Tag: astronomy

Hubble eyes the Egg Nebula

10:48 am

Hubble eyes the Egg Nebula
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a study of “preplanetary nebula,” the initial stages of a planetary nebula that forms as some star types begin dying. From the caption:

Many preplanetary nebulae are relatively dim and hard to spot. They are made of layers of gas ejected by the star, but that star is not yet hot enough to ionise the gas and cause it to glow. The Egg Nebula is relatively unique, easily visible as a sparkling jewelled egg in space. Powerful beams of starlight blast out of the inner cloud, two a-side, giving a breathtaking illumination to this cosmic structure. Fast-moving outflows of hot molecular hydrogen also emerge from within the dust cloud, visible just at the base of the searchlight beams. These outflows glow with infrared light, which is shown in this image by orange highlights.

The central cloud of dust is surrounded by concentric rings, themselves made up from thin, faint arcs of gas. These were created by successive outbursts from the central star, which ejected a little more material from its outer surface every few hundred years. The beams of starlight are reflected by these layers of gas, creating an appearance like ripples on the surface of water. The way that gas molecules reflect and scatter light gives a bluish colour to the arcs. The reflected starlight reveals important details about the central star, which is impossible to view directly in its dusty shell.

Many planetary nebula get their spectacular shapes because they have a binary star system in their center, that act like the blades in a blender as they circle each other, mixing the materials the stars’ eject to form those shapes. Because of those surrounding shells, it is often impossible to determine with the nebula has a single central star, or a binary system.

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Astronomers use SphereX infrared space telescope to study interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas

8:32 am

False color images of SphereX infrared data
False color images of SphereX infrared data.
Click for original.

Using NASA’s SphereX infrared space telescope, astronomers have now detected a range of new molecules in the coma surround interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas as that coma brightened and grew in December 2025 following the comet’s closest approach to the Sun in the fall.

You can read the research paper here. From the press release:

In a new research note, mission scientists describe the detection of organic molecules, such as methanol, cyanide, and methane. On Earth, organic molecules are the foundation for biological processes but can be created by non-biological processes as well. The researchers also note a dramatic increase in brightness two months after the icy body had passed its closest distance to the Sun, a phenomenon associated with comets as they vent water, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide into space.

In every way this interstellar object continues to behave like an ordinary comet, which is actually quite profound. It tells us the rest of the universe is not that different than our solar system.

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Astronomers discover a “surprisingly mature” cluster of galaxies in early universe

11:18 am

Proto galaxy cluster
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science strikes again! Astronomers using both the Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory now think they have discovered a just-forming protocluster of galaxies only one billion years after the Big Bang, when such galaxy clusters should not yet exist.

You can read their paper here [pdf]. The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows the Webb infrared data as the background of stars and galaxies, with the galaxies thought to be part of this protocluster circled. The blue cloud is Chandra’s X-ray data. From the press release:

The Chandra and Webb data reveal that JADES-ID1 contains the two properties that confirm the presence of a protocluster: a large number of galaxies held together by gravity (Webb sees at least 66 potential members) that are also sitting in a huge cloud of hot gas (detected by Chandra). As a galaxy cluster forms, gas falls inward and is heated by shock waves, reaching temperatures of millions of degrees and glowing in X-rays.

What makes JADES-ID1 exceptional is the remarkably early time when it appears in cosmic history. Most models of the universe predict that there likely would not be enough time and a large enough density of galaxies for a protocluster of this size to form only a billion years after the big bang. The previous record holder for a protocluster with X-ray emission is seen much later, about three billion years after the big bang.

It increasingly appears that there are aspects of the universe we simply do not yet understand, which in turn make our theories of its birth and formation either incomplete or invalid. Those theories might be right in principle, but the data suggests they are wrong in detail.

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Webb finds another unexpected galaxy in the very early universe

9:25 am

Unexpected galaxy
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science: Using the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered another galaxy in the very early universe that appears too bright and developed for it to even exist so soon after the Big Bang.

MoM-z14 is one of a growing group of surprisingly bright galaxies in the early universe – 100 times more than theoretical studies predicted before the launch of Webb, according to the research team. “There is a growing chasm between theory and observation related to the early universe, which presents compelling questions to be explored going forward,” said Jacob Shen, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and a member of the research team.

…With galaxy MoM-z14 existing only 280 million years after the big bang, there was not enough time for generations of stars to produce such high amounts of nitrogen in the way that astronomers would expect. One theory the researchers note is that the dense environment of the early universe resulted in supermassive stars capable of producing more nitrogen than any stars observed in the local universe.

All theories about the Big Bang and the early universe did not predict the existence of this galaxy, or a bunch of others that Webb has now detected.

The false color infrared Webb image is to the right, cropped and reduced to post here. The full image covered a much larger area, so this tiny galaxy was not easy to find. Scientists identified it by the very high red shift of its light, due to the expansion of the universe and it being so far away. That expansion away from us causes the wavelengths of its light to stretch into the infrared so that only Webb can see it.

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Astronomers use AI to discover hundreds of weird galaxies in Hubble archive

10:23 am

Weird galaxies in the Hubble archive, found with AI
Click for original image.

In what is a perfect example of the proper use of artificial computer intelligence (AI), astronomers have now used this programming to analyze almost 100 million images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over the decades to find any galaxies hidden there that have “anomalies” or unusual shapes.

The team analyzed nearly 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, each measuring just a few dozen pixels (7 to 8 arcseconds) on a side. They identified more than 1,300 objects with an odd appearance in just two and a half days — more than 800 of which had never been documented in scientific literature.

The six galaxies to the right are just a small sample. All six were previously unidentified, and include “three lenses with arcs distorted by gravity, one galactic merger, one ring galaxy, and one galaxy that defied classification” (the galaxy at the top left). From the European Space Agency’s (ESA) press release:

The strange, bi-polar galaxy seen here is certainly anomalous, with its compact, swirling core and two open lobes at the sides. Exactly what kind of galaxy it is is unclear, and it was not previously known to astronomers.

As noted in the first link, the volume of data that astronomers are now collecting from ground-based and orbiting telescopes — many of which are survey telescopes that photograph the entire sky repeatedly — has actually become a problem. They have great data, but don’t have the time or human resources to study it sufficiently. Even employing large numbers of ordinary citizens, working at home with their own computers, can’t get the job done.

This is the kind of grunt work that AI is ideally made for. It can quickly review the data and identify objects that don’t fit normal expectations. Humans then can do the real work, finding the most interesting of these strange objects, such as the top left galaxy, and devote human creativity to studying it.

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Astronomers detect a bar of iron in the center of the Ring Nebula

9:17 am

Composite image showing iron bar inside Ring Nebula
Composite image showing iron bar inside Ring Nebula.
Click for original.

The uncertainty of science: Using a new instrument on the Herschel Telescope in Chile, astronomers have detected a bar of iron cutting across the hole in the center of the Ring Nebula. You can read their paper here.

The cloud of iron atoms, described for the first time in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is in the shape of a bar or strip: it just fits inside the inner layer of the elliptically shaped nebula, familiar from many images including those obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope at infrared wavelengths. The bar’s length is roughly 500 times that of Pluto’s orbit around the Sun and, according to the team, its mass of iron atoms is comparable to the mass of Mars.

The bar does not cross the nebula’s central star, nor does it exhibit the kind of motion seen by jets flowing outward from such stars. From the paper’s conclusion:

At present, there seem to be no obvious explanations that can account for the presence of the narrow ‘bar’ of [Fe v] and [Fe vi] emission seen in our WEAVE spectra to extend across the central regions of the Ring Nebula. Fresh observations of this newly uncovered feature at much higher spectral resolution seem essential to make progress

The scientists toss out the possibility that the bar is the remains of a rocky planet vaporized at some point in the system’s past, but that is simply a wild guess.

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No alien civilizations? After analyzing two decades of data SETI@Home produces 100 signals “worth a second look”

9:08 am

For more than two decades, from 1999 to 2020, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project asked millions of people worldwide to loan it the use of their computers so the project to could analyze twelve billion signal detections that were of interest.

After 10 years of work, the SETI@home team has now finished analyzing those detections, winnowing them down to about a million “candidate” signals and then to 100 that are worth a second look. They have been pointing China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, a radio telescope referred to as FAST, at these targets since July, hoping to see the signals again.

Though the FAST data are not yet analyzed, [computer scientist and project co-founder David Anderson] admits he doesn’t expect to find a signal from ET.

At the link the SETI team outlined the many reasons, all quite reasonable, for the failure to detect any obvious signals from alien civilizations. The universe is vast, they only looked at a very tiny slice, the variations of signals are many, and the amount of data was still so gigantic analyzing it was endlessly time-consuming. Moreover, they might have been looking at the wrong wavelengths, and there is even the possibility that advanced civilizations simply don’t broadcast at any wavelengths.

Nonetheless, the project was not a failure. It showed it was possible to use a lot of home computers to create the equivalent of a super-computer. The technology and volunteer system it developed has since been used by other scientists on projects like looking for clouds on Mars and studying galaxy types.

The big question remains unanswered however. Considering the numbers of stars in the galaxy, and the recent data that shows most have planets, it seems strange that there have been so few candidate detections, and even these are questionable. Could it actually be the case that we are the first sentient intelligence species in the Milky Way?

There always has to be a first. That humanity might be that first is a mind-blowing thought.

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SpaceX launches NASA’s Pandora exoplanet space telescope

9:32 am

SpaceX today successfully launched a new NASA space telescope, Pandora, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

Pandora is a smallsat focused on studying 20 stars known to have transiting exoplanets. It will look at each repeatedly to draw as much information about the star and the exoplanet as possible. Also deployed were two other NASA smaller astronomy cubesats.

The Falcon 9 first stage completed its 5th flight, landing back at Vandenberg. The two fairing halves completed their first and seventh flights respectively.

At this moment, SpaceX is the only entity to have launched in 2026. This was its fourth launch.

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Another spiral galaxy that should not exist discovered in the early universe

9:40 am

Early spiral galaxy
Click for original.

Using the Webb Space Telescope, a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh has discovered another barred-spiral galaxy that should not exist because it exists only two billion years after the Big Bang,.

The false color Webb image of this new galaxy is to the right, reduced to post here. This is the second such early spiral galaxy discovered, with the previous discovery announced in December 2025.

In essence, Ivanov said, “It’s the highest redshift, spectroscopically confirmed, unlensed barred spiral galaxy.” He wasn’t necessarily surprised to find a barred spiral galaxy so early in the universe’s evolution. In fact, some simulations suggest bars forming at redshift 5, or about 12.5 billion years ago. But, Ivanov said, “In principle, I think that this is not an epoch in which you expect to find many of these objects. It helps to constrain the timescales of bar formation. And it’s just really interesting.”

I think he is being careful with his words. Based on present theories of galaxy evolution as well as Big Bang cosmology, spiral galaxies like this should not yet exist this early.

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Billionaire to fund construction of an orbiting optical telescope larger than Hubble

10:42 am

Lazuli
Figure 1 from the proposal paper [pdf].

Schmidt Sciences, a foundation created by one of Google’s founders, announced yesterday it is financing the construction of four new research telescopes, one of which will be an orbiting optical telescope with a mirror 3.1 meters in diameter, larger than the 2.4 meter primary mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope.

Today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Schmidt Sciences, a foundation backed by billionaires Eric and Wendy Schmidt, announced one of the largest ever private investments in astronomy: funding for an orbiting observatory larger than NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, along with funds to build three novel ground-based observatories. The project aims to have all four components up and running by the end of the decade.

“We’re providing a new set of windows into the universe,” says Stuart Feldman, president of Schmidt Sciences, which will manage the observatory system. Time on the telescopes will be open to scientists worldwide, and data harvested by them will be available in linked databases. Schmidt Sciences declined to say how much it is investing but Feldman says the space telescope, called Lazuli, alone will cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Eric Schmidt was once CEO of Google, and in recent years has been spending his large fortune (estimated to exceed $50 billion) on space ventures. For example, in March 2025 he acquired control of the rocket startup Relativity.

While the three new ground-based telescopes will do important work, the Lazuli space telescope is by far the most important, not only scientifically but culturally. » Read more

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Rubin Observatory’s first observations detects more than 2,000 asteroids

11:04 am

The first look patch, in which 2,103 asteroids were detected
The first look patch, in which 2,103 asteroids
were detected. Figure 1 of the paper.

Scientists have now published the first results from the Rubin Observatory in Chile during its on-going commissioning phase, during which they detected more than 2,000 asteroids in just one patch in the sky, most of which had been unknown previously and many rotating at record-breaking speeds.

You can read the paper here [pdf]. From the press release:

The study presents 76 asteroids with reliable rotation periods. This includes 16 super-fast rotators with rotation periods between roughly 13 minutes and 2.2 hours, and three ultra-fast rotators that complete a full spin in less than five minutes.

All 19 newly identified fast-rotators are longer than the length of an American football field (100 yards or about 90 meters). The fastest-spinning main-belt asteroid identified, named 2025 MN45, is 710 meters (0.4 miles) in diameter and it completes a full rotation every 1.88 minutes. This combination makes it the fastest-spinning asteroid with a diameter over 500 meters that astronomers have found.

All but one of these fast-rotators are in the main asteroid belt, with the exception a near-Earth asteroid.

This work essentially completes Rubin’s commissioning. It will begin full observations in 2026. From the paper:

Toward the start of 2026, the observatory will begin conducting the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a decade-long campaign to repeatedly image the southern sky in multiple bands. The main LSST survey will use six filters spanning near-ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths, revisiting the same pointing twice each night, returning to take additional pairs every few nights. … The cadence is designed to result in a dataset capable of answering numerous and varied science cases, from understanding the nature of dark energy to discovering and characterizing millions of asteroids, comets, interstellar objects, and transneptunian objects (TNOs) in the solar system.

In building Rubin the astronomers have always thought their biggest problem was archiving and accessing this large dataset, and much work was spent developing a usable and accessible archive system. Even so, it will take thousands of scientists many decades to mine the discoveries that will be hidden there.

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The growing X-ray shell of the 1604 Kepler supernova

3:31 pm

Kepler's supernovae remnant over time
Click to see movie.

Cool image time! Astronomers now have created a short movie from X-ray data compiled by the Chandra X-ray Observatory accumulated during the past quarter century showing the expansion of the cloud ejected from the 1604 supernova discovered by astronomer Johannes Kepler.

The two images to the right are the first and last frames in the movie. Though they appear the same, if you look closely you will see that in the more recent image the cloud is larger. From the press release:

Supernova remnants, the debris fields left behind after a stellar explosion, often glow strongly in X-ray light because the material has been heated to millions of degrees from the blast. The remnant is located in our galaxy, about 17,000 light-years from Earth, allowing Chandra to make … detailed images of the debris and how it changes with time. This latest video includes its X-ray data from 2000, 2004, 2006, 2014, and 2025. This makes it the longest-spanning video that Chandra has ever released, enabled by Chandra’s longevity. Only Chandra, with its sharp X-ray images and longevity, can see changes like those seen here.

…The researchers used the video to show that the fastest parts of the remnant are traveling at about 13.8 million miles per hour (2% of the speed of light), moving toward the bottom of the image. Meanwhile, the slowest parts are traveling toward the top at about 4 million miles per hour (0.5% of the speed of light). This large difference in speed is because the gas that the remnant is plowing into toward the top of the image is denser than the gas toward the bottom. This gives scientists information about the environments into which this star exploded.

This is one of the curses that astronomers live with. Things take a loooong time to unfold, often several generations. Thus Kepler might see this supernova when it erupts, but the explosion continues for many centuries.

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Scientists: We think the little red dots in the early universe are supermassive stars

11:48 am

The uncertainty of science: Using the Webb Space Telescope, scientists now believe that the mysterious little red dots that Webb had previously detected in the early universe are actually supermassive stars, the predicted first stars to form after the Big Bang that also might produce the universe’s first black holes.

In 2022 the first deep images from Webb, a telescope designed to see longer wavelengths of light, revealed little red dots in the distant universe. The new results gave scientists more context into what these mysterious, compact, and very old objects could be. Past theories explaining little red dots required complicated explanations involving black holes, accretion disks and dust clouds, but the new model shows that a single massive star can also naturally produce all of the key signatures in little red dots: extreme brightness, a distinctive V-shaped spectrum, and the rare combination of one bright hydrogen emission.

Now, for the first time, astronomers have created a detailed physical model of a rare, metal-free, rapidly growing supermassive star about a million times the mass of the Sun, and showed that its unique features are a perfect match for little red dots.

Models outlining the early stages of the universe had predicted that the first stars formed after the Big Bang would be much more massive than the stars seen today. This hypothesis fits that model.

At the same time, no one should take any theory to the bank. The data remains very slim, so that all conclusions remain based on a very weak foundation.

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Detection of the wake of Betelgeuse’s companion star

4:27 pm

The wake of Betelgeuse's companion star

Astronomers believe they have detected evidence of the wake created by Betelgeuse’s companion star as it plows through the primary star’s vast atmosphere.

You can read their paper here [pdf]. The cartoon to the right, annotated by me to post here, is figure 5 of the paper, looking down at Betelgeuse’s pole. It is not to scale. The scientists have nicknamed the companion Siwarha.

The team detected Siwarha’s wake by carefully tracking changes in the star’s light over nearly eight years. These changes show the effects of the previously unconfirmed companion as it plows through the outer atmosphere of Betelgeuse. This discovery resolves one of the biggest mysteries about the giant star, helping scientists to explain how it behaves and evolves while opening new doors to understanding other massive stars nearing the end of their lives.

Located roughly 650 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Orion, Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star so large that more than 400 million Suns could fit inside. Because of its enormous size and proximity, Betelgeuse is one of the few stars whose surface and surrounding atmosphere can be directly observed by astronomers, making it an important and accessible laboratory for studying how giant stars age, lose mass, and eventually explode as supernovae.

Using NASA’s Hubble and ground-based telescopes at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory and Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory, the team was able to see a pattern of changes in Betelgeuse, which provided clear evidence of a long-suspected companion star and its impact on the red supergiant’s outer atmosphere. Those include changes in the star’s spectrum, or the specific colors of light given off by different elements, and the speed and direction of gases in the outer atmosphere due to a trail of denser material, or wake. This trail appears just after the companion crosses in front of Betelgeuse every six years, or about 2,100 days, confirming theoretical models.

Betelgeuse is essentially a giant blob that undulates like a blob of water floating in weightlessness on ISS. Knowing the location and orbit of this companion will help astronomers better understand the central star’s periodic inexplicable changes.

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Colliding galaxies, as seen in the infrared and X-rays

9:02 am

Colliding galaxies in the infrared and X-rays
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image illustrates how beautiful images of heavenly objects don’t always have to be in wavelengths our eyes can see. With the wonders of modern technology, we can now see wondrous things in wavelengths that are invisible to us.

The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, is a perfect illustration. It was released on December 1, 2025, and combines X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory with infrared data from the Webb Space Telescope. From the caption:

This view of NGC 2207 and IC 2163 takes a James Webb mid-infrared image (white, gray, and red) and adds the X-ray view from Chandra (blue). Together, it is quite an eye-catching result.

…Here, both spirals are shown face on, with the smaller of the two galaxies, IC 2163, at the upper left of the larger galaxy, NGC 2207, which dominates the center and lower right of the image. Both galaxies have long, spiraling, silver blue arms, dotted with specs of blue and red. Toward our upper left, the curving arms overlap, and bend toward their neighbors’ core.

In optical wavelengths the gossamer lines of structure would be lost, overwhelmed by the light of each galaxy’s stars.

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Hubble images gigantic protoplanetary disk

10:20 am

Largest known protoplanetary disk
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on February 8, 2025, and shows what scientists believe is the largest protoplanetary disk so far measured.

Located roughly 1,000 light-years from Earth, IRAS 23077+6707, nicknamed “Dracula’s Chivito,” spans nearly 400 billion miles — 40 times the diameter of our solar system to the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt of cometary bodies. The disk obscures the young star within it, which scientists believe may be either a hot, massive star, or a pair of stars. And the enormous disk is not only the largest known planet-forming disk; it’s also shaping up to be one of the most unusual.

…The impressive height of these features wasn’t the only thing that captured the attention of scientists. The new images revealed that vertically imposing filament-like features appear on just one side of the disk, while the other side appears to have a sharp edge and no visible filaments. This peculiar, lopsided structure suggests that dynamic processes, like the recent infall of dust and gas, or interactions with its surroundings, are shaping the disk.

You can read the peer-reviewed paper here [pdf]. The structure of this system has left them with more questions than answers. They can’t see the central star due to the dust. They don’t know if any planets exist as yet in the system. They don’t really understand the structural details that they can see.

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Two very different galaxies

9:54 am

Two very different galaxies.
Click for original.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was released today as the Hubble picture of the week. From the caption:

The trick is that these galaxies are not actually very close. The large blue galaxy MCG-02-05-050 is located 65 million light-years from Earth; its brighter smaller companion MCG-02-05-050a, at 675 million light-years away, is over ten times the distance! Owing to this, MCG-02-05-050a is likely the larger galaxy of the two, and MCG-02-05-050 comparatively small. Their pairing in this image is simply an unlikely visual coincidence.

The smaller blue galaxy, also called Arp 4, has an active nucleus that emits a lot of energy, suggesting the presence of a supermassive black hole. Less is known about the more distant orange galaxy.

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A new commercial smallsat space telescope is now operational and offering its data to scientists

9:51 am

Mauve space telescope
Mauve space telescope. Click for source.

Capitalism in space: A new commercial optical space telescope with a 5-inch-wide mirror and dubbed the Mauve Telescope is now operational in orbit, with its private owner, UK startup Blue Skies, offering its data to scientists for an annual subscription fee.

Blue Skies is in the process of commissioning the Mauve and plans to start delivering data to scientists in early 2026. Customers include Boston University, Columbia University, INAF’s Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Konkoly Observatory, Kyoto University, Maynooth University, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Rice University, Vanderbilt University, and Western University.

The spacecraft’s three-year mission is to study flares from stars and their impact on the habitability of planets around them. From low Earth orbit, it hosts a telescope that can collect data in the ultraviolet to visual light range (200-700 nm spectrum).

With such a small mirror Mauve is not going to be able to do a lot of ground-breaking work, though there are definitely observations of value it can accomplish, such as those listed above. Its main purpose is as a demonstration project to attract a bigger round of new investment capital, from universities like the ones listed above, for launching a larger private telescope with greater capabilities.

This is how all telescopes were funded in the U.S. until World War II, through private funds privately built. Blue Skies effort here suggests we are heading back to that model, with government budgets increasingly constrained. The company is already working on a second and larger space telescope, dubbed Twinkle with a 18-inch primary mirror. It hopes over time to continue to scale up its orbital telescopes until it is matching Hubble and Webb, and doing so faster and at far less cost.

And for profit no less!

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Scientists think they have detected a collision in the debris disk surrounding the star Fomalhaut

9:24 am

Fomalhaut asteroid collision
Click for original.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have detected a bright object in the debris disk that surrounds the nearby star Fomalhaut that wasn’t there previously, suggesting it is a glowing cloud of material left over from the collision of two asteroids.

You can read the published paper here [pdf]. Fomalhaut is a young star about 25 light years away, and has one of the best-mapped debris disks known.

The image to the right, reduced to post here, shows this new object, labeled CS2 and detected in 2023. CS1 is a similar detection from 2012 that was initially thought to be an exoplanet. When CS1 faded over time that theory was dismissed, replaced instead with the hypothesis that it was a cloud produced by an asteroid collision.

The recent appearance of CS2 strengthens this hypothesis, which will be further confirmed by future observations that show CS2 fading in the same manner. It also provides scientists a chance to measure the rate of such collisions within Fomalhaut’s debris disk, which scientists believe is essentially a baby solar system in formation. While very uncertain due to the short time scale, this data will help them begin to figure out the rate in which planets will form in such a disk.

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Two new NASA science spacecraft achieve “first light”

9:09 am

First lights from Carruthers and IMAP

According to two different NASA announcements today, two new science spacecraft designed to study the Sun’s environment have successfully demonstrated that their cameras and instruments are working as planned, having taken their “first light” data after their recent launches.

That data is to the right. On top is the first light data from the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory. From the caption:

The images were taken on Nov. 17, 2025, from a location near the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 1 by the spacecraft’s Wide Field Imager (left column) and Narrow Field Imager (right column) in far ultraviolet light (top row) and the specific wavelength of light emitted by atomic hydrogen known as Lyman-alpha (bottom row). Earth is the larger, bright circle near the middle of each image; the Moon is the smaller circle below and to the left of it. The fuzzy “halo” around Earth in the images in the bottom row is the geocorona: the ultraviolet light emitted by Earth’s exosphere, or outermost atmospheric layer. The lunar surface still shines in Lyman-alpha because its rocky surface reflects all wavelengths of sunlight — one reason it is important to compare Lyman-alpha images with the broad ultraviolet filter. The far ultraviolet light imagery from the Narrow Field Imagery also captured two background stars, whose surface temperatures must be approximately twice as hot as the our Sun’s to be so bright in this wavelength of light.

This data will help map the corona or Sun’s atmosphere, near the Sun.

On bottom is the first light data from IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe), which will work to map the very fringes of the solar system, the heliosphere that separates the Sun’s environment from interstellar space.

To map the heliosphere’s boundaries, IMAP is equipped with three instruments that measure energetic neutral atoms: IMAP-Lo, IMAP-Hi, and IMAP-Ultra. These uncharged particles, called ENAs for short, are cosmic messengers formed at the heliosphere’s edge that allow scientists to study the boundary region and its variability from afar.

…As IMAP travelled away from Earth, the IMAP-Ultra instrument looked back at the planet and picked up ENAs created by Earth’s magnetic environment. These terrestrially made ENAs, which overwhelm ENAs coming from the heliosphere in sheer numbers, is a reason why IMAP will be stationed at L1. There the spacecraft will have an unobstructed view of ENAs coming from the heliosphere’s boundaries.

…Earth’s magnetic environment can be seen glowing bright. … Earth sits at the center of the red donut-shaped structure.

Both spacecraft are still on their way to their final operational position at L1, so actual science operations have not yet begun.

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