Year: 2025

Sunspot update: Sunspot activity rebounds somewhat in June

12:13 pm

As I have done since I started this website fifteen years ago, I post at the start of every month an update of the Sun’s ongoing sunspot activity, using the update that NOAA posts each month to its own graph of sunspot activity but annotated by me with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.

Below is that graph, showing that in June sunspot activity rebounded upward somewhat from the shocking drop in activity that occurred in May.

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Another interstellar object identified entering the solar system

11:44 am

A11pl3Z's path through the solar system

Astronomers think they have identified another interstellar object that is now entering the solar system.

The dim space rock is currently at about magnitude 18.8. Our new visitor, A11pl3Z, will get its closest to the sun – at about 2 astronomical units (AU), or twice as far as Earth is from the sun – in October. As it reaches perihelion – its closest point to the sun – it should be moving at about 68 km/s relative to the sun, or at about 152,000 miles per hour.

The object’s calculated path through the solar system, shown by the blue line in the graphic to the right, as well as the object’s high speed, are why the astronomers think it is interstellar in origin. Both facts suggest it is coming from beyond the Oort cloud.

This is the third such object discovered, after Oumuamua (whose nature remains somewhat unknown), followed by Comet 21/Borisov.

UPDATE: The object has now been renamed 3I/Atlas. The “3I” indicates it is the third interstellar object discovered, and “Atlas” refers to the discovering telescope survey.

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Astronomers discover supernovae that apparently exploded twice

10:55 am

Double detonation supernova
Click for original picture.

Using the ground-based Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, astronomers have discovered evidence suggesting a star apparently exploded twice went it went supernova several hundred years ago.

They detected this possibility by looking at the remnant of that blast, shown to the right. It shows a double halo, indicated by the blue and orange colors. The blue however is seen in both shells. As noted by the VLT’s press notice:

Calcium is shown in blue, and it is arranged in two concentric shells. These two layers indicate that the now-dead star exploded with a double-detonation.

This type of supernova, dubbed type 1a, occurs when a white dwarf sucks matter from its closely orbiting stellar companion. That material piles up on the surface of the star until it reaches critical mass and explodes, causing the supernova.

The two shells, suggesting a double detonation, fits a theory proposed for this process. From the paper’s abstract:

Our analysis reveals that the outer calcium shell originates from the helium detonation at the base of the outer envelope, while the inner shell is associated with the carbon–oxygen core detonation. This morphological distribution of intermediate-mass elements agrees qualitatively with the predicted signature of the double detonation of a sub-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarf from a hydrodynamical explosion simulation.

In other words, the outer shell resulted from the explosion caused by the helium ripped from the companion star, with the resulting shockwave detonating the second explosion inside the white dwarf’s core.

That’s the theory at least. This data supports it, but it certainly doesn’t prove it.

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Methane climate satellite fails

10:07 am

Fifteen months into a five year mission it appears the methane climate satellite MethaneSat has apparently failed prematurely.

From the press release by the environmental activist organization Environmental Defense Fund that operated the satellite:

On Friday, June 20, the MethaneSAT mission operations lost contact with MethaneSAT. After pursuing all options to restore communications, we learned this morning that the satellite has lost power, and that it is likely not recoverable.

The satellite was unusual in that it was developed and built by this activist organization, not a government or academic institution. Its failure is especially unfortunate at this time, because this non-governmental approach to science research is exactly what the science community needs to pursue faced as it is with major cuts in federal funding.

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Senate reconciliation budget bill includes Cruz’s big spending additions to NASA

9:36 am

Senate NASA budget increases

According to a tweet yesterday by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), the reconciliation budget bill that was passed by the Senate included the budget additions that Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had proposed to save SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway.

The graphic to the right lists these budget numbers. It is not clear whether the launch taxes on payloads that Cruz proposed were also included, though likely not based on the rules under which the reconciliation bill was passed.

This additional money for these projects contradicts directly the NASA 2026 budget proposal put forth by Trump that aimed to cancel Lunar Gateway and end SLS and Orion after only two more flights. Their existence in this passed Senate bill suggests that Congress is cool with the idea of spending this money and continuing these projects, even though they do nothing but waste taxpayer money and get us no where in space.

It also appears from the language in the graphic that the Senate is eager to also spend more money on NASA’s Mars sample return project, even though NASA itself still has no idea how to accomplish the task.

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SpaceX yesterday completed two launches

9:10 am

SpaceX yesterday successfully completed two launches from Florida. First, it placed a European Union weather and climate research satellite, Sentinel-4, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center. The first stage completed its ninth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Next, it continued its unrelenting pace of launching Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off with 27 from Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its 29th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

That flight makes this particular first stage the third most traveled launch vehicle, with only the space shuttles Discover (39 flights) and Atlantis (33 flights) ahead of it.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

84 SpaceX
35 China
10 Rocket Lab
7 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 84 to 61.

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July 1, 2025 Quick space links

3:28 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

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Upcoming appearances on both the Space Show and Coast to Coast

1:29 pm

I will be appearing on both the Space Show with David Livingston and Coast to Coast with George Noory over the next two evenings.

First, tonight I will be doing a 90 minute-plus appearance on the Space Show. It will be broadcast on Zoom and well as live streamed. Instructions for calling in can be found at this link. Scroll down to see them.

Next, tomorrow I will be doing the first two hours on Coast to Coast with George Noory. More information can be found here.

In both appearances the subject of Trump, Musk, SpaceX, Starship, and SLS is certain to come up, as well as the NASA budget. Expect as always conclusions you don’t expect. I welcome my readers to participate, either by calling in or emailing questions.

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Webb detects unexpected “little red dots” in the early universe

11:52 am

The uncertainty of science: Using the Webb Space Telescope astronomers have begun to compile a small catalog of what they call “little red dots” [LRDs], objects in the very early universe that are very small, too small to be galaxies and are thus a mystery.

A team of astronomers recently compiled one of the largest samples of LRDs to date, nearly all of which existed during the first 1.5 billion years after the big bang. They found that a large fraction of the LRDs in their sample showed signs of containing growing supermassive black holes.

“We’re confounded by this new population of objects that Webb has found. We don’t see analogs of them at lower redshifts, which is why we haven’t seen them prior to Webb,” said Dale Kocevski of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and lead author of the study. “There’s a substantial amount of work being done to try to determine the nature of these little red dots and whether their light is dominated by accreting black holes.”

The present most popular theory to explain the dots, based on the available data, is that the dots are newly formed black holes, their red light caused by material falling into the hole at millions of miles per hour. That theory has of course problems. For example, it doesn’t explain why we don’t see these dots in more recent times. Nor does it explain why the dots are dim in X-rays, a radiation expected from accreting black holes.

As always, the press release claims that this discovery does not “break” the present cosmological theories for the formation of the universe, but at the same time, it does illustrate our overall lack of knowledge about that early universe. We really don’t know very much, which means any theories we have are likely wrong simply due to our present ignorance.

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China releases images of Earth and Moon, taken by its Tianwen-2 asteroid probe

9:40 am

Tianwen-2 images of the Earth and the Moon
For original images go here and here.

According to a report today in China’s state-run press, its Tianwen-2 asteroid sample return spacecraft is operating normally, and has successfully taken pictures of both the Earth and the Moon to test its instrumentation.

Those images are to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here.

The CNSA [China National Space Administration] said that the narrow-field-of-view navigation sensor equipped on the probe recently captured the images of Earth and the moon, demonstrating good functional performance.

The images released include a photograph of Earth obtained by Tianwen-2 when it was approximately 590,000 kilometers away from the planet, as well as a new photograph of the moon captured when it was about the same distance from the moon. After the images were transmitted back to the ground, they were processed and produced by scientific researchers.

The Tianwen-2 probe has currently been in orbit for over 33 days, at a distance from Earth exceeding 12 million kilometers, and it is in good working condition, the CNSA said.

The probe will take about a year to reach asteroid Kamo’oalewa, where it will fly in formation studying it for another year, during which time it will attempt to grab samples by two methods. One method is a copy of the touch-and-go technique used by OSIRIS-REx on Bennu. The second method, dubbed “anchor and attach,” is untried, and involves using four robot arms, each with their own drill.

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