Space News & Blog Articles

If the next launch attempt of the Artemis I mission goes as planned, it should be a spectacular sight.

NASA is now targeting Monday, November 14 at just after midnight Eastern Time for the liftoff of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft. A 69-minute launch window opens at 12:07 a.m. EST.

This will be the fourth attempt to launch the long awaited first mission for the Artemis program. Artemis-1 is an uncrewed flight test, the first full integrated test of the super heavy-lift SLS launch vehicle and the Orion capsule. The mission will fly around the Moon and back to Earth, going further into space than all the Apollo missions, and last several weeks.

NASA first attempted to launch the Moon rocket on August 29, but a bad reading from a faulty temperature sensor scrubbed the launch. A second try came on September 3, but this was scrubbed due to a persistent hydrogen leak. After repairs, a fueling test appeared to confirm the leak was fixed.  But then, the next launch attempt scheduled for September 27 had to be waved off when Hurricane Ian’s uncertain path forced NASA to roll the giant rocket back to safety inside the Vehicle Assembly Building.

NASA said they took the opportunity while in the VAB to conduct inspections and analyses, and determined minimal work would be required to prepare the rocket and spacecraft to roll out to Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center. Teams are performing standard maintenance to repair minor damage to the foam and cork on the thermal protection system and recharge or replace batteries on the rocket, several secondary payloads, and the flight termination system. The agency plans to roll the rocket back to the launch pad as early as Friday, Nov. 4.

Originally predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, black holes are the most extreme object in the known Universe. These objects form when stars reach the end of their life cycle, blow off their outer layers, and are so gravitationally powerful that nothing (not even light) can escape their surfaces. They are also of interest because they allow astronomers to observe the laws of physics under the most extreme conditions. Periodically, these gravitational behemoths will devoir stars and other objects in their vicinity, releasing tremendous amounts of light and radiation.

In October 2018, astronomers witnessed one such event when observing a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light-years from Earth. While astronomers have witnessed events like this before, another team from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics noticed something unprecedented when they examined the same black hole three years later. As they explained in a recent study, the black hole was shining very brightly because it was ejecting (or “burping”) leftover material from the star at half the speed of light. Their findings could provide new clues about how black holes feed and grow over time.

The team was led by Yvette Cendes, a research associate with the CfA, who was joined by an international team of researchers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics, UC Berkeley, Radboud University (Netherlands), and York University in Toronto. The paper that describes their findings recently appeared in the Astrophysical Journal.

As they stated in their paper, the team observed the outburst while revisiting data on tidal disruption events (TDEs) that took place over the last few years. These occur when stars pass too close to black holes and are pulled apart during multiple passes, a process known as “spaghettification” because of how the stars are ripped into strands. In 2018, the TDE in question (dubbed AT2018hyz) was observed by astronomers at Ohio State University as part of the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN).

Shortly thereafter, an international team examined AT2018hyz in the visible and ultraviolet wavelengths using the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae, the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, and the UV-Optical Telescope (UVOT) on the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. This team was led by Sebastian Gomez, a postdoctoral fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute and co-author on the new paper. As he explained, the TDE was “unremarkable” at the time. In June of 2021, Cendes and her colleagues examined it again using radio data from the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico.

When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched, one of its jobs was studying galactic formation and evolution. When we look around the Universe, today’s galaxies take the shape of grand spirals like the Whirlpool galaxy and giant ellipticals like M60. But galaxies didn’t always look like this.

We don’t see these shapes when we look at the most distant and most ancient galaxies. Early galaxies are lumpy and misshapen and lack the structure of modern galaxies.

A new study based on JSWT observations looks at organic molecules near galactic centers. The researchers say observing these molecules can teach us a lot about galactic evolution.

The molecules in this study are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). They’re important building blocks for prebiotic compounds. Those compounds may have played a role in the early formation of life. But they’re not only attractive to scientists because of their connection to life. When PAHs are illuminated with optical and UV radiation from stars, they get excited and are very bright in infrared emission bands. So observing them tells astronomers a lot about conditions inside the galaxy.

The study is “A high angular resolution view of the PAH emission in Seyfert galaxies using JWST/MRS data,” published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The lead author is Dr. Ismael García-Bernete from Oxford University’s Department of Physics.