On the First Look at Dimorphos: LICIACube, DART, HST and James Webb Space Telescope and WTSN

Dimorphos, which had never been seen before, turned out to be egg-shaped and covered in boulders. The rocky asteroid has surprised scientists, who are eager to study the images captured by DART before it crashed in a blaze of glory.

Researchers estimate it will take about two months to determine whether DART was successful in changing Dimorphos’ motion in space in humanity’s first test of asteroid deflection technology.

The first look at the asteroid shared by the craft was amazing but it is not the only perspective of that system we have been fortunate to see.

The collision and material released from the surface of Dimorphos were observed by the Hubble Space Telescope as well as James Webb Space Telescope.

But the most dramatic images were the first ones shared by LICIACube, the mini Italian satellite that followed DART and watched the entire event from a safe distance. The best part? We are going to see a lot over the next two months.

It’s difficult to predict who will win these prestigious awards because the nominators, short list and the selection process are kept from public view.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/01/world/asteroid-impact-science-newsletter-wt-scn/index.html

The first 30 years of the Hubble Space Telescope’s exploration of the North Ecliptic Pole: A remarkable journey through the seaside to find a lost habitat

But there are plenty of women who are worthy candidates, such as Dr. Mary-Claire King, who discovered cancer-causing genes, and Dr. Marilyn Hughes Gaston, whose work blazed a trail in treating sickle cell disease.

You can learn about the discoveries of female scientists on CNN’s list.

Where glaciers meet the ocean can be a dangerous place for humans. Monitoring the acoustics of these dense bodies of ice from afar is changing how researchers understand them and what we know about how their sounds impact the animals living in these disappearing habitats.

On April 14, 1912, the British merchant steamship sent a message to the Titanic, but it didn’t reach the control center in time.

A German submarine torpedoed the Mesaba just six years later, resulting in the death of 20 people. But the exact location of the vessel has been unknown until now.

Researchers still need to confirm the distances of these galaxies by analysing the spectral properties of the light that they emit. But if initial estimates are correct, light from these objects has travelled such great distances that they appear as they did just 350 million to 450 million years after the Big Bang. Along with other JWST findings, these observations indicate that galaxies formed and evolved earlier in the Universe’s history than astronomers had been able to probe until now.

Some of the first images to be rolled out since July have shown the observatory’s abilities to reveal previously unseen aspects of the universe.

– The Hubble Space Telescope may get a boost into a higher orbit to extend its life, depending on the findings under a new exploratory agreement between NASA and SpaceX.

The area was first imaged by Hubble in the 1990s. The distinctive area of star birth is captured by the William Herschel Telescope and Hubble created its own follow-up image. Each new instrument that sets its sights on the region gives researchers new insight, according to ESA.

The Webb telescope focused on a part of the sky called the North Ecliptic Pole and was able to use eight different colors of near-infrared light to see celestial objects that are 1 billion times fainter than what can be seen with the unaided eye.

Nearly 30 years ago, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured the first image of the Pillars of Creation — the iconic star nursery featuring thick pillars of gas and dust. Now, the new James Webb Space Telescope has captured NASA’s most detailed image of the landscape that is helping scientists better understand how stars form.

“Not only are there obvious stars speckled in every nook and cranny of this image, but if you look closely at the tips of the pillars, you can see this fiery redness,” Banks said in a Twitter video. “It looks like a volcano spitting lava.”

“This sometimes also results in bow shocks, which can form wavy patterns like a boat does as it moves through water,” it reads. These young stars are only a few hundred thousand years old, and will continue to form for millions of years.

The Two Brightest Galaxies That Have Been spotted by the Webb Telescope and the J. W. Stevenson Telescope

Webb is operated by NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency. The $10 billion space observatory, launched last December, has enough fuel to continue snapping unprecedented images of the cosmos for about 20 years.

Astronomers are using the telescope to illuminate our own solar system, and so far it has taken images of Mars, Jupiter and Neptune.

A picture of the Pillars was taken by the man. The image that Hubble saw was less vibrant and more vivid. The long wavelength of light can pierce the clouds of dust that block the light from Hubble. And because of this, astronomers can now see details and structures that were previously invisible to them. That could be filaments of dust or gas, or even stars.

The telescope had to endure 20 years of technical difficulties, cost overruns, delays, and threats from congress in order to be able to see the stars. Critics doubted the large size of the main mirror, which had six times more light collecting area than the Hubble.

Astronomers had thought that there would be many brighter, more diverse and better formed galaxies, but they have been proven wrong. Steven Finkelstein, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, believes that the early Universe was a very exciting place to be.

Like many of the far-away galaxies spotted by the telescope, the two contenders for the most distant appear small and bright, suggesting that they are compact, disk-shaped objects rather than being diffuse and straggly. With their tiful colors, they suggest that early galaxies have already developed well- organized structures out of many stars rather than being distorted and faint as previous studies with the Hubble Space Telescope suggested.

At a 17 November press briefing, the author of one of the reports, who is an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that they are seeing “such bright galaxies at early times.”

The Universe is studied by the $10-billion observatory, the John W. Stevenson Telescope. Light from distant galaxies that has been stretched to redder wavelength by the expansion of the universe is one of its specialities. The redshift is a measure used to describe how far away the galaxies are. One of the distant-galaxy candidates has a redshift of around ten or twelve, while the second has a redshift around twelve. The latter breaks the previous record: a galaxy with a redshift of around 11, spotted by Hubble3.

WASP-39b is a ‘hot Jupiter’ located 215 parsecs (700 light years) from Earth. The gas giant is about one-third the mass of Jupiter but is closer in composition to Saturn. The planet is so hot, it’s eight times hotter than the Sun, that it’s not a good place to live. It was the perfect target for the JWST to observe at an early stage in its operations, so it could test its exoplanet capabilities.

“We’ve studied lots of planets before,” says Laura Kreidberg, director of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany, and part of the observation team. We have never seen a data set of this magnitude. On November 22, the team posted five papers on the arXiv preprint server.

The telescope, launched in December 2021, observed the planet for more than 40 hours in July. Initial results showed carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere. It was the first time that the gas had been seen on an exoplanet.

“These spectra are just exquisite in their detail, and reveal an additional way that the star affects the planet’s atmospheric composition, through photochemistry,” says Victoria Meadows, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle.

It is expected that the inward migration of hot Jupiters will explain their proximity to their stars. What remains unclear is whether this is a slow process, over perhaps tens of millions of years, or whether it results from a gravitational ‘shove’ from another planet or star. Knowing WASP-39b’s composition could help astronomers to determine which scenario occurred.

The planet is tidally locked to its star, with the same face always pointing towards it, because of the immense gravitational attraction between them. And the observations show that it has incomplete cloud cover — something that astronomers have never observed before on an exoplanet. At the boundary of night and day, the planet is “only about 60% covered by clouds”, says Bean — perhaps because clouds evaporate as they reach the hotter (day) side and condense as they reach the cooler side.

The James Webb Space Telescope and the Placement of a Telescope in Space: An Overview of Rigby’s Journey in Astronomy

Jane used to think of a nightmare scenario when she was thinking about the hundreds of things that could have gone wrong with the James Webb Space Telescope. As the US$10-billion telescope unfolded in deep space, it had to deploy a secondary mirror in front of its huge primary mirror so that it could capture and relay the precious photons back to Earth.

“That’s the one that scared me the most,” says Rigby, who is the telescope’s operations project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. I could see the mirror in space focusing light to nothing with no secondary mirror there.

She became an astronomer because she couldn’t fly a space shuttle. Growing up in rural Delaware, she watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series on television and read about Sally Ride, the US astrophysicist who became an astronaut. Rigby didn’t meet the physical requirements to become a shuttle pilot, so she set her sights on astronomy as a way into space. She bought a second-hand telescope and took it out to the fields at night, and gained hands-on experience of soldering and tinkering with her father, a physics teacher.

She dove into research immediately after graduating high school, using data from the telescopes in Hawaii. At the time she was starting graduate school at the University of Arizona in Tucson, she was using the NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to analyse their observations. She says that putting up a telescope is so much better than the ones that have been put up before.

She doesn’t want to talk about the telescope’s name. The name was made controversial because it honours James Webb, who worked in high-ranking government positions at a time when homosexual employees were fired by the US government.

There is a group of people in astronomy that feel like they can always count on the Universe to look out for them. She says that it’s crucial that the sense of acceptance and safety is present for many LGBT+ scientists. I was drawn to astronomy because of my queer identity, and the feeling of being part of the Universe, and being part of the bigger story.

The First Wide-Field Image of the Universe: Diffuse Light in the Sky and the First Astronomical Observations with the PEARLS Field

A portion of the PEARLS field is depicted in the image, which will be four times larger. The mosaic is even better than scientists expected after running simulations in the months before Webb began making scientific observations in July.

It is one of the first medium deep wide-field images of the universe, and it shows the faintest objects visible.

“I was blown away by the first PEARLS images,” said study coauthor Rolf Jansen, research scientist at Arizona State University and a PEARLS coinvestigator, in a statement.

The story of the universe is told by measuring diffuse light in front of and behind the stars and galaxies in the image, according to one of the authors of the study.

“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, regents professor at Arizona State University and PEARLS principal investigator, in a statement.

But it works — and spectacularly so. Laura tells us that she feels lucky to be alive as an astronomer and that she works with a telescope.

Some of the initial findings are being revised as data calibrations improve, and some of the early claims of distant galaxies await confirmation by studies of the galaxies’s light. Physicists includingCurtis-Lake said on December 9, that they had already confirmation of two galaxies that are much farther away than ever before.

The telescope proved its worth when it came to studying objects in the sky. The astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland showed a new image of the moon Enceladus at the symposium. The water in the ocean can sometimes make its way out of the cracks in the ice, but the water is invisible to the naked eye. Separately, engineers have also figured out a way to get JWST to track rapidly moving objects, such as Solar System planets, much better than expected. That led to new studies such as observations of the DART spacecraft’s deliberate crash into an asteroid in September, says Naomi Rowe-Gurney, an astronomer also at Goddard.

Applications are now open for astronomer to propose observations during the second year of operations at the Jawaharlal Nehru Space Telescope. Now that the telescope can be used, more ambitious or creative proposals could be made in the next round.

Amid all the good news, there are still glitches. Primary among them is a lack of funding to support scientists working on JWST data, says López-Morales. “We can do the science, we have the skills, we are developing the tools, we are going to make groundbreaking discoveries but on a very thin budget,” she says. Right now that is not ideal.

Rowe-Gurney says the telescope opens up completely new realm of astronomy, answering questions that her PhD was trying to find.

Hey, it’s Michael. This week is a time when we revisit some of our favorite episodes of the year, and learn what happened since they first ran. Today we return to an episode hosted by Astead Herndon about the moment the largest space observatory ever built sent its first images back to Earth and what it found on its journey across the universe. It’s Wednesday, December 28.

The James Webb Telescope is Showing Things We’ve Never Seeed Before. Why the Hubble Space Telescope was so successful in detecting the early events of the Cold War

They were beautiful. There was a picture of this nursery. New stars are being born in these ripples of gas. You could see a picture of a dying star in the distance, another one of five galaxies in this dance.

It’s amazing is that you realize that the universe, you just look in the sky. It seems like it is mostly empty. But once you look at it in these new wavelengths of light, you realize there’s exciting structure.

The scientists kept on saying that they were speechless. One person said that she was so sad when she saw the data. Some of them were joking that everyone in the world has changed their background screens on their computers.

Ken, you said that the James Webb is showing things we have never seen before. What else do we expect from it? Spaceplain to me.

So again, what makes Webb special is that its mirror is so much bigger than Hubble’s. And it’s looking at this new part of the spectrum of light, the infrared, to look at the universe. And because it’s looking at the infrared, they can see details that they couldn’t see before. That’s why this image is so much more colorful, so much more detailed than what Hubble could do.

It is time travel in astronomy because light takes time to reach us. It will take more light to get to us from the farther away. So when we look at the farthest things, we are looking back in time.

Back in 1990, NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope, which has produced these amazing pictures of the universe that almost everyone has seen. It is a resounding success now. But when it launched, it was a huge embarrassment for NASA.

The images were blurry when they got the first images back. They began tweaking. Maybe they thought they needed to adjust something. But no matter what they did, the images were still blurry. After more investigation they realized the mirror was not the correct shape.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/podcasts/the-daily/nasa-james-webb-telescope.html

Nasa James Webb Telescope: When NASA gave the green light to the Webb project, and what they didn’t: It had to run into problems

And with Hubble, NASA could send astronauts with the space shuttle to fix the problems. There is no such luxury with Webb. Because of it’s larger design they had to put it in space because it had to be extremely cold and far away from the Earth.

So everything that was on Webb had to work the first time. There was no chance to try it again. And that means you have to check everything and check again. Testing is important to make sure everything works correctly. It cost a lot of money. And that’s where the Webb project kept on running into problems over the years.

So when NASA gave the green light to this space telescope in the mid 1990s, they thought it would cost $1.5 billion, maybe a little bit more than that. It was supposed to be ready for launch by 2007. They underestimated just how hard it was and just how many things they had to invent along the way.

And more importantly, infrared light is easily distorted if there’s any sources of heat around it. The telescope was going to be a million miles from Earth. The Earth’s atmosphere isn’t warm enough to affect the telescope because it’s so far away.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/podcasts/the-daily/nasa-james-webb-telescope.html

The NASA-James Webb Telescope: Christmas Day, 2021, when NASA realised it had to be done sooner than expected

And so they had to do something that was almost like origami. They put the mirror in pieces and created small hexagonal structures on each other. They needed to design a rocket and fold up the sun shield so that it would unfold and move into place when it arrived in space. It turns out it was a little harder than NASA thought.

And at that point they said, we are now aiming for 2018. And we’re going to say that this is going to cost no more than $8 billion, which is huge, because again, they thought it was $1 billion and change when they started.

It is hard to overstate how important this was. The signature program was going to define NASA for a long time. And now NASA had to go back to Congress saying, oops, we can’t get this done on time. We have to ask for a lot more money from you.

There was talk in Congress that we should just cut our losses and not pay for Webb because of all the problems. Congress decided not to cancel the project. It gave NASA more money. The project started moving forward again. Christmas Day, 2021, is when we will launch.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/podcasts/the-daily/nasa-james-webb-telescope.html

The first image of an exoplanet from a little black dot with an Ariane 5 rocket comes from the deep universe: Well done, Webb

You are watching live footage of an Ariane 5 rocket. At the very top of that extraordinary machine we find the most ambitious space observatory ever built.

A rocket is being piloted by a person. It is a European rocket. There is a launch pad in South America. It’s actually a good place to launch, because it’s closer to the equator.

So when you’re trying to get to space, if you’re close to the equator, you can take advantage of the rotation of the Earth to add velocity to your rocket.

So first thing in the morning there are literally astronomers around the world watching the live stream of this rocket. And they’re all completely nervous.

Since the ‘90s, they have been dreaming about this. And they’re worried that there might have been some oversight, like the Hubble mirror not being quite right, that something would go wrong that they could not fix because this was a million miles away.

This is the end. We’ve seen the confirmation that an Ariane 5 safely delivered a person into space. All I can say is, good luck, Webb. Bring us the data from the deep universe.

And all 344 things, they all worked. At the end of January, it reached its final destination. The instruments started to turn on. Almost everything worked as well as NASA could have possibly hoped. And all this preparation, all this calibration, all this testing, it all paid off. And by June, they were ready to start taking their first scientific measurements. And so far Webb seems to be working better than promised.

So one of the main parts of Webb’s mission is to look at exoplanets. That is planets around other stars. A few months ago, Webb captured its first image of an exoplanet. It orbits a star 385 light years from Earth in a constellation called Centaurus. Because it’s a giant ball of gas, and because it’s so far from its star this particular exoplanet won’t have life. But it’s the first step to studying these planets.

And this is kind of a trick. Occasionally they pass in front of a star on certain planets. So basically you just have a little black dot. What happens is that the atmosphere of the planet blocks certain colors of the starlight. You can look at the star light alone or in front of a tiny planet. And there’s going to be slight differences, because different molecules, they will block slightly different colors from the starlight

You can tell what the atmosphere of that planet can be from that. So a planet that’s about the size of Earth, it passes in front of stars, we can start seeing is the oxygen in there? Is there water? Is there things that perhaps are evidence of life on that planet?

Wow, so it is not far fetched to say that this telescope is the furthest we have gotten in terms of having a tool that can understand whether there is potential life on another planet.

Yeah, so we now there are these star systems. And some of them are pretty close where there’s planets. In fact, there’s one called TRAPPIST 1. It’s about 40 light years away, so not far at all. There are seven Earth-sized planets around it.

It is a small star. So the planets are actually pretty close to the star. The three that are in the zone are near the ocean. That’s where it’s not too cold or not too hot. And if it’s not too hot, not too cold, maybe there’s liquid water on it. If there is liquid water.

We don’t know any of this information now. We just know it looks like it’s about the size of Earth. We have no idea about the properties of the atmosphere or Earth. With Webb we can actually start looking across all these stars, and explore the planets around them, and get a better idea of the range of planets that are in our universe. How different are they from Earth? What is it that is similar to Earth?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/podcasts/the-daily/nasa-james-webb-telescope.html

Nasa James Webb Telescope Is Still Functioning and It’s Getting Better With The Hubble Space Telescope Theorem

They had a goal of 10 years. They didn’t have to use much propellant because the launch went so perfectly. They say they have enough propellant to last 20 years.

Now, of course, things in space, you never know what’s out there. There’s rocks just whizzing back and forth in the solar system. If one of them hits the telescope in the wrong spot it could cause it to not work tomorrow.

Yes, it happened a couple months ago. They sort of anticipated it. They were expecting a little more than that. But they have ways to adjust for that. They said that it is still functioning and meeting its specifications.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/podcasts/the-daily/nasa-james-webb-telescope.html

Nasa James Webb Telescope: A New Look at Space Travel and the History of Space and Space Science. What do we want to know when we get there?

They wanted to know how many times it got hit by different things in order to understand the amount of stuff in the solar system. Even if it’s damaged.

I’m thinking about SpaceX and Elon Musk’s travel. I was thinking about Jeff Bezos while in space. How do you see the relationship between these billionaires and how the private corporations have changed our understanding of space travel?

This is space science. These questions are the fundamental ones that we all think about when we can’t sleep. Are we on our own? Why is there a universe at all? These are questions and you can argue that they have no effect on your everyday life. We are curious about the things that make people special. We wondered what was beyond the next hill. We wish to see more beyond the next star.

And it’s just like centuries ago people were exploring the oceans, exploring the new continents. NASA’s exploring the solar system and the universe in ways that is very much in the adventure vein that people have always done.

It resembles the history of television in the same way as how in the old days we had the equivalent of cathode ray TVs. And then Hubble came along. It was very nice to finally have HD.

And now, with Webb, we’ve got 4K. We’ve got Dolby Vision. We have everything. Everything scientists hope to be seeing, they are now seeing with Webb. This is just the beginning.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/podcasts/the-daily/nasa-james-webb-telescope.html

The Herndon Spinors: The Unreleased Discovery of a Supersymmetric Electroweak System, Part II, Substructure, and the Nature of the Universe

The science reporter Kenneth Cheung was interviewing Astead Herndon for today’s episode. It was produced by Sydney Harbor, Michael Simon Johnson, Nina Feldman, Asthaa Chaturvedi, and Rikki Novetsky, and was edited by Michael Benoist, Patricia Willans, and Anita Badejo, with help from Liz Baylen. It was engineered by Chris Wood and Corey Schreppel and contains original music by two people. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.