Space News & Blog Articles

Early this morning, Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic achieved a major milestone in the development of commercial space travel. Along with a team of specialists, Branson traveled to the edge of space aboard the VSS Unity and made it safely back to Earth. In so doing, Branson and his company have also fired the latest salvo in the ongoing race between the titans of the commercial space industry (aka. NewSpace).

Coverage began at 7:30 am PST (10:30 am EST) and was live-streamed on the company website, its Youtube channel, and social media accounts. As promised, the event was hosted by comedian Stephen Colbert and co-hosted by a panel that consisted of famed former astronaut and science communicator Chris Hadfield, industry professional and popular science communicator Kelly Jerardi, and Virgin Galactic structures engineer Veronika McGowan.

Kicking things off in style, Branson rode his bicycle to Spaceport America and joined the rest of the crew, who then entered the facility and signed the “astronaut log book.” This included aerospace engineer Beth Moses (Astronaut 002), Virgin Galactic’s Chief Astronaut Instructor; Colin Bennett (Astronaut 003), the company’s lead operations engineer; and Sirisha Bandla (Astronaut 004), Virgin Galactic’s vice president of government affairs and research.

At 08:21 AM PDT (11:21 AM EDT), the mission took off with its carrier – the VMS Eve (named after Branson’s late mother) – and was flown to its launch altitude of over 13,715 m (45,000 ft). At 09:15 AM PDT (12:15 PM EDT), the VSS Unity detached from VMS Eve and engaged its rocket motor for a full burn of 60 seconds. At this point, Branson and his fellow crewmembers were given the green light to undo their safety harnesses and float around the cabin.

The spacecraft achieved a top velocity of Mach 3 (3,700 km/h; 2,300 mph) and reach an altitude of 86 km (53.5 mi) – just slightly below the Kármán Line (the official boundary of space). The entire flight was captured by flight cameras mounted on the mothership, the spacecraft, and the chase plane. Branson and crew also live-tweeted the event and shared photos of their ascent and the four minutes of weightlessness they experienced.

Magnetic fields are great for lots of things – directing explorers, levitating trains, and containing nuclear fusion reactions are just an example of what these invisible forces can do.  Now we can ascribe another feature to magnetic fields – they can give planets a rocky core.

That is the result from research done by Dr. William McDonough at the University of Maryland and Dr. Takashi Yoshizaki from Tohoku University.  The pair developed a model that was published in Progress in Earth and Planetary Sciences that show how the sun’s magnetic field controlled the gradient of raw materials that the planets were formed out of. 

One of the outcomes of their research was a correlation between a newly formed planet’s “density and proportion of iron” and the strength of the star’s magnetic field during that planet’s formation.  Though without experimental controls the research is unable to show causation, it makes logical sense that iron, which is magnetic, would be affected by the massive magnetic fields emitted by a young star.  

Our own solar system is a reasonable example of this – Mercury, despite being the smallest planet, has an iron core that makes up ¾ of its mass.  As planets get farther and farther away, their metallic cores make up less and less of their overall weight, with Venus and Earth coming in at about ? of their weight in their cores while Mars clocks in at ¼.

The cores themselves aren’t created by magnetic fields though.  Magnetism’s impact is more subtle, drawing chunks of iron together into newly formed protoplanetary balls.  Gravitational forces then take over in driving the dense iron into the core of the planet, where it either melted or cooled, depending on a variety of other planetary formation factors. U

It’s no secret that the commercial space industry (aka. NewSpace) has become immensely lucrative in recent years, nor the fact that it has become intensely competitive as a result. To illustrate, one needs to look no further than the top three NewSpace companies in the world right now: SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic. Between these three companies, all founded by billionaires with similar visions, a new space race has begun.

In recent months, the race has intensified as Jeff Bezos announced that he would be going to space on the inaugural flight of the New Shepard rocket. In response, Virgin Galactic founder and CEO Richard Branson announced earlier this week that he would fly aboard the VSS Unity as it makes its latest test flight. If successful, this mission – scheduled for Sunday, July 11th (weather permitting) – will see Branson become the first billionaire to go to space.

In the past, Branson has said that he would fly aboard his spacecraft once the company began conducting crewed flights. Until recently, company spokespersons stated Branson’s flight would take place later this year after another crewed test flight took place. But when Bezos announced his plans early last month, there were rumblings that Branson was thinking about expediting the timetable.

According to their latest updates, Virgin Galactic plans to launch the “Unity 22” mission on Sunday, July 11th, in the early morning hours. The spacecraft will take off with its carrier aircraft (WhiteKnightTwo) from Spaceport America in the Jornada del Muerto desert basin of New Mexico. This event will also be shared via a global livestream, which can be watched on Virgin Galactic.com and the company’s Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook channels.

Famed comedian Stephen Colbert, who has interviewed Branson several times on his late-night shows, has been confirmed as the host. The event will also feature the Grammy-nominated singer Khalid, who will be debuting a new song of hers at the landing site after the test flight is complete. According to Virgin Galactic’s official press release, the purpose of flight will be threefold:

Predicting volcanic eruptions is notoriously tricky. In large part this is because volcanos are unique, each with their own quirks and personalities: the lessons learned from studying one volcano may not apply directly to another. Luckily, researchers are getting better at finding warning signs that they can apply broadly. Some of the most well-known are heightened seismic activity, rising temperatures, expanding magma pools, and the release of gases. New research using satellite imagery now offers a new warning sign for underwater volcanos: a change in the color of the ocean.

The idea is simple: it has long been known that as underwater volcanos prepare to erupt, the gases and compounds they release affect the composition of the surrounding seawater. Iron-rich water looks yellowish or brown, for example, while aluminum and silicon turn the water white. The challenge has always been in systematically applying this information to make useful predictions. Measuring these color changes accurately isn’t easy.

Yuji Sakuno, associate professor at Hiroshima University, has been working on this problem. As an expert in remote sensing, his key tool in this endeavor is the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA)’s Global Change Observation Mission – Climate (GCOM-C) satellite. GCOM-C observes the ocean every 2-3 days at 250-meter resolution, giving Sakuno reliable data about changes in water color over time.

By combining GCOM-C imagery with eruption information from Himawari-8 (a geostationary weather satellite) Sakuno was able to note changes in sea water colour about a month prior to volcanic activity on Nishinoshima Island.

One of the breakthroughs that made this possible involved finding a way to measure color accurately, despite the way that sunlight can distort and play tricks with apparent water color. Sakuno looked to other areas of research to find a solution: previous work done on hot spring water provided the tools needed to counteract the Sun’s distortions.

These days it seems you can’t walk through a bookstore without bumping into a book or magazine pointing out the negative consequences of climate change.  Everything from the hottest years on record to ruining astronomy can be tied to climate change.  Now some new science lays another potential problem at climate change’s feet – the Earth is retaining more than twice as much heat annually as it was 15 years ago.

A team from NASA and NOAA found that the Earth’s “energy imbalance” doubled between 2005 and 2019.  The energy imbalance is simple to understand but complex in its causes and impacts.  It is the difference between the amount of energy absorbed by the Earth and the amount of energy emitted by it.  Any increase in the energy imbalance means the overall Earth system is gaining energy, causing it to heat up.

To quantify this change, the team used data from two separate sources – NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) and a system run by NOAA called Argo.  CERES specializes in how much energy is entering and leaving the Earth.  Most of the energy entering s in the form of solar radiation, while energy leaving the system could take a variety of forms, including some of that solar radiation bouncing off of white clouds.

Argo, on the other hand, estimates the rate of temperature increase for the oceans. 90% of the energy that is absorbed by the Earth system is absorbed into the oceans, so any significant energy imbalance would be seen as a heating up of the oceans.  

Data from both sensing platforms pointed to the same conclusions – that the Earth was absorbing more energy than it was emitting, that energy is then stored by the ocean, and the annual amount of energy stored has increased dramatically in the recent past.  All of these findings have important implications for the future of understanding and coping with climate change.

Every day, there are more indications that show how anthropogenic factors are causing uncomfortable changes in our climate. Here in beautiful British Columbia, this means that wildfires are once again threatening countless acres of forests, communities, and wildlife. By the end of June 2021, more than 40 wildfires were raging across the province, including a rather substantial cluster around the town of Lytton.

Located just 150 km (about 93 mi) northeast of the city of Vancouver, Lytton, had to be evacuated on June 30th after an extreme heatwave led to wildfire sweeping through the area. These wildfires and the impact they were having at the time was being monitored by some of NASA’s Earth Observatory satellites. In a series of images recently shared on their website, they show the fires that were raging near Lytton just hours before the evacuation.

The satellites included the NOAA-20 satellite, which was launched as part of the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) program mounted by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Using its Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), the NOAA-20 acquired an image (shown below) of three fires that were burning around Lytoon at the time – 02:00 PM PDT (05:00 PM EDT) on June 30th.

These include the McKay Creek fire (left) and the Sparks Lake fire (right) that burned an estimated 150 – 200 km (60 – 75 mi) about 25 km (15.5 mi) north of Lillooett and 45 km (28 mi) northeast of Kamloops. The image also shows a smaller fire burning just 5 km (3 mi) south of Lytton, located in the vicinity of George Road. The images also show the different types of clouds that accompany these sorts of wildfires that occur in wooded areas.

The second image (shown below) was acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 satellite, which was developed jointly by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). This image was taken at 12:00 PM PDT (03:00 PM EDT) and provides a more detailed look at the McKay Creek Fire and the contrast between pyroCbs clouds and dry smoke, as well as the fires driving them.

Surprising findings sometimes come in small packages.  And sometimes those small packages have to be delivered by very big systems.  Physicists at MIT made some surprising findings from a very small radioactive molecule that was created in an accelerator at CERN.  They believe that, if studied closely enough, these new types of radioactive molecules could shine some light on why there is more matter than anti-matter in the universe.

Radioactive molecules might seem a strange place to start looking for the answer to one of the fundamental questions that has stumped modern day physics.  But these aren’t your everyday radioactive molecules – they usually only exist in neutron star mergers or supernovae.  In fact, this is the first time they have been created synthetically.

What makes them interesting is their number of neutrons.  Neutrons usually don’t have much of an effect on a molecule, being one millionth the size of the molecule it is a part of.  But the physicists were able to measure the impact of the neutron on its molecule’s energy.  That in itself is a breakthrough, but it was by no means an easy road to get there.

First, the researchers, led by assistant professor Ronald Fernando Garcia Ruiz of MIT, had to create the novel molecule.  They were particularly interested in radium monoflouride (RaF), an unstable radioactive molecule that only exists for a few seconds after it’s created.   After successfully creating some for the first time last year, they turned their attention to different isotopes of this unstable molecule.  

The isotopes in question contained different numbers of neutrons.  To create these different isotopes, the researchers developed a disc made up of uranium-carbide and injected carbon fluoride gas.  After zapping it with a low-energy proton beam at CERN, the researchers released a veritable zoo of new molecules, including 5 different isotopes of RaF.  

This month, two billionaires will be flying to space aboard their very own commercial launch vehicles. The first to go will be Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who will be a passenger aboard the inaugural crewed flight of the New Shepard on July 20th. Mark Bezos, Jeff’s brother, will be accompanying him on this flight, as will the person who won the auction that wrapped up on June 12th (they bid $28 million for the seat).

On July 1st, Blue Origin announced that the fourth passenger on this historic flight would be Wally Funk, a pioneer in aerospace who trained to become an astronaut back in the 1960s. As part of the “Mercury 13” Woman in Space Program, Funk was one of several qualified test pilots and graduated at the top of her class. And now, sixty years later, she is once again a pioneer since she is the oldest person that has ever flown to space.

The announcement was made in a video shared via Blue Origin’s website and Jeff Bezos’ Instagram account. In it, Funk relates how she has been flying all of her life, and how the opportunity to go to space after all this time will be “the best thing that ever happened” to her. We also see Bezos describing what the flight will entail, particularly the four minutes of weightlessness they’ll experience after the crew capsule separates from the first stage launcher.

“In 1961, Wally Funk was at the top of her class as part of the “Mercury 13” Woman in Space Program,” said Bezos in a written statement accompanying the video. “Despite completing their training, the program was canceled, and none of the thirteen flew. It’s time. Welcome to the crew, Wally. We’re excited to have you fly with us on July 20th as our honored guest.”

The Mercury 13 program (1960-1961) saw 13 female pilots go through the same medical tests and training as the male astronauts selected for NASA’s Mercury program. These women were all experienced pilots who did better than their male counterparts in some aspects of training and (in some cases) even had more flying time. Funk was at the top of her class and outperformed the male astronauts in every category, but never got to go to space. As she related in the video:

Spacewalks are a relatively rare occurrence, and they normally draw at least a moderate amount of media coverage.  So when a team of Chinese astronauts performed a spacewalk outside of their newly launched space station for the first time, it was bound to attract some notice.  The successful walk installed equipment, including cameras, outside of the new Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace”) station.

Having reached the space station on June 17th, a crew of three astronauts have set about making their new home fully functional, as they will be staying there for three months.  Two astronauts participated in the walk – Liu Bomin and Tang Hongbo, while a third, Nie Haisheng, remained inside the space station while his colleagues braved the vacuum of space.

The action was captured by a camera that was installed on the station, and was released by the state-owned Xinhua news agency.  Videos show Liu attached to a 15 meter (70 ft) robotic arm that held him in place while he performed installation work with a drill and other hand tools.  

This activity was the first EVA for Liu and Tang, though Liu was present in 2008 when Zhai Zhigang made China’s first ever spacewalk.  All three men on the mission are military pilots, as were NASA’s original astronauts.  

Though this first one was a step in the right direction, many more EVAs will be necessary to fully complete the station.  In fact, the astronauts already on board have even more EVAs planned before they leave. By the end of the year, two more modules will join the Tianhe (“Heavenly Harmony”) module already in place.  Once everything is ready to go, the station can start contributing to the science of microgravity and prolonged space exposure.  It will also provide plenty more firsts for the media to cover.

In the past decade, the discovery of extrasolar planets has accelerated immensely. To date, 4,424 exoplanets have been confirmed in 3,280 star systems, with another 7,453 awaiting confirmation. So far, most of these planets have been gas giants, with about 66% being similar to Jupiter or Neptune, while another 30% have been giant rocky planets (aka. “Super-Earths). Only a small fraction of confirmed exoplanets (less than 4%) have been similar in size to Earth.

However, according to new research by astronomers working at NASA Ames Research Center, it is possible that Earth-sized exoplanets are more common than previously thought. As they indicated in a recent study, there could be twice as many rocky exoplanets in binary systems that are obscured by the glare of their parent stars. These findings could have drastic implications in the search for potentially habitable worlds since roughly half of all stars are binary systems.

For the sake of their study, the research team examined 517 exoplanet-hosting stars that were identified by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) during its three years in operation. When compared to data from the twin telescopes of the international Gemini Observatory and the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, they found that over 100 of these stars likely had a binary companion.

The paper that describes their findings has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal. Dr. Kathryn Lester, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA Ames Research Center, led the research effort with the assistance of colleagues from NASA Ames, the U.S. Naval Observatory, the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, the NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab), the Lowell Observatory, as well as Georgia State and Standford University.

The Trouble with Transits

To date, the vast majority of confirmed exoplanets (roughly 75%) have been discovered using the Transit Method (aka. Transit Photometry). This consists of observing stars for periodic dips in their brightness, which can be the result of a planet passing in front of their face (transiting) relative to the observer. Like its predecessor, Kepler, TESS relies on the Transit Method to determine the presence of exoplanet systems around thousands of stars at any given time.

“The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” – this famous paraphrase of Scottish poet Robert Burns sometimes sums up human ingenuity.  That is exactly what happened when a county in Washington State decided to replace all of its county-owned streetlights with LEDs at least partially in an effort to combat light pollution.  New research shows that they actually made the light pollution worse.

Dr. Li-Wei Hung and her colleagues at the National Park Service recently released a paper currently available on arXiv that details work that they did to monitor the night sky both before and after Chelan County replaced their streetlights with LEDs.

Map of Chelan County and where its street lights are located.
Credit – Hung et al.

Chelan County is located in the north-central part of the state and serves as a gateway to several outdoor recreational areas nearby, including North Cascades National Park.  Given this interest in the outdoors, less light pollution would seem like a benefit to stargazing hoping to catch a glimpse of the Milky Way.

So the county decided to replace all 3,693 of the county-owned streetlights (60% of the total outdoor streetlights in Chelan County) with “full cutoff” light emitting diodes for bulbs.  About 80% of these new LEDs were “3000K” or “warm white light”, while the other 20% were slightly brighter “4000K” bulbs that were installed to meet lighting requirements set by the Washington State Department of Transportation.

Last year we reported on how the Roman Space Telescope’s backers hoped it would be able to detect rogue planets using a technique called “microlensing”.  Now, a team led by Iain McDonald, then at the University of Manchester, beat them to the punch by finding a few examples of Earth-sized rogue planets using data from an already aging space telescope – Kepler.

Both collecting and analyzing the data used in the study wasn’t easy though.  Kepler embarked on a two-month campaign in 2016 that had it looking at millions of stars located near the center of the Milky Way every 30 minutes.  Even with that much data, picking the signal from the noise was difficult.  

They are difficult because microlensing is exhibited by tiny fluctuations in the light of stars when an object passes in front of them.  According to Dr. McDonald, about every one in a million stars in the galaxy is subject to microlensing at any point in time.  So of the million of stars towards the center of the Milky Way, several could be undergoing microlensing right now.

Those events can last anywhere from minutes to days, as it depends on the difference between the foreground object and background stars, as well as the weight of the foreground object.  Of the many microlensing events that take place facing the galactic core, only approximately 1% of them are caused by rogue planets, and the signals from those events are much smaller when compared to microlenses caused by foreground stars.

Despite all the difficulties in collecting data with an old telescope, siphoning through all the additional data and background noise, and trying to differentiate between events caused by stars and those caused by planets, Dr. McDonald and his co-author, Eamonn Kerins were able to find 27 candidates for microlensing events. Of those, four could have potentially been caused by Earth-sized rogue planets.  

Even though the Cassini mission at Saturn ended nearly four years ago, data from the spacecraft still keeps scientists busy. And the latest research using Cassini’s wealth of data might be the most enticing yet.

Researchers say they’ve detected methane in the plumes of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. The process for how the methane is produced is not known at this time, but the study suggests that the surprisingly large amount of methane found are likely coming from activity at hydrothermal vents present on Enceladus’s interior seafloor. These vents could be very similar those found in Earth’s oceans, where microorganisms live, feed on the energy from the vents and produce methane in a process called methanogenesis.

“We are not concluding that life exists in Enceladus’ ocean,” said Régis Ferrière, an associate professor at the University of Arizona, and one of the study’s two lead authors.  “Rather, we wanted to understand how likely it would be that Enceladus’ hydrothermal vents could be habitable to Earthlike microorganisms. Very likely, the Cassini data tell us, according to our models.”

One of the biggest surprises of the 13-year Cassini mission came in Enceladus, a tiny moon with active geysers at its south pole. At only about 310 miles (500 km) in diameter, the bright and ice-covered Enceladus should be too small and too far from the Sun to be active. Instead, this little moon is one of the most geologically dynamic objects in the Solar System.

Stunning backlit images of the moon from Cassini’s camera show plumes erupting in Yellowstone-like geysers, emanating from tiger-stripe-shaped fractures in the moon’s surface. The discovery of the geysers took on more importance when Cassini later determined the plumes contained water ice and organics. Since life as we know it relies on water, this small but energetic moon has been added to the short list of possible places for life in our Solar System. 

A close pass of Comet Wirtanen in 2018 offered researchers an unprecedented opportunity.

Comets are full of surprises. Not only do they often under- or very occasionally over- perform versus expectations, but they also offer a glimpse of the remnants of the very early solar system. In December 2018, astronomers had an unprecedented opportunity to study one of these relics of the early solar system up close as Comet 46P/Wirtanen sped by Earth just 30 times the Earth-Moon distance (7.1 million miles away) on its closest passage for this century.

Discovered by astronomer Carl A. Wirtanen in 1948, short period Comet 46P Wirtanen orbits the Sun every 5.4 years, on a path that takes it from a perihelion 1.06 AU from the Sun to an aphelion of 5.13 AU, just outside the perihelion of Jupiter.

The 2018 approach past Earth for the comet was an especially favorable one, and this time, astronomers at the W.M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawai’i were ready. Keck’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSPEC) just received a major upgrade, featuring more pixels and higher sensitivity, an upgrade that would see first light obtaining spectra of the comet.

And the results, recently published in The Planetary Science Journal were a spectacular success. Not only did the team classify a list of key compounds seen out-gassing from Comet Wirtanen, but they discovered a high alcohol ratio for the comet, along with an anomalous heating mechanism at play.

Planetary scientists estimate that each year, about 500 meteorites survive the fiery trip through Earth’s atmosphere and fall to our planet’s surface. Most are quite small, and less than 2% of them are ever recovered. While the majority of rocks from space may not be recoverable due to ending up in oceans or remote, inaccessible areas, other meteorite falls are just not witnessed or known about.

But new technology has upped the number known falls in recent years. Doppler radar has detected meteorite falls, as well as all-sky camera networks specifically on the lookout for meteors. Additionally, increased use of dashcams and security cameras have allowed for more serendipitous sightings and data on fireballs and potential meteorite falls.

A team of researchers is now taking advantage of additional technology advances by testing out drones and machine learning for automated searches for small meteorites.  The drones are programmed to fly a grid search pattern in a projected ‘strewn field’ for a recent meteorite fall, taking systematic pictures of the ground over a large survey area. Artificial intelligence is then used to search through the pictures to identify potential meteorites.  

“Those images can be analyzed using a machine learning classifier to identify meteorites in the field among many other features,” said Robert Citron of the University of California, Davis, in a recent paper published in published in Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

Citron and his colleagues have tested their conceptual drone setup several times, mostly recently in the area of a known 2019 meteorite fall near Walker Lake, Nevada. Their proof-of-concept meteorite classifier deploys a combination of “different convolution neural networks to recognize meteorites from images taken by drones in the field,” the team writes.

As usual, the SpaceX South Texas Launch Facility, located near the village of Boca Chica, is the focal point of a lot of attention. Almost two months ago, crews at the facility began working on the first true Super Heavy prototype, the launch stage of SpaceX’s Starship. After six weeks of assembly, SpaceX rolled the Super Heavy Booster 3 (B3) out of the “High Bay” (where it was assembled) and installed it onto the launch pad.

The assembly process began on May 15th, which was assisted by the new Bridge Crane (added to the High Bay back in March) and wrapped up on Thursday, July 1st. The B3 was then moved out and loaded aboard the companies Self-Propelled Modular Transporter (SPMT) and transported down Highway 4 to the launch facility, where it was transferred by another crane onto Test Pad A.

Once it is ready to conduct commercial missions, the Starship and Super Heavy will be the world’s first entirely reusable launch system. As the booster element (aka. first stage) of the system, the Super Heavy stands about 65 meters (215 ft) tall and will be equipped with 32 Raptor engines. This record number of engines (more than any rocket in history) will allow the Super Heavy to produce 72 meganewtons (MN), or 16 million pounds/thrust (lbf).

This is more than twice the thrust generated by the first stage of the Saturn V booster, which NASA used to send the Apollo astronauts to the Moon – 35.1 MN, or 7.89 million lbf. When paired with the Starship – the orbital vehicle element that will rely on 6 Raptors engines – the launch system will be capable of sending 100 metric tons (110 US tons) to Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

According to a statement made by Musk via Twitter, the B3 prototype will be used for ground tests, similar to the ground tests conducted with the Starship (SN) prototypes. This differentiates it from Booster 1 (BN1), the first Super Heavy prototype to complete stacking inside the High Bay, which served as a

The standard model of cosmology is known as the LCDM model. Here, CDM stands for Cold Dark Matter, which makes up most of the matter in the universe, and L stands for Lambda, which is the symbol used in general relativity to represent dark energy or cosmic expansion. While the observational evidence we have largely supports the LCDM model, there are some issues with it. One of the most bothersome is known as cosmic tension.

It centers on our measurement of the Hubble constant, which tells us the rate at which the universe has expanded over time. There are lots of ways to measure the Hubble constant, from the brightness of distant supernovae, to the clustering of galaxies, to fluctuations in the cosmic background, to the light of microwave lasers. All of these methods have advantages and disadvantages, but if our cosmological model is right they should all agree within the limits of uncertainty.

The problem is, they don’t agree. Back in the early days of cosmology the uncertainty of our measurement was so large that all these results overlapped, but as our measurements got better it became clear different methods gave slightly different values for the Hubble constant. In polite company, astronomers say there is tension between these values.

This tension means that either our measurements are a bit off, or there is something wrong with our model. This has led some astronomers to propose some missing aspects to our model, such as how the mass of neutrinos might realign our Hubble values. But as new measurements of the Hubble constant keep coming in, it looks as if the tension is just getting worse. Now a new paper from Wendy Freedman argues that the tension problem isn’t that bad and that the tension will likely fade as the next generation of telescopes gives us even better data.

As it stands, the main tension in Hubble values arises between methods that rely upon the cosmic distance ladder, such as supernova observations, and those that don’t, such as the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

Sometimes simple and elegant solutions are all that is needed to solve a problem.  One problem that was searching for a solution was how to track microplastics.  These small particles of plastics are what results after the sun and friction (such as ocean waves) break down larger plastic objects.  They have become a huge problem in the ocean, wreaking havoc on ecosystems and their constituent organisms.  Now, a team from the University of Michigan have used data originally collected to monitor hurricanes to try to track microplastics, potentially helping to reign in a problem that threatens to engulf the world’s oceans.

The data the team used was collected by NASA’s Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS).  CYGNSS is a constellation of 8 microsatellites that launched in 2016 and normally monitors weather and ocean patterns to keep track of hurricanes.  Specifically they were interested in data collected on ocean roughness – or how choppy the ocean is.  Though placid oceans are not caused by only a single factor, one factor that contributes to it is the amount of debris in the ocean at a given location.

Much of that debris is made up of microplastics.  So the researchers theorized that calmer water would result from high concentrations of microplastics.  To find the calming effect of those microplastics though, they first had to control for another factor impacting choppiness – wind speed.  Luckily, CYGNSS also has data on wind speeds at the same locations it collected data on ocean roughness.  

With proper controls in place, the researchers then compared areas of calm seas with the areas of concentrated microplastics, as predicted by models. They matched up particularly well, lending credence to the idea that microplastics could be tracked via remote sensing of ocean roughness.

Example of microplastics captured in the Atlantic Ocean.
Credit – Nichole Trenholm / Ocean Research Project

Certain parts of the galaxy are more magical than others.  There are barren wastelands where barely a particle strays through occasionally, and there are fantastical nebulae that can literally light up the sky.  But beyond their good looks, those nebulae hold secrets to understanding some of the most important features of any galaxy – stars. Now, for the first time, a team from the University of Maryland managed to capture a high resolution image of one of the most active star-forming regions in our part of the galaxy.  Data from that image are not only spectacular, but can illuminate the details of the star formation process.

The instrument the team used to collect the most important parts of the data, known as SOFIA, is an amazing air-based telescopes.  Strapped to a modified 747 chassis, it specializes in capturing infrared images, just slightly out of the wavelengths that the human eye can see.  SOFIA turned its eye on a star forming region known as Westerlund 2, which is located in the RCW 49 nebula.  But the researchers didn’t stop there, using data collected in every wavelength from x-rays down to radio waves via different instruments.

Hubble image of a starforming nebula with the 747 housing SOFIA in the foreground.
Credit – Marc Pound / UMD

Luckily there was plenty of data to choose from.  That region of space had been the focus of previous studies, which hinted that there might be two bubbles of warm gas surrounding the region.  These types of gas bubbles have long been thought to play a role in star formation. Data from SOFIA definitively showed that there was in fact only one bubble, and that bubble is expanding.  The most likely cause of that expansion is a stellar wind launched by the formation of a massive star somewhere within the bubble itself.  

Gas bubbles aren’t the only material surrounding these formation regions though.  They’re joined by a “shell” made up of a form of ionized carbon.  Seen in the kaleidoscope of wavelengths the researchers analyzed, the shell and the gas bubbles intermingle with each other, but separating out individual wavelengths allowed for much higher resolution pictures of the bubbles (which were invisible in previous radio and sub-millimeter data) and shell (which glowed in a far-infrared band that SOFIA was able to collect).  

In Australia and South Africa, there are a series of radio telescopes that will be soon joined by a number of newly-constructed facilities to form the Square Kilometer Array (SKA). Once established, the SKA will have a collecting area that measures a million square meters (close to 2 million square yards). It will also be 50 times more sensitive than any radio telescope currently in operation, and be able to conduct surveys ten thousand times faster.

During a historic meeting that took place on June 29th, 2021, the member states that make up the SKAO Council voted to commence construction. By the late 2020s, when it’s expected to gather its first light, the array will consist of thousands of dishes and up to a million low-frequency antennas. These will enable it to conduct all kinds of scientific operations, from scanning the earliest periods in the Universe to searching for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

At its core, the SKA relies on a process known as interferometry, where light from cosmic sources is gathered by multiple telescopes and then combined to create high-resolution images. For radio telescopes, this technique has the added advantage of allowing for observations where only a subset of the full array is available. With such a large collecting area, the SKA will allow for all kinds of revolutionary science.

A Huge Effort

The SKA consists of four “precursor facilities,” which include the MeerKAT and the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) in South Africa, and the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) and Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia. Beyond these, there are also the “pathfinder” facilities located outside of these two countries, consisting of the Allen Telescope Array in northern California and the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) in the Netherlands.

These facilities are divided into two networks designated SKA-Low and SKA-Mid, which describe the radio frequency range they will cover. The decision to approve construction comes on the heels of two major developmental milestones for the SKAO. First, there was the publication of two key documents last year, the Observatory’s Construction Proposal and Observatory Establishment and Delivery Plan, and an executive summary of both.