that the hotter stars fade, the cooler gases and dust glow, and the points of light within the nebula’s clouds indicate embedded protostars that are still gaining mass.

The Tarantula Nebula has been a favorite of astronomers studying star formation since it has has a similar chemical makeup to that of the gigantic star-forming regions at the universe’s cosmic noon. This is when the cosmos were roughly two to three billion years old and star formation was at its peak. The Tarantula Nebula is the closest (easiest to see in detail) example of what was happening in the universe as it reached that brilliant high noon of furious star birth.

According to NASA, JWST will help give astronomers opportunity to compare and contrast observations of star formation in the Tarantula Nebula with the telescope’s deep observations of distant galaxies from the actual era of cosmic noon.

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For the first time ever, astronomers at NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) captured a direct image of an exoplanet using the James Webb Space Telescope. Extra solar planets, or exoplanets, are planets that exist outside of our solar system.

Researchers are currently analyzing the new data from these observations and are working on a paper for peer review. The findings are currently published in a preprint. But Webb’s first capture of an exoplanet already hints at future possibilities for studying distant worlds.

JWST captured the image of the inhabitable gas giant called HIP 65426 b located about 385 light-years away from Earth. It is roughly six to 12 times the mass of Jupiter (our solar system’s biggest planet) and astronomers believe that their observations could help narrow down that estimate. Compared to 4.5 billion-year-old Planet Earth, HIP 65426 b is only 15 to 20 million years-old, so still a young one as far as planets go.

[Related: In a first, James Webb Space Telescope reveals distant gassy atmosphere is filled with carbon dioxide.]

“This is a transformative moment, not only for Webb but also for astronomy generally,” said Sasha Hinkley, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, who led these observations with a large international collaboration, in a NASA blog.

The image released by NASA/ESA/CSA shows the exoplanet through four different light filters. Unlike the human eye, JWST can see the universe in infrared light, which gives astronomers more precise measurements of an exoplanet’s mass and temperature and can even detect clouds moving in a distant planet’s sky. The infrared light pointing the way to future observations that will reveal more information than ever before about exoplanets.

JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) have coronagraphs. These are sets of tiny masks that can block out starlight and enable the telescope to take direct images of certain exoplanets like HIP 65426 b. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch this decade, will demonstrate an even more advanced coronagraph.

“It was really impressive how well the Webb coronagraphs worked to suppress the light of the host star,” said Hinkley.

While this specific image is new to astronomers, HIP 65426 b is not. The exoplanet was first detected in 2017 using the SPHERE instrument located at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope in northern Chile. The ground-based telescope took images of the exoplanet using short infrared wavelengths of light. JWST is able to capture longer infrared wavelengths, revealing some new details that ground-based telescopes can’t necessarily see due to the intrinsic infrared glow of Earth’s atmosphere.

While more than 5,000 exoplanets have been discovered, taking direct images of them is incredibly challenging. Exoplanets revolve around a star just like Earth revolves around the sun, and those stars are typically much brighter than planets. According to NASA, HIP 65426 b is more than 10,000 times fainter than its host star in the near-infrared and a few thousand times fainter in the mid-infrared.

[Related: Newly discovered exoplanet may be a ‘Super Earth’ covered in water.]

In each filter image, HIP 65426 b appears as a slightly differently shaped blob of light due to how JWST’s optical system translates light through the different optics.

“Obtaining this image felt like digging for space treasure,” Aarynn Carter, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the analysis of the images said in the NASA release. “At first all I could see was light from the star, but with careful image processing I was able to remove that light and uncover the planet.”

While this is not the first direct image of an exoplanet taken from space, these images of HIP 65426 b points the way forward for JWST’s exciting exoplanet exploration.

“I think what’s most exciting is that we’ve only just begun,” said Carter. “There are many more images of exoplanets to come that will shape our overall understanding of their physics, chemistry, and formation. We may even discover previously unknown planets, too.”

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This morning, the Artemis 1 flight was supposed to launch on a mission to the moon, but the flight experienced setbacks due to engine issues and has been postponed. If and when the massive Space Launch System does get off the ground, this uncrewed test mission will push the Artemis program forward for NASA, which aims to eventually return astronauts to the moon. Orion, the spacecraft on top of the SLS being used for the test, will have no humans aboard, but three companies—Lockheed Martin, Cisco, and Amazon—have teamed up to assemble a tech package that could give NASA additional info on what’s happening onboard. 

The collaboration, given the project name Callisto, has been four years in the making. It was announced to the public earlier this year. This demo will test whether Alexa could be used to control certain spacecraft functions like lights, or fetch telemetry data hands-free, and whether Webex could be used to establish a secure and stable connection for video-conferencing and more. 

Here’s a peek at how the companies got their Star Trek-inspired tech space-ready. 

A beta test in space

For both Cisco and the Alexa team, after they were pitched the idea by Lockheed Martin in September 2018, they made a game plan, and kicked off official work in 2019. From then on, both teams came up with designs, worked through kinks with hardware and the software, and put on the finishing touches.

“The thing that I thought was interesting when I started working with Lockheed Martin was their approach to this project was very customer-focused,” says Justin Nikolaus, lead voice UX designer for Alexa. “Astronauts’ time in space is very expensive, it’s very scripted, and they wanted to make them as efficient as possible. They’re looking for different ways for astronauts to be able to interact with the vehicle. Voice is one of those mechanisms.”

The goal from the beginning was to make the lives of end users—the astronauts—easier, safer, and more enjoyable. Nikolaus refers to this current attempt as “probably a beta test of sorts.”  

But the journey of adapting Earth tech for space was filled with many unique challenges. 

“At every major milestone, we started having more hardware. I know modeling, I know machine learning, but space is a brand new frontier for me,” says Clement Chung, the applied science manager at Alexa. “We could plan for and guess what it looks like, but as we get different hardwares and the spaceship to start testing, a lot of our assumptions go out the door.” 

[Related: The big new updates to Alexa, and Amazon’s pursuit of ambient AI]

The acoustic sounds in the space capsule, the closed environment of the spacecraft, and what astronauts would want to say or how they want to interact with Alexa were all factors they had to consider in their initial design. Additionally, the team had to integrate Alexa and the Amazon cloud with NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) and add local processing capabilities to reduce latency. 

To start, the team worked to adjust Alexa’s abilities and tweak it for a different audience in a different setting. 

Using space sounds provided by Lockheed Martin, and considering the materials used onboard, they retrained their models, as the noise-to-signal ratio was different. Cisco, to this end, will use their background noise-canceling software to work around this challenge. 

Also, Alexa, the voice assistant, had to learn a lot of new knowledge. “Just from a content perspective, I interviewed former astronauts, flight controllers to understand what astronauts want to ask and how to deliver that information,” Nikolaus says. For instance, Alexa has access to 100,000 telemetry endpoints on Orion, from the science data it’s gathering on its mission, to the temperature and functions on different parts of the spacecraft, to where it is positioned and headed in its flight. 

“I had to turn that technical data into an easily digestible sentence for Alexa to speak back to the crew members,” Nikolaus says. “There’s a lot of nuances for this environment and this specific user that we had to learn and research and make appropriate for the flight that’s going to happen.”

Above the clouds, and beyond the cloud

Beyond this, the team had to work out the bigger infrastructure questions. The device had to be robust, as it’s not like a repair team could easily update it. “When you go out to space you need to consider radiation, you need to consider shock, vibrations, temperature control, the components that are in there,” says Philippe Lantin, principal solutions architect for Alexa voice service. “You really can’t have batteries, for example. I thought this was a great learning experience for us to design things in a certain way that may be more resilient.” 

Once the device was constructed, they had to sort out how best to divide Alexa’s functions between the cloud and an onboard computer. “We had to figure out how we get the voice of the VIP that’s on the ground to the craft. So we had to create that technology from scratch,” says Lantin. A big focus for the project was on making a self-contained version of Alexa that doesn’t rely on the cloud. “There’s a very reduced bandwidth that we’re allowed to use for this project. The total amount of time between when you speak and when you hear a response could be 13 seconds.” 

Adjusting to the bandwidth availability and latency was also a problem Cisco worked to overcome. In addition to video-conference, Cisco has cameras set up as their eyes around the spacecraft. “Right now we’re firing up megabits worth of video, and that’s just not a reality with deep space exploration where we rely on NASA’s deep space network,” says Jono Luk, VP of product management at Cisco.. 

Amazon engineers determined that using a cloud-based service to Alexa, where it reaches out to Amazon servers to give you a response, would not be practical in space. So they expanded upon a feature called local voice control, which can be found in certain Echo family devices for tasks like fetching the time, date, and smart home commands like turning on and off lights, and changing its color. 

While people on the ground are used to being able to ask Alexa to turn on the lights, Alexa in space will do something similar: It has the ability to control the connected devices onboard Orion. So there is a set of lights that Alexa will be able to control, and Webex cameras would be used to confirm whether Alexa is turning on and off the lights

But Alexa will not be all alone in space all the time. The last question the team is testing is whether Alexa could make certain requests that go back down to a secured cloud on Earth to be processed. These would be if astronauts wanted to ask for sports scores or keep up to date on whatever’s happening on Earth. “There’s some things that you just can’t know ahead of time,” says Nikolaus.  

If the tech demo goes well on the uncrewed mission, both companies could imagine future applications where this tech could help human crew onboard, even just with small things to start, like setting timers, schedules, and reminders. 

Cisco is already testing features like annotating pictures to provide instructions for how an astronaut should proceed with an experiment in space from the ground, for example. Even more ambitiously, Luk imagines that they could integrate more immersive experiences in future tests, such as augmented reality or the hologram function. 

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While most of us were busy watching for the latest Artemis I news, NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has sent back stunning new images of spiral galaxy M74. The rosy pink arms of the image show areas of new star formation. Lying around 3.2 million light-years away from earth in the constellation Pisces, M74 is also known as the “Phantom Galaxy,” and is a familiar sight for the over three-decades old space telescope.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the reddish blooms that spread throughout M74 are large clouds of hydrogen gas. The ultraviolet radiation from hot, young stars embedded within the hydrogen clouds make them glow. Astronomers call these regions H II regions and they mark the spot of recent star formation. H II regions are an important target for space telescopes like Hubble and ground-based telescopes because they help astronomers determine a galaxy’s distance and chemical composition. The data in this image was by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, which even has a filter specially tailored to pick out only this specific red wavelength of light.

The Hubble team created this image from data of observations exploring the evolution of local spiral galaxies such as M74. This will help astronomers gain insights into the history of star formation in these spirals. Astronomers also observed M74 to complement observations of the region from other telescopes. By combining observations of the same object from different telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum gives, astronomers gain far more insight than they would from a single telescope.

[Related: NASA releases Hubble images of cotton candy-colored clouds in Orion Nebula.]

Additionally, Hubble’s observations also paved the way for future instruments and M74 was one of the first targets of the powerful, newly launched James Webb Space Telescope.

NASA/ESA uses four classes to define galaxies: spiral, barred spiral, elliptical, and irregular.

Spiral galaxies typically have a rotating disc with spiral ‘arms’ that curve out from a dense central region. They have a more complex structure and are surrounded by sparsely populated halos. These halos are roughly spherical regions above and below the plane of the discs. Our galaxy, The Milky Way, is an example of a spiral galaxy.

Barred spiral galaxies have arms that do not lead all the way into the center, but are connected to the two ends of a straight bar of stars which contains the nucleus at its centre. Roughly two-thirds of all spiral galaxies are thought to be barred spiral galaxies. In 2021, the Hubble produced beautiful images of NGC 613, a barred spiral galaxy about 67-million light years away from Earth.

[Related: Astronomers may have found a galaxy that formed without dark matter.]

Elliptical galaxies do not have as defined shape as spiral galaxies, have a more spherical appearance smooth, and are typically observed in galaxy clusters. Cygnus A is one of the most famous elliptical galaxies and was a central part of the plot of Carl Sagan’s 1985 sci-fi novel “Contact.”

Irregular galaxies have odd shapes and appear to be more grainy. Unlike spiral galaxies, they do not have a central nucleus, and they are generally blue with a few exceptions that are red. IC10 is a recent example of an irregular galaxy and is the closest-known “starburst galaxy” to Earth. Starbursts are regions undergoing huge amounts of star formation do to having a lot of cool hydrogen gas to fuel it.

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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues its sizzling summer of scientific discovery, finding the first clear evidence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. The findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Nature. Extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, are any planet outside of our solar system. Most of them orbit other stars the way Earth orbits the sun, but some free-floating exoplanets (aka rogue planets) orbit a galactic center, untethered to any other stars.

This new finding means that the groundbreaking JWST may be able to detect and measure key molecules like carbon dioxide in the thinner atmospheres of smaller rocky planets in the future. This kind of data gives scientists insight into the formation, composition, and evolution of the galaxy’s planets.

Exoplanet WASP-39b was first discovered in 2011. Seven years later, NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes detected water vapor, sodium, and potassium in WASP-39b’s atmosphere, offering a glimpse at what’s going on around the planet. In 2022, it became the first exoplanet to be studied by JWST.

Spinning about 700 light-years away from Earth, WASP-39b is a hot gas giant with a mass about the same as Saturn, but a diameter about 1.3 larger than Jupiter (our solar system’s biggest planet). The planet’s puffiness is partially due to the fact that it’s about 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit (900 degrees Celsius), giving it the nickname “hot Saturn.” WASP-39b is in an endless summer because it orbits its home star very closely, unlike the cooler and more compact gas giants in our solar system. It’s so close that it completes a complete orbit of its star, or one “year,” in just over four Earth-days.

[Related: NASA’s official exoplanet tally has passed 5,000 worlds.]

WASP-39b was first reported using ground-based detections of periodic dimming of light from its host star. This is when the light from the planet’s host star dims as the the planet passes in front of it, like during an eclipse. Transiting, or this eclipse-like event, can provide researchers with ideal opportunities to probe planetary atmospheres.

Different gases absorb different combinations of colors, which means researchers “can analyze small differences in brightness of the transmitted light across a spectrum of wavelengths to determine exactly what an atmosphere is made of” according to NASA. WASP-39b’s combination of inflated atmosphere and frequent transits makes it a perfect target for a technique called transmission spectroscopy.

The team used JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) for these observations. “As soon as the data appeared on my screen, the whopping carbon dioxide feature grabbed me,” Zafar Rustamkulov, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and member of the JWST Transiting Exoplanet Community Early Release Science team, which undertook this investigation, said in a statement. “It was a special moment, crossing an important threshold in exoplanet sciences.”

[Related: Newly discovered exoplanet may be a ‘Super Earth’ covered in water.]

Measuring such subtle difference in the brightness of so many single colors across the 3 to 5.5-micron range in an exoplanet transmission spectrum is a first for researchers, NASA reports. It’s critical to access this part of the spectrum when measuring how much gas, water, methane, and carbon dioxide in exoplanets.

“Detecting such a clear signal of carbon dioxide on WASP-39 b bodes well for the detection of atmospheres on smaller, terrestrial-sized planets,” team leader Natalie Batalha of the University of California at Santa Cruz said in the NASA statement.

For scientists, understanding what makes up a planet’s atmosphere is important because it offers a window into its origin and evolution. “Carbon dioxide molecules are sensitive tracers of the story of planet formation,” research team member Mike Line of Arizona State University said in the NASA statement. “By measuring this carbon dioxide feature, we can determine how much solid versus how much gaseous material was used to form this gas giant planet. In the coming decade, JWST will make this measurement for a variety of planets, providing insight into the details of how planets form and the uniqueness of our own solar system.”

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An extrasolar planet named TOI-1452 b was recently discovered by an international team of researchers led by Charles Cadieux, a graduate student at the Université de Montréal and member of the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx). Their findings on this possible “Super Earth” were published in The Astronomical Journal.

According to NASA, extrasolar or exoplanets are any planets beyond our solar system. Most exoplanets orbit other stars like Earth does with our sun, but free-floating exoplanets (or rogue planets) orbit the galactic center and are untethered to any star. TOI-1452 b is about 100 light-years away from planet Earth and is orbiting a red dwarf star in a binary star system located in the Draco constellation. It is slightly bigger than Earth in both in size and mass and is potentially rocky.  TOI-1452 b’s temperature is what Goldilocks would call “just right,” since liquid water could exist on its surface due to the planet’s distance from its star.

The team believes that TOI-1452 b could be an “ocean planet.” These types of moist celestial bodies are completely covered by a thick layer of water, like some of Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s moons. According to astronomers, some of the recently identified exoplanets have a density that can only be explained if a large fraction of their mass is made up of lighter materials than the ones that make up the internal structure of the Earth. Water is the primary suspect.

“TOI-1452 b is one of the best candidates for an ocean planet that we have found to date,” Cadieux said in a statement. “Its radius and mass suggest a much lower density than what one would expect for a planet that is basically made up of metal and rock, like Earth.”

Two experts in exoplanet interior modeling (Mykhaylo Plotnykov and Diana Valencia of The University of Toronto) analyzed TOI-1452 b and their modeling shows that water may make up as much as 30 percent of the planets mass.

[Related:NASA’s official exoplanet tally has passed 5,000 worlds.]

The team first got on TOI-1452 b’s trail through NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a space telescope that searches the entire sky for planetary systems close to our own. According to the study, the TESS signal showed a slight decrease in brightness every 11 days, leading astronomers to believe that the exoplanet is about 70 percent larger than Earth due to this quick orbit time. According to NASA, one “year” on TOI-1452 b is only 11 days, since it takes that amount of time to orbit its star. The red dwarf star is smaller and cooler than our sun, so TOI-1452 b receives about as much light as what Venus gets from the sun. Cadieux and a group of astronomers follow-up TESS observations with ground based telescopes to confirm the planet type and other characteristics.

“I’m extremely proud of this discovery because it shows the high calibre of our researchers and instrumentation,” said René Doyon, Université de Montréal Professor and Director of iREx and of the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic (OMM) in a statement. “It is thanks to the OMM, a special instrument designed in our labs called SPIRou, and an innovative analytic method developed by our research team that we were able to detect this one-of-a-kind exoplanet.”

[Related: Some exoplanets tilt too much, and it’s pushing everyone apart.]

More follow up is needed to confirm theories on the planet’s density and status as an ocean planet. Scientists say it might also be a huge rock, with little or no atmosphere or even a rocky planet with an atmosphere made up of hydrogen and helium. TOI-1452 b is perfectly positioned for further study by the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope. It’s only 100 light-years away (fairly close in astronomical terms). Its brightness should allow Webb to capture a spectrum of starlight shining through its atmosphere. These spectrums are kind of like a fingerprint of what makes of its atmosphere. Its position in the Draco constellation is also one that Webb can observe almost any time of year.

Since exoplanets are an emerging area of discover, The International Astronomical Union is launching the NameExoWorlds 2022 Competition to give the public a chance to name christen some of the first exoplanetary systems to be seen by the Webb telescope.

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The year is 1977. Jimmy Carter is sworn in as President of the United States. Brazilian soccer star Pele plays his last game in Japan. Star Wars Episode IV- A New Hope is dazzling audiences with droids and lightsabers. And in space, NASA launches Voyager 2 on August 20. Voyager 1 quickly follows its twin probe on September 5, 1977.

The voyagers are still on the cutting-edge of space exploration and remain the only probes to ever explore interstellar space or the the galactic ocean that our sun and its planets travel through. Part of what makes the sun and its planets so difficult to investigate is the heliosphere. The heliosphere is a protective bubble created by the sun’s magnetic field and an outward flow of charged particles from the sun called solar wind.

Heading into their 45th year of space service, the Voyager probes are a bit of an interstellar time capsule. According to NASA, they each carry an eight-track tape player to record data, contain about 3 million times less memory than modern cellphones, and transmit that data about 38,000 times slower than a current day 5G internet connection.

NASA notes that its researchers, some of whom are now younger than the Voyager probes themselves, are combining Voyager’s observations with data from newer space exploration missions to build a more complete picture of our sun and how the heliosphere interacts with interstellar space.

“The heliophysics mission fleet provides invaluable insights into our Sun, from understanding the corona or the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere, to examining the Sun’s impacts throughout the solar system, including here on Earth, in our atmosphere, and on into interstellar space,” said Nicola Fox, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington via press release. “Over the last 45 years, the Voyager missions have been integral in providing this knowledge and have helped change our understanding of the Sun and its influence in ways no other spacecraft can.”

Between the two probes, Voyager 1 and 2  have explored all the giant planets of our outer solar system (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune), 48 of their moons, and their unique system of rings and magnetic fields.

Should the Voyager spacecrafts bump into extra-terrestrial life, they are prepared with a message. A 12-inch gold-plated copper disk with recordings of sounds and images selected to “portray the diversity of life and culture on earth,” is loaded onto a phonograph. A committee chaired by the late Carl Sagan of Cornell University selected 115 images, a variety of natural sounds (songs and calls of the humpback whale included), music from different cultures, and greetings from Earth-people in 55 different languages.

As of April 2020, Voyager 1 is about 13.9 billion miles away from the sun, continuing its mission to explore the far reaches of the universe.

“Today, as both Voyagers explore interstellar space, they are providing humanity with observations of uncharted territory,” said Linda Spilker, Voyager’s deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a press release. “This is the first time we’ve been able to directly study how a star, our Sun, interacts with the particles and magnetic fields outside our heliosphere, helping scientists understand the local neighborhood between the stars, upending some of the theories about this region, and providing key information for future missions.”

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If you thought the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was impressive, think again. With a fresh $205 million in funding secured to accelerate its construction, the Giant Magellan Telescope is poised to be the most powerful telescope… ever. It will be used to hunt for habitable planets, study the first galaxies of the universe, and attempt to explain mysteries like dark matter and energy.

Giant Magellan Telescope receives $205 million in funding

The $205 million check is one of the largest in the Giant Magellan Telescope’s history, led by the Carnegie Institution for Science, Harvard University, São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), The University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, and the University of Chicago. 

The funds will be used to construct the 12-story telescope, including the seven primary mirrors underway at the University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab and an advanced spectrograph instrument in Texas. The final product will be assembled at Ingersoll Machine Tools in Illinois.

“The funding is truly a collaborative effort from our Founders. It will result in the fabrication of the world’s largest mirrors, the giant telescope mount that holds and aligns them, and a science instrument that will allow us to study the chemical evolution of stars and planets like never before,” says Dr. Robert Shelton, President of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO).

An important priority in astronomy

 JWST is already a feat of human engineering. So why all the hype around the Giant Magellan Telescope? 

The National Academy of Sciences Astro2020 Decadal Survey deemed the project “absolutely essential if the United States is to maintain a position as a leader in ground-based astronomy.”

The telescope will have 10 times the light collecting area and four times the spatial resolution of the JWST, and will be 200 times more powerful than any other research telescope currently in use. For context, it will be able to show the torch on a dime from nearly 100 miles away with tack-sharp focus.

With that, the goal of the Giant Magellan Telescope will be to study the physics and chemistry of faint light sources discovered by the JWST. The hope is to identify potentially habitable planets; study the universe’s first galaxies; and search for clues that would unlock the mysteries of dark matter and energy, black holes, and the universe’s origins. 

Giant Magellan Telescope’s current progress

Though the project does not currently have a completion date, significant progress has been made. Presently, six of the seven primary mirror segments have been cast, with the third segment having completed its two-year polishing phase. 

The Giant Magellan Telescope will be assembled at a newly-constructed, 40,000-square-foot facility, and the first adaptive secondary mirror is currently in production in Europe. 

If the project is anything like other deep space telescope projects, it could be a while before we see any results. But until then, we’ll be eagerly waiting.

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Hal Levison was planning to take a nap when he got the bad news. 

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft rocketed off our planet at 5:34 a.m. on October 16, 2021, so Levison and his team had been up all night preparing. It was a spectacular, “picture perfect” launch, recalls Levison, who is the Lucy mission principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The spacecraft would soon be on its way to the Trojan asteroids, unexplored fossils of the solar system that sit roughly the same distance from the sun as Jupiter. Those small space rocks, which are thought to have formed from the same processes that created the planets, could shed light on how our world came to be.

But then, just a few hours after launch, the team received data from Lucy that revealed that one of her two solar arrays–which power the spacecraft’s systems–hadn’t fully opened. Without both solar arrays deployed, the team wasn’t sure Lucy would make it to her intended destination.

“The basic mission was in jeopardy,” Levison says. There would be no time for a nap. “It was a very hard day.”

The team jumped into action to figure out what went wrong and to devise a solution. After months of sleuthing through the data, testing ideas on computer models and spare parts on the ground, and considering alternative trajectories for the scientific mission, the Lucy engineering team came up with a plan, which they set into action earlier this summer. Now, the spacecraft’s troublesome solar array is almost completely unfurled–enough so that the mission can continue as planned. 

“The state of the spacecraft is much, much healthier,” Levison says, calling the feat pulled off by the team’s engineers “totally amazing and brilliant.”

When the mission engineers first discovered the problem, they didn’t immediately know what had gone wrong. All the data showed them was that one of the solar arrays hadn’t completely unfurled and latched into place. The engineers couldn’t get a visual because Lucy’s cameras point outward. Everything came through data about the spacecraft’s performance.

Lucy’s solar arrays are like large folding fans. When the spacecraft launched, the arrays were folded up. To deploy them, a motor pulled on a lanyard attached to each array. Then, if it had reached full deployment, a latch would have held the edge of the array in place, keeping it from moving.

“What we think happened is somewhere along in the deployment, that lanyard got misaligned and came out of the spool that brings the lanyard toward the latching mechanism,” explains Mark Effertz, spacecraft lead engineer for Lucy at Lockheed Martin, which built the spacecraft. The team had no direct data about the lanyard being tangled, he adds, but they extrapolated that it “started to snarl on either side of the spool and create a kind of bundle of lanyard as the motor kept pulling.”