Category: Behind The Black

Oxygen found in the most distant known galaxy, too soon after the Big Bang

9:22 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers studying the most distant galaxy so far discovered, 13.4 billion light years away and existing only 300 million years after the Big Bang, have now detected the existence of oxygen, an element that simply should not have had the time to develop in such a short time span.

The new oxygen detection with ALMA, a telescope array in Chile’s Atacama Desert, suggests the galaxy is much more chemically mature than expected. “It is like finding an adolescent where you would only expect babies,” says Sander Schouws, a PhD candidate at Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands, and first author of the Dutch-led study, now accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. “The results show the galaxy has formed very rapidly and is also maturing rapidly, adding to a growing body of evidence that the formation of galaxies happens much faster than was expected.”

Galaxies usually start their lives full of young stars, which are made mostly of light elements like hydrogen and helium. As stars evolve, they create heavier elements like oxygen, which get dispersed through their host galaxy after they die. Researchers had thought that, at 300 million years old, the Universe was still too young to have galaxies ripe with heavy elements. However, the two ALMA studies indicate JADES-GS-z14-0 has about 10 times more heavy elements than expected.

The spectroscopy that confirmed the oxygen also allowed the scientists to confirm the galaxy’s distance, which also confirmed the fact that there is something seriously wrong with the present theories of cosmologists about the formation of the universe. Present theory requires at least several generations of star birth followed by star death, with each forming heavier and heavier atoms. Such a process is expected to take far more than 300 million years.

Either that theory is very wrong, or the theory of the Big Bang has problems. The facts don’t fit the theories, and when that happens, it is the theories that must be abandoned.

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China and SpaceX complete launches

9:03 am

Two more launches since yesterday. First, SpaceX successfully launched a National Reconnaissance Office classified surveillance satellite, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off shortly before midnight from Vandenberg in California.

The first stage not only completed its fourth flight, landing back at Vandenberg, it did so setting a new record for the shortest turnaround from its previous flight, only ten days previously. The fairings completed their fourth and seventh flights respectively.

China then followed, with its pseudo-company Galactic Energy placing six weather satellites into orbit, its solid-fueled Ceres-1 rocket lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China. China’s state run press provided no information on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China. This was the second launch for Galactic Energy this week, and the nineteenth overall, making it the most successful Chinese pseudo-company. That its rocket is solid-fueled tells us that it is based on missile technology, which also tells us that the company is not really an independent company as we conceive it in the west, but closely controlled and supervised by China’s military.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

33 SpaceX
14 China
4 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successfully launches, 33 to 25.

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March 20, 2025 Quick space links

3:46 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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NASA’s still undecided as to Starliner’s next flight

9:27 am

Starliner docked to ISS
Starliner docked to ISS.

Though it now appears that the management at both NASA and Boeing are still committed to getting Boeing’s manned Starliner capsule certified for commercial flights, NASA remains undecided as to the scope and nature of the capsule’s next test flight.

[T]esting will be a big part of the next Starliner flight, whenever it lifts off. “We need to make sure we can eliminate the helium leaks; eliminate the service module thruster issues that we had on docking,” [said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program].

NASA has not yet decided whether the coming Starliner flight will carry astronauts or not, he added. But even if the mission is uncrewed, the agency wants it to be crew-capable — “to have all the systems in place that we could fly a crew with,” Stich said. “As I think about it, it might be there for a contingency situation, as we prepare for whatever events could happen,” he added. “One of the things that I’ve learned in my time at NASA is, always be prepared for the unexpected.”

NASA plans to certify Starliner for operational, long-duration astronaut missions shortly after this next flight, if all goes well.

Stich’s comments took place during a press conference following the return of the Starliner crew on SpaceX’s Freedom capsule.

There had been rumors last year that NASA would pay Boeing to use Starliner on a cargo mission to ISS, thus saving the company the cost of flying another demo mission on its own dime. I suspect those plans have now been squashed by the Trump administration, which is likely to insist that Boeing honor the deal in its fixed price contract. If so, the next flight will once again be a demo mission to prove the capsule’s systems, paid for by Boeing. Whether astronauts fly on it will be a political decision made by Trump, with advice from NASA management. And that decision cannot occur until NASA’s new administrator is confirmed and has had time to review the situation.

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Camille Saint-Saëns – from the Symphony No. 3

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Performed live December 7, 2024 for the reopening of Notre Dame in Paris. Gustavo Dudamel is the conductor, leading Olivier Latry and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France.

Hat tip Judd Clark.

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March 19, 2025 Quick space links

3:33 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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High ridge down the center of a big Martian crack

1:15 pm

High ridge down the middle of a Martian canyon
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 27, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled simply as a “terrain sample,” it was likely taken not as part of any specific research project but to fill a gap in the schedule in order to maintain the camera’s proper temperature.

Whenever the camera team needs to do this, they try to find an interesting object to photograph, and often succeed. In this case they focused on the geology to the right. I suspect that at first glance my readers will have trouble deciphering what they are looking at. Let me elucidate: This this a 2.5-mile-wide canyon, about 1,000 feet deep, that is bisected by a ridge about 500 feet high.

On the sunlight walls of this canyon you can see boulders and debris, with material gathered on the canyon floor. The smoothness of the floor suggests also that a lot of Martian dust, likely volcanic ash, has become trapped there over the eons.
» Read more

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Firefly releases movie of lunar sunset

9:59 am

Sunset on the Moon
Click for original image.

Using imagery taken by Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, the company today released a short movie showing sunset on the Moon, from several different angles.

I have embedded that movie below. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, is one of the photos from that movie. It shows the Sun on the horizon, with the Earth above it and Venus the small bright dot in between.

One alien aspect of the Moon that that while the Sun (and Venus) slowly crossed the sky during Firefly’s two week mission, going from just after sunrise in the east to sunset in the west, the Earth remained stationary in this location above the horizon. This phenomenon occurs because the length of the Moon’s day and its orbit around the Earth are the same length, so that one hemisphere always faces the Earth. Blue Ghost landed in Mare Crisium on the eastern edge of that hemisphere. At that location the Earth always hangs at this spot in the sky.
» Read more

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Freedom capsule splashes down successfully

3:26 pm

SpaceX’s Freedom capsule has successfully splashed down off the coast of Florida, and has now been fished out of the water.

UPDATE: All four astronauts have now exited the capsule.

In watching the live stream, it is important to once again note that no one involved in this recovery operation is a government employee. The entire operation is being run by SpaceX, a private American company doing this work for profit.

It will take a bit more time before the astronauts come out of the capsule, as they must do some leak checks to make sure everything is safe.

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