Tag: science

Pluto’s mountains of ice surrounded by a sea of frozen nitrogen

2:18 pm

Ice mountains floating in nitrogen sea on Pluto
Click for original image.

Cool image time! Though we only have a limited archive of high resolution pictures of Pluto that were taken when New Horizons did its close fly-by of the planet in July 2015, it is worthwhile sometimes to take a second look at some of those images. The picture to the right, cropped and annotated to post here, was taken during that July 14, 2015 fly-by, and shows a mountainous region dubbed Al-Idrisi Montes on the shore of a white frozen ocean. The red dotted line indicates a large trench that separates the Al-Idrisi mountains from the mountainous region to the west.

Sounds similar to an arctic shoreline here on Earth, doesn’t it? Not in the least. Those mountains, ranging from 600 to 9,000 feet high, are made of frozen ice, which on Pluto are as hard as granite due to the endless cold. And the white frozen ocean is frozen nitrogen, broken into polygon shaped blocks. Even stranger: those ice mountains might even be floating in that nitrogen sea! A paper from 2019 [pdf] looked at the New Horizons data and concluded as follows:

Evidence suggests that the Al-Idrisi mountains may have been uplifted by the formation of
the western trench feature. Solid state convection appears to be our best supposition as to how the Al-Idrisi Montes reached their heights.

In other words, as that large trench/depression formed, convection (the bubbles you see when you simmer tomato sauce) pushed these mountains of ice upward to float above the “sea level” of that nitrogen sea.

At least, that’s one hypothesis. The scientists who wrote this paper admit their “our hypothesis still remains in need of study and this trench-mountain system warrants serious further research.” In other words, we simply don’t know enough to have a definitive understanding of the geology of this extremely alien planet.

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Saturn’s rings with two of its moons perfectly aligned

2:30 pm

Two of Saturn's moons above its rings
Click for original image.

Cool image time! Rather than posting another Mars orbital image, I decided today to delve into the archive of pictures taken by the Cassini orbiter during the thirteen years it circled Saturn, from 2004 until 2017. The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was released on December 14, 2015, and is just one example of the many breath-taking photographs that the Cassini science team took during that mission. From the caption:

Like a cosmic bull’s-eye, Enceladus and Tethys line up almost perfectly for Cassini’s cameras. Since the two moons are not only aligned, but also at relatively similar distances from Cassini, the apparent sizes in this image are a good approximation of the relative sizes of Enceladus (313 miles across) and Tethys (660 miles across).

This view looks toward the un-illuminated side of the rings from 0.34 degrees below the ring plane. The image was taken in red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 24, 2015.

The image was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million miles from Enceladus. Image scale on Enceladus is 7 miles per pixel. Tethys was at a distance of 1.6 million miles with a pixel scale of 10 miles per pixel.

Enceladus is in the foreground, and is the planet that has what scientists have labeled tiger stripe fractures that vent water and other material, including carbon molecules.

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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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Scientists produce new estimate of the thickness of Europa’s icy crust

5:23 pm

Europa in true color
Europa in true color, taken by Juno during that
September 2022 fly-by. Click for full image.

Using data produced by Juno during a 2022 close-fly of Jupiter’s moon Europa, scientists have made a new estimate of the thickness of Europa’s icy crust, approximately 18 miles thick with a 6-mile margin of error.

In other words, their estimate could be as small as 12 miles thick, or as large as 24 miles thick.

You can read their paper here. From their abstract:

For the idealized case of pure water ice, the data are consistent with the existence of a thermally conductive ice shell with a thickness of 29 ± 10 km [18 ± 6 miles] and with the presence of cracks, pores or other scatterers extending to depths of hundreds of metres below the surface with a characteristic size smaller than a few centimetres in radius. An ice-shell salinity of 15 mg kg−1, as indicated by models based on terrestrial marine ice, would reduce our estimate of the thickness of the ice shell by about 5 km, substantially less than our 10 km uncertainty. The low volume fraction, small size and shallow depth of the scatterers indicate that the fracture interfaces observed at Europa’s surface are alone unlikely to be capable of carrying nutrients between the surface and the ocean. [emphasi mine]

The highlighted sentence is the important one. If this new estimate is right, than the unidentified reddish material that appears to leak out of the long ridgelike cracks on Europa’s surface, clearly visible in the picture to the right, are not coming from any underground ocean. The distances are too large.

Other estimates have suggested that ice crust could be as thin as 2 miles, but like this research the uncertainties are very large.

Meanwhile, the Juno mission is still alive, though essentially winding down operations. The mission was expected to officially end at the end of September 2025, when its budget ran out, but the just passed budget included enough money to keep it going, albeit at a relatively low level. According to the orbiter’s webpage, it will continue to orbit Jupiter, its orbit degrading naturally until it falls into Jupiter to burn up. As it does so data will continue to be collected, though at a much lower rate.

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Windswept Martian volcanic ash?

2:35 pm

Volcanic ash on Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 30, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this simply as “Features,” the vagueness of which I can understand after digging in to get a better idea of the location and geography.

The location, as shown by the white dot on the overview map below, is inside the Medusa Fossae Formation, the largest volcanic ash field on Mars that is thought to be the source of much of the red planet’s dust. That ash field is large and very deep, and was put down more than a billion years ago when the giant volcanoes of Mars were active and erupting. Thus it is well layered, and many images of that ash field show that layering exposed by the eons of Martian wind scouring its surface.

In this case, that scouring appears to have produced this feathery surface, though the origin of those ridges might have instead come from volcanic flows that are now hardened. Or we could be looking at ancient channels produced by ice or water, though that would have to have been a very long time ago, as this image is located in the Martian dry tropics, where no near surface ice presently exists.
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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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“AI isn’t getting smarter. We are getting dumber.”

2:20 pm

Link here. The point the op-ed makes is fundamental: AI cannot add anything to the information it has. It might be able to compile that information well, but its analysis is always going to be limited because it has no true creative spirit. It is merely a software program, albeit a very sophisticated one.

This quote from the essay will give you the sense:

Maybe you just use AI to clarify your thoughts. Turn the mottle of ideas in your head into coherent communicable paragraphs. It’s OK, you say, because you’re reviewing the results, and often editing the output. You’re ending up with exactly what you want to say, just in a form and style that’s better than any way you could have put it yourself.

But is what you end up with really your thoughts? And what if everyone started doing that?

Stripping the novelty and personality out of all communication; turning every one of our interactions into homogeneous robotic engagements? Every birthday greeting becomes akin to a printed hallmark card. Every eulogy turns into a stamp-card sentiment. Every email follows the auto-response template suggested by the browser.

We do this long enough and eventually we begin to lose the ability to communicate our inner thoughts to others. Our minds start to think in terms of LLM prompts. All I need is the gist of what I want to say, and the system fills in the blanks. [emphasis in original]

Comments are of course welcome. But please read the full essay before doing so.

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Dragonfly’s rotors complete testing

12:07 pm

According to a press release yesterday from the Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Maryland that is building the Dragonfly helicopter that is going to Saturn’s moon Titan, the rotors have completed the first round of testing, and are now about to undergo “fatigue and cryogenic trials under simulated Titan conditions.”

Over five weeks, from August into September, the team evaluated the performance of Dragonfly’s rotor system — which provides the lift for the lander to fly and enables it to maneuver — in Titan-like conditions, looking at aeromechanical performance factors such as stress on the rotor arms, and effects of vibration on the rotor blades and lander body. In late December, the team also wrapped up a set of aerodynamics tests on smaller-scale Dragonfly rotor models in the TDT [Transonic Dynamics Tunnel].

This quote about the manufacture of the rotors however stood out the most:

Pennington and team cut Dragonfly’s first rotors on Nov. 1, 2024. They refined the process as they went: starting with waterjet paring of 1,000-pound aluminum blocks, followed by rough machining, cover fitting, vent-hole drilling, and hole-threading. After an inspection, the parts were cleaned, sent out for welding, and returned for final finishing.

“We didn’t have time or materials to make test parts or extras, so every cut had to be right the first time,” Pennington said, adding that the team also had to find special tools and equipment to accommodate some material changes and design tweaks. [emphasis mine]

In other words, this is another hardware-poor NASA project. What they build is what they have. No time or money for testing of prototypes.

This mission is really pushing the envelope, possibly more than any NASA planetary probe in a half century. I just hope they get it right.

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New gullies on Mars?

12:08 pm

Fresh gullies on Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on November 6, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this image “Fresh-Looking Gullies.” It was clearly taken to study the gullies flowing down the north interior crater wall of this 4.4 mile-wide unnamed crater, about 1,500 feet deep.

What causes these gullies remains an open question. They are found in many places in the Martian mid-latitudes. When first discovered scientists thought they might be related to the sublimation of underground ice. More recent research suggests they are formed by the seasonal dry ice frost cycle that in the high latitudes has carbon dioxide condense to fall as snow in autumn and then sublimate away in the spring.
» Read more

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Communications resume with Mars

1:02 pm

First images back from Curiosity and Perseverance
Go here and here for the original images.

It appears the solar conjunction that has blocked all communications with the rovers and orbiters for the past three weeks around Mars has now fully ended, with the first new images appearing today from both Curiosity and Perseverance.

The two images to the right were downloaded today. The top image was taken on January 20, 2026 by Curiosity’s front hazard avoidance camera. It appears to be looking uphill in the direction the rover is soon to travel, climbing Mount Sharp. If you look closely you can see the mountain’s higher ranges on the horizon, just to the right of the rover itself.

The bottom picture was actually taken on January 15, 2026 by Perseverance, but was only downloaded today. Both science teams had programmed their rovers to take images throughout the conjunction, scheduled for download when communications resumed.

The picture was taken by Perseverance’s left high resolution camera located on top of the rover’s mast. It looks down at the ground near the rover at the pebbles and rocks that strewn the relatively smooth surface of the terrain west of Jezero crater.

Neither image is particularly ground-breaking. What is important however is that both images prove the rovers are functioning as expected. Expect a lot more data to arrive in the next few days, all gathered during three weeks of blackout.

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Computer simulations suggest Jupiter and Saturn have fundamentally different interiors

9:57 am

The different polar vortexes of Jupiter and Saturn

The uncertainty of science: In attempting to explain why the polar vortexes of Jupiter and Saturn are so different, scientists running large computer simulations have found that the difference could be because Jupiter’s interior is “softer” than Saturn’s.

The two images to the right illustrate the different polar vortexes of both planets. Jupiter’s (top) is made up of multiple chaotic small storms that form a hexagon-like ring around the pole. Saturn’s (bottom) is a single very coherent hexagon-shaped storm.

Over multiple different simulations, they observed that some scenarios evolved to form a single large polar vortex, like Saturn, whereas others formed multiple smaller vortices, like Jupiter. After analyzing the combinations of parameters and variables in each scenario and how they related to the final outcome, they landed on a single mechanism to explain whether a single or multiple vortices evolve: As random fluid motions start to coalesce into individual vortices, the size to which a vortex can grow is limited by how soft the bottom of the vortex is. The softer, or lighter the gas is that is rotating at the bottom of a vortex, the smaller the vortex is in the end, allowing for multiple smaller-scale vortices to coexist at a planet’s pole, similar to those on Jupiter.

Conversely, the harder or denser a vortex bottom is, the larger the system can grow, to a size where eventually it can follow the planet’s curvature as a single, planetary-scale vortex, like the one on Saturn.

If this mechanism is indeed what is at play on both gas giants, it would suggest that Jupiter could be made of softer, lighter material, while Saturn may harbor heavier stuff in its interior.

This conclusion however runs completely counter to what we should expect. Jupiter has a much great mass, and one would assume from this that its interior would therefore be denser and thus harder.

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A 10-mile-long avalanche on Mars

11:32 am

Overview map

A ten mile long avalanche on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 8, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows only three miles of a ten-mile-long avalanche inside the solar system’s largest canyon, Valles Marineris.

The white dot on the overview map above marks the location. In the inset the white rectangle indicates the area covered by the picture to the right. I have indicated the avalanche’s full extent beyond this.

Overall, the landslide fell about one mile along those ten miles. That there are about a dozen small craters on top of the slide tells us this happened quite a long time ago.

As always, the scale of Valles Marineris boggles the mind. Though this avalanche fell about 5,000 feet (the same depth of the south rim of the Grand Canyon), that drop only covered one fifth of Valles Marineris’s depth. At this point, from the rim to the floor the elevation difference is about 23,000 feet, which would place the rim among the 100 highest mountains on Earth. And of course, this is only one small spot in this gigantic canyon that runs 2,500 miles east-to-west, with its depth about the same that entire length.

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Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s high resolution camera is showing its age

10:53 am

More data drop-outs from MRO

In a cool image earlier this week I noted that, in going through the archive of images most recently sent back from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO) high resolution camera, it appeared the camera was exhibiting more anomalies, and that we must therefore “be prepared for the loss of this camera and orbiter in the somewhat near future.”

In reviewing the archive again yesterday I noticed even more evidence of deterioration, as illustrated by the picture to the left. Not only are there blank vertical strips of no data, but the color drops out of the color strip halfway down, something I had never seen before. Nor was this the only picture with these issues.

I decided to email Alfred McEwen of the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory in Arizona. who until recently had been the camera’s principal investigator, to find out what is really going on. His answer:

Yes, HiRISE is getting old, just like us. There are 2 issues:

  • 1. Sometimes RED4 fails, leaving a gap in the RED products and color.
  • 2. Bit flips create bad pixels (zeros) in RED1_1 and RED3_1. This can still be mitigated by raising electronics temperatures, and we were just approved for an increase, so this problem should soon be reduced for a year or two. One problem with these increased temperatures is that our calibration isn’t correct, leading to the stripe-ing and strange colors that you noted, although dusty air can also create such issues. The calibration will eventually get updated, but funding is extremely tight.

The first issue explains the drop-out in the color strip. This appears to be a relatively new problem.

The second issue explains the two additional black strips to the right of the color strip. (Bit flips are cases where the radiation of space causes a binary bit to flip randomly from 0 to 1, or visa versa.) Bit flips are something engineers expect in spacecraft, but it appears on MRO they are occurring with more and more frequency.

A third issue, the failure of the electronics unit for CCD RED4 that occurred in August 2023, causes a loss of data in the color strip (see the b&w version of the image above for an example), which the camera team has compensated for using other color filters in that area.

According to McEwen, while the team seems confident the increased temperatures, combined with re-calibration, will fix or reduce issue #2, it is less confident about its impact on the camera’s lifespan.

We wish we knew. We’ve raised temperatures many times and it still works, so we keep raising temperatures incrementally just in case.

All in all, however, McEwen says he expects the high resolution camera to be able to produce images for at as long as MRO operates (at least a decade more), though with time we might be finding the images become narrower and narrower strips.

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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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Martian glacier flowing past small peak

12:32 pm

Overview map

Martian glacier flowing past small peak
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 24, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

As is proper, the science team labels this vaguely as a “flow obstacle in lobate debris apron.” The obstacle is that small peak. The lobate debris apron is the material flowing past, resembling in almost all details what a glacier looks like on Earth. The scientists use vague terms because they don’t want to trap themselves into a conclusion before it is confirmed.

Nonetheless, based on all the data MRO and other Mars orbiters have been gathering for the past decade, we are almost certainly looking at near-surface ice flowing downhill and past that peak.

The white dot in the overview map above marks the location, on the western end of the 2,000-mile-long mid-latitude strip I label “glacier country,” because practically every image from this region shows features such as this.

The arrow in the inset shows the direction of the downhill grade, dropping from 2,000 to 3,000 feet from the surrounding plateau. The peak itself rises about 130 feet above the flow on the uphill side, but 650 feet above on the downhill side. Apparently the flow piled up somewhat as it hit the peak.

That flow however is likely inactive at this time. Though the researchers have repeatedly monitored the many glacial flows they have found on Mars in the decade since MRO arrived in Mars orbit, so far I have heard of no example showing any movement. And that covers about five Martian years.

These images do prove one thing: Mars is not dry. It has plenty of water near the surface, though locked in ice.

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Exposed weirdness on floor of Martian crater

12:18 pm

Crazy shapes on floor of Martian crater
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 27, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this “exposed crater floor materials”. While properly vague, that hardly suffices. This image could easily fall into my “What the heck?!” category of Martian geology that is difficult to understand, no less explain.

The color strip suggests that dust dominates near the top and bottom, though dust is also present in the middle. The patches with the bluish tint in the middle suggests these lighter swirls and patches are bedrock.

Of course, none of that explains the weird shapes of these patches, nor why they exist at all.

Before delving into those weird shapes, we must note the two vertical black strips to the right of the color strip, indicating a gap in data. Such gaps have been appearing more frequently of late, suggesting MRO’s age, almost a decade in orbit around Mars, is beginning to show itself. A failure in 2023 in one filter band of the high resolution camera already leaves blank the color swath in black and white images. These new blank strips indicate further issues, warning us that we must be prepared for the loss of this camera and orbiter in the somewhat near future.
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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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The first preliminary research into landing a Mars helicopter in the Starship landing zone

12:58 pm

Map of rotorcraft images in Starship landing zone

In early November 2025 I posted a cool image from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) that had the very provocative label “Characterize Possible Rotorcraft Landing Site”. While this was not the first such image taken by scientists using MRO to scout out potential landing zones for future Mars helicopter missions (see here and here), this particular image was one of several taken recently that were all within the candidate landing zone for SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft, focused specifically on the low Erebus mountain chain that sits within this part of Mars’ northern lowland plains.

In the January image download from MRO, I found another such image, taken on December 1, 2025. The map to the right shows that Starship candidate landing zone, with all the images taken for SpaceX indicated. The inset adds all the recent images taken for this “possible rotorcraft” mission, including the December image and the previous four (here, here, here, and here), with orange representing images already obtained and yellow those requested but pending.

I decided I needed to find out more, and tracked down the scientist who had requested the images, Eldar Dobrea of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona. In response to my email, he explained:
» Read more

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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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Icy Mars

2:26 pm

Overview map

Icy Mars

Today’s cool image once again illustrates the fact that most of Mars Mars is not a dry desert like the Sahara, as most news sources and the general public still believes, but a cold icy place similar to Antarctica, with plenty of near surface ice covering almost the whole planet, except for the dry equatorial regions (the one region we have sent almost all our landers and rovers).

The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 26, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows one small section of the floor of an unnamed very old and eroded 82-mile-wide crater located in the northern mid-latitudes of Mars.

That location is indicated by the white dot on the overview map above. This part of the mid-latitudes is a region I dub “glacier country”, a 2,000-mile long strip where practically every image taken there shows very obvious glacial features.

Today’s image is no different. The 2-mile-wide crater in the upper left appears blobby, as if the impact had landed in mud. Its interior is filled with what the scientists believe is glacial debris. The surrounding landscape has a similar appearance, as if the ground was slushy and easily misshapen by seasonal temperature changes. To the southwest of the crater, within what appears to be a surrounding splash apron, there appears to be an eroded drainage channel, likely created by the flow of glacial ice downward.

So, when you read articles telling you Mars is dry and scientists are still hunting for water there, know that whomever wrote that article had no idea what he or she were talking about. The scientists studying Mars know that Mars has lots of water. Except for the tropics below 30 degrees latitude, there is near surface ice everywhere. Their questions revolve instead on figuring out how deep and extensive it is, and how it has shaped Mars’ overall geology.

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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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Second Escapade Mars orbiter completes a delayed engine burn

10:03 am

Engineers have now successfully placed both Escapade Mars orbiters in their parking orbit, the second orbiter completed the required engine burn after it was delayed due to unexpected telemetry during an earlier mid-course correction burn.

That unexpected telemetry suggested the engine was firing at a lower thrust than expected. Today’s update did not provide any additional information as to how the thrust issue had been solved or overcome. All it said was that both spacecraft will fire their engines in November 2026 as planned to head to Mars.

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Scientists: Methane from spacecraft landing on the Moon could “obscure” evidence of life

12:31 pm

Chicken Little rules!
Chicken Little rules!

Chicken Little stupidity now abounds everywhere! Scientists using computer models say the methane fuel that many lunar landers will use can spread quickly across the entire Moon and then “obscure” any evidence of life that might be found there.

Sinibaldi and Francisca Paiva, a physicist at Instituto Superior Técnico and lead author of the study, built a computer model to simulate how that contamination might play out, using the European Space Agency’s Argonaut mission as a case study. The simulations focused on how methane, the main organic compound released during combustion of Argonaut propellants, might spread across the lunar surface during a landing at the moon’s South Pole. While previous studies had investigated how water molecules might move on the moon, none had done so for organic molecules like methane. The new model also accounted for how factors like solar wind and UV radiation would impact the methane’s behavior.

…The model showed exhaust methane reaching the North Pole in under two lunar days. Within seven lunar days (almost 7 months on Earth), more than half of the total exhaust methane had been “cold trapped” at the frigid poles — 42% at the South Pole and 12% at the North.

Though this result is of interest, as it suggests such exhaust can spread quickly on a low-gravity planet with no atmosphere, these scientists then make themselves look like fools by claiming this quick spread will contaminate the Moon, thus hindering the search for evidence of life there, and thus require new “planetary protection” measures. From their paper’s conclusion:

As lunar exploration unfolds, prioritizing effective and informed planetary protection measures will be key for safeguarding the Moon’s pristine scientific value and paving the way for a sustainable and responsible lunar exploration.

The level of foolishness in these claims is hard to measure. The Moon is the least likely place to search for evidence of past life. And regardless, limiting the use of methane fuel but allowing other exploration is not going to solve their problem. The mere presence of human activity is going to “contaminate” the Moon’s “pristine” environment. To make believe it is possible to impose some rules to prevent it is idiocy.

This whole study and its focus on “planetary protection” is really aimed at protecting the turf of these scientists. If others are allowed to explore the planets with different goals (profit or settlement instead of pure scientific research), their playground will be spoiled. Thus, they write these reports designed to give them ammunition for convincing governments to impose regulations in their favor. And they know they have allies in the UN for this purpose.

They also know they have willing allies in the propaganda press. Be prepared for numerous mainstream stories in the next day or so, touting this study with no skepticism.

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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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Study: If Europa has an underground ocean, it is lifeless and dormant

9:43 am

Scientists analyzing the conditions that are believed to exist in Europa’s theorized underground ocean have concluded there is little geological activity within that ocean, reducing significantly the chances there is life there.

A new study led by Paul Byrne, an associate professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences, at Washington University in St. Louis, throws cold water on the idea that Europa could support life at the seafloor. Using calculations that consider the moon’s size, the makeup of its rocky core and the gravitational forces from Jupiter, Byrne and a team of scientists conclude that Europa likely lacks the tectonic motion, warm hydrothermal vents or any other sort of underwater geologic activity that would presumably be a prerequisite for life.

“If we could explore that ocean with a remote-control submarine, we predict we wouldn’t see any new fractures, active volcanoes or plumes of hot water on the seafloor,” Byrne said. “Geologically, there’s not a lot happening down there. Everything would be quiet.” And on an icy world like Europa, a quiet seafloor might well mean a lifeless ocean, he added.

You can read the paper here [pdf]. It admits in its conclusion that these results have a lot of uncertainty, and the Europa Clipper mission, set to arrive in orbit around Jupiter in 2031, will reduce that uncertainty but not eliminate it, adding that “Ultimately, however, the true test of our results here will require directly accessing the ocean and, perhaps one day, the ocean floor itself.”

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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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