Space News & Blog Articles

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST ) was designed to look back in time and study galaxies that existed shortly after the Big Bang. In so doing, scientists hoped to gain a better understanding of how the Universe has evolved from the earliest cosmological epoch to the present. When Webb first trained its advanced optics and instruments on the early Universe, it discovered a new class of astrophysical objects: bright red sources that were dubbed "Little Red Dots" (LRDs). Initially, astronomers hypothesized that they could be massive star-forming regions, but this was inconsistent with established cosmological models.

This is Part 3 in a series on the age of the universe. Read Parts 1 and 2.

Humanity has worked itself into a position where we can detect a single high-energy particle from space and wonder where in Nature it came from. Billions of people likely don't care at all about such matters, but for those that are naturally curious and are fortunate enough to have the time to indulge their curiosity, an extremely energetic neutrino detected in 2023 was a remarkable event, and may even turn out to be an historic one.

Dwarf Lab’s newest entry into the smartscope market is also the smallest yet.

Astronomers have been collecting data for generations, and the sad fact is that not all of it has yet been fully analyzed. There are still discoveries hiding in the dark recesses of data archives strewn throughout the astronomical world. Some of them are harder to access than others, such as actual physical plates containing star positions from more than a hundred years ago. But as more and more of this data is archived, astronomers also keep coming up with ever more impressive tools to analyze it. A recent paper from Cyril Tasse of the Paris Observatory and his co-authors, published recently in Nature Astronomy describes an algorithm that analyzes hundreds of thousands of previously unknown data points in radio telescope archives - and they found some interesting features in it.

In this photo, the Artemis II mission's Orion spacecraft is shown positioned on Launch Pad 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The image shows the second stage, comprising the Orion Crew Module, the European Service Module, the Launch Abort System, and the spacecraft adapter, all enclosed by the second-stage panels. Just visible beneath is the upper section of the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA's next-generation super-heavy launch vehicle that will send crewed spacecraft and payloads beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) in the near future.