Category Archives: Astronomy

First images from Nasa’s James Webb space telescope reveal ancient galaxies

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The pictures show elements of the universe as they were 13bn years ago, reshaping our understanding of the cosmos

Nasa has released an image of far-flung galaxies as they were 13bn years ago, the first glimpse from the most powerful telescope ever launched into space, which promises to reshape our understanding of the dawn of the universe.

The small slice of the universe, called SMACS 0723, has been captured in sharp detail by the James Webb space telescope (JWST), showing the light from many different twinkling galaxies, among the oldest in the universe. Joe Biden, who unveiled the image at a White House event, called the moment “historic” and said it provided “a new window into the history of our universe”.

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Spirals of blue light in New Zealand night sky leave stargazers ‘kind of freaking out’

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Social media abuzz with pictures and theories about formations thought to be from exhaust plume of SpaceX rocket

New Zealand stargazers were left puzzled and awed by strange, spiralling light formations in the night sky on Sunday night.

Around 7.25pm Alasdair Burns, a stargazing guide on Stewart Island/Rakiura, received a text from a friend: go outside and look at the sky. “As soon as we actually went outside, it was very obvious what it was he was referring to,” Burns said.

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Fastest-growing black hole of past 9bn years may have been found, Australian-led astronomers say

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Scientists spot extremely luminous object powered by supermassive black hole using Coonabarabran telescope

Astronomers believe they have discovered the fastest-growing black hole of the past 9bn years.

The supermassive black hole consumes the equivalent of one Earth every second and has the mass of 3bn suns, they estimate.

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Cambridge University astrophysicist loses space project role amid Brexit row

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Nicholas Walton gives up leadership of €2.8m pan-European research after dispute over Northern Ireland protocol

A Cambridge University astrophysicist studying the Milky Way and hoping to play a major part in the European Space Agency’s (Esa) next big project has been forced to hand over his coordinating role on the scheme after the row over Northern Ireland’s Brexit arrangements put science in the firing line.

Nicholas Walton, a research fellow at the Institute of Astronomy, reluctantly passed his leadership role in the €2.8m pan-European Marie Curie Network research project to a colleague in the Netherlands on Friday.

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Starwatch: red star Antares makes striking winter appearance

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Usually twinkling in summer months, the ‘rival of Mars’ will appear clearer in still winter air

This week offers early risers a chance to see the silver moon next to the deep-red star Antares. The chart shows the view looking south from London at 0500 GMT on the morning of 24 February.

The moon will be low in the sky with an altitude of just 12 degrees; Antares will be even lower, so find the clearest southern horizon that you can. With 46.8% of its visible surface illuminated, the moon will be more or less at its last quarter phase, about to become a waning crescent.

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Scientists discover new planet orbiting nearest star to solar system

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Proxima d is the third planet to have been spotted circling Proxima Centauri four light years away

Astronomers have found evidence for a new planet circling Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun.

The alien world is only a quarter of the mass of Earth and orbits extremely close to its parent star, at one tenth of the distance between the sun and Mercury, the solar system’s innermost planet.

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Astronomers discover mysterious pulsing object that may be new class of star

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Experts say object is a match for predicted class of neutron star with ultra-powerful magnetic field

Astronomers have discovered a mysterious object emitting a radio wave beam that pulsed every 20 minutes.

The team behind the discovery believe the object could be a new class of slowly rotating neutron star with an ultra-powerful magnetic field. The repeating signals were detected during the first three months of 2018, but then disappeared, suggesting they were linked to a dramatic, one-off event, such as a starquake.

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Astronomers on tenterhooks as $10bn James Webb telescope set for lift off

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Nasa’s flagship mission counts down to launch at 1220 GMT on Christmas Day from Kourou, French Guiana

Final checks and fuelling are under way for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, a flagship mission for Nasa that aims to observe worlds beyond the solar system and the first stars and galaxies that lit up the cosmos.

If all goes to plan, the $10bn (£7.4bn) observatory will become the largest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space when it blasts off at 12.20pm UK time on Christmas Day onboard an Ariane 5 rocket from the European Space Agency’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

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The James Webb space telescope: in search of the secrets of the Milky Way

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Billions of dollars over budget and years late, the most expensive, complex telescope to be sent into space will launch next month. What will it learn?

In a few weeks, the most ambitious, costly robot probe ever built, the £6.8bn James Webb space telescope, will be blasted into space on top of a giant European Ariane 5 rocket. The launch of the observatory – which has been plagued by decades of delays and massive cost overruns – promises to be the most nervously watched liftoff in the history of unmanned space exploration.

The observatory – built by Nasa with European and Canadian space agency collaboration – has been designed to revolutionise our study of the early universe and to pinpoint possible life-supporting planets inside our galaxy. However, its planning and construction have taken more than 30 years, with the project suffering cancellation threats, political controversies and further tribulations. In the process, several other scientific projects had to be cancelled to meet the massive, swelling price tag of the observatory. As the journal Nature put it, this is “the telescope that ate astronomy”.

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Nasa to slam spacecraft into asteroid in mission to avoid future Armaggedon

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Test drive of planetary defence system aims to provide data on how to deflect asteroids away from Earth

That’s one large rock, one momentous shift in our relationship with space. On Wednesday, Nasa will launch a mission to deliberately slam a spacecraft into an asteroid to try to alter its orbit – the first time humanity has tried to interfere in the gravitational dance of the solar system. The aim is to test drive a planetary defence system that could prevent us from going the same way as the dinosaurs, providing the first real data about what it would take to deflect an Armageddon-inducing asteroid away from Earth.

Our planet is constantly being bombarded with small pieces of debris, but these are usually burned or broken up long before they hit the ground. Once in a while, however, something large enough to do significant damage hits the ground. About 66m years ago, one such collision is thought to have ended the reign of the dinosaurs, ejecting vast amounts of dust and debris into the upper atmosphere, which obscured the sun and caused food chains to collapse. Someday, something similar could call time on humanity’s reign – unless we can find a way to deflect it.

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Astronomers spot first possible exoplanet outside our galaxy

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Saturn-sized planet candidate has been identified in Whirlpool Galaxy 28m light years away

A possible Saturn-sized planet identified in the distant Whirlpool Galaxy could be the first exoplanet to be detected outside the Milky Way.

The exoplanet candidate appears to be orbiting an X-ray binary – made up of a normal star and a collapsed star or black hole – with its distance from this binary roughly equivalent to the distance of Uranus from the sun.

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‘Waiting for a ghost’: the search for dark matter 1km under an Australian town

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To study the stuff of the universe, you have to block it out, and that is exactly what a bold project in regional Victoria is trying to do

Dark matter is flowing through you, right now.

This mysterious, invisible stuff makes up more than 80% of the universe, an elusive web of particles that pass freely through matter. To observe it, you have to get rid of all the interference.

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Dark matter: one last push to crack the biggest secret in the universe

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Scientists are pinning hopes on elaborate detectors to track the elusive material that holds galaxies together

Deep underground, scientists are closing in on one of the most elusive targets of modern science: dark matter. In subterranean laboratories in the US and Italy, they have set up huge vats of liquid xenon and lined them with highly sensitive detectors in the hope of spotting subatomic collisions that will reveal the presence of this elusive material.

However, researchers acknowledge that the current generation of detectors are reaching the limit of their effectiveness and warn that if they fail to detect dark matter with these types of machines, they could be forced to completely reappraise their understanding of the cosmos.

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Scientists identify 29 planets where aliens could observe Earth

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Astronomers estimate 29 habitable planets are positioned to see Earth transit and intercept human broadcasts

For centuries, Earthlings have gazed at the heavens and wondered about life among the stars. But as humans hunted for little green men, the extraterrestrials might have been watching us back.

In new research, astronomers have drawn up a shortlist of nearby star systems where any inquisitive inhabitants on orbiting planets would be well placed to spot life on Earth.

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How and when to watch the solar eclipse on Thursday

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The moon will partially cover the sun in the UK later this week, but some parts of the northern hemisphere will experience a total eclipse

This Thursday, Greenland, Iceland, the Arctic, most of Europe, much of North America and Asia will experience a solar eclipse.

Most will see a partial eclipse, where the moon takes a bite out of the sun. From a few specific places in Russia, Greenland and Canada, the event will be visible as an annular eclipse, which occurs when the moon is located near the furthest part of its orbit around the Earth.

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Asteroid’s 22m-year journey from source to Earth mapped in historic first

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Flight path of Kalahari’s six-tonne asteroid is first tracing of meteorite shedding rock to solar system origin

Astronomers have reconstructed the 22m-year-long voyage of an asteroid that hurtled through the solar system and exploded over Botswana, showering meteorites across the Kalahari desert.

It is the first time scientists have traced showering space rock to its source – in this case Vesta, one of largest bodies in the asteroid belt that circles the sun between Jupiter and Mars.

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Cielo review – love letter to the desert’s starry skies

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Alison McAlpine’s documentary draws out tales from locals and astronomers to evoke the magic and mystery of Chile’s stargazing hotspot

Cielo means “sky” in Spanish, and “heaven”, too. And it’s with a sense of humbled wonder at the immense mystery of it all that the Canadian film-maker Alison McAlpine casts her camera upwards in this beautiful documentary about the night sky. It’s filmed at the stargazing hotspot of Chile’s Atacama desert, where there is virtually no light pollution; the heavens appear to be within touching distance – as if a seam in the sky has been unpicked and the stars tumble out like diamonds.

For those of us who live in urban areas, we look up from noisy streets and bright city lights to the vast emptiness of the sky. In Atacama, it’s the reverse; the sky seems more alive than the earth – a bare, Martian landscape of rock and sand. With her cinematographer, Benjamín Echazarreta, McAlpine shoots some astonishing time-lapse photography, which features alongside interviews with astronomers at the European observatories in the desert and locals who eke out a living somehow. One man is a UFO photographer; he thinks that humans are more evil than the aliens and, knowing this, the aliens don’t bother to land.

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String theorist Michio Kaku: ‘Reaching out to aliens is a terrible idea’

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The physicist on Newton finding inspiration amid the great plague, how the multiverse can unite religions, and why a ‘theory of everything’ is within our grasp

Michio Kaku is a professor of theoretical physics at City College, New York, a proponent of string theory but also a well-known populariser of science, with multiple TV appearances and several bestselling books behind him. His latest book, The God Equation, is a clear and accessible examination of the quest to combine Einstein’s general relativity with quantum theory to create an all-encompassing “theory of everything” about the nature of the universe.

How close do you believe science is to accomplishing a theory of everything?
Well, I think we actually have the theory but not in its final form. It hasn’t been tested yet and Nobel prize winners have taken opposite points of view concerning something called string theory. I’m the co-founder of string field theory, which is one of the main branches of string theory, so I have some “skin in the game”. I try to be fair and balanced. I think we’re on the verge of a new era. New experiments are being done to detect deviations from the Standard Model. Plus, we have the mystery of dark matter. Any of these unexplored areas could give a clue as to the theory of everything.

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Space oddity Oumuamua probably shard of Pluto-like world, scientists say

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Interstellar visitor likely made of frozen nitrogen, cookie-shaped rather than cigar, and not a comet or asteroid – while some stick to alien theory

Our solar system’s first known interstellar visitor is neither a comet nor asteroid as first suspected and looks nothing like a cigar. A new study says the mystery object is likely a remnant of a Pluto-like world and shaped like a cookie.

Arizona State University astronomers report the strange 45-metre (148ft) object appears to be made of frozen nitrogen, just like the surface of Pluto, and Neptune’s largest moon, Triton.

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