Space News & Blog Articles

Blue Origin wants to build solar panels on the Moon, out of the Moon, SpaceX sold its floating landing pads, and another asteroid hits Earth exactly where and when astronomers predicted.

Blue Origin’s Blue Alchemist

Blue Origin announced a new technology they call Blue Alchemist. It will allow making solar panels out of Moon regolith. This can be a very big deal, as a system like that will not require any additional input from Earth. All it needs is energy. So, once you put a robot like this on the Moon and give it some time, you should have a bunch of solar panels as the result. Of course, it’s still in development and tests will be required to prove the concept viable. But it definitely sounds promising.

More about Blue Alchemist.

SpaceX Sells Phobos and Deimos

In the past, SpaceX had bought two oil platforms that they hoped to convert into Starship launch and landing pads. The platforms were called Phobos and Deimos, after the two satellites of Mars. However, this week we learned that the company sold the platforms. Gwenn Shotwell, president of SpaceX, told the press that SpaceX needs to learn to fly Starship first and understand the vehicle better, before expanding the infrastructure like sea launch and landing pads.

Another Meteoroid Discovered Right Before it Hits the Atmosphere

Sneaky asteroids have a hard time crashing into the Earth without notice these days. For the seventh time, astronomers detected a small space rock, or meteoroid, about half a day before it impacted the planet. The detection was made by Krisztián Sárneczky using a 60 cm Schmidt telescope from the Piszkéstet? Observatory in Hungary. The 1-meter object was designated as 2023 CX1 and was predicted with 100% certainty to hit Earth above the English Channel. Astronomers continued to track the object, and then it lit up the skies in Europe right on schedule.

The European Space Agency is working on a new mission that would act as an early warning system for dangerous, hard-to-see asteroids. Called NEOMIR (Near-Earth Object Mission in the InfraRed), the spacecraft would orbit between the Earth and the Sun at the L1 Lagrange Point, finding space rocks that otherwise get lost in the glare of the Sun.

Usually, astronomers can discover asteroids thanks to the light they reflect from the Sun. The proposed NEOMIR mission would have the ability to find asteroids 20 meters and larger that can’t be seen from the ground, ones that are heading towards Earth and coming from the direction of the Sun. These could be imminent impactors, on a collision course with Earth.

The spacecraft would use a half-meter telescope with a large, corrected focal plane with the ability to see in infrared light in the 5-10 micrometer waveband.

ESA says that NEOMIR will monitor a close ring around the Sun, a region that is impossible to observe from telescopes on Earth because of the Sun’s blinding glare. By making observations in the infrared part of the light spectrum, NEOMIR will detect the heat emitted by asteroids themselves, which isn’t drowned out by sunlight.

Additionally, this particular range of thermal emissions are absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere – another reason why an Earth-based telescope wouldn’t fit the bill. Also, as a space-based observatory, NEOMIR will be able to see closer to the Sun than we can currently see from the ground.

By the 1920s, astronomers learned that the Universe was expanding as Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity predicted. This led to a debate among astrophysicists between those who believed the Universe began with a Big Bang and those who believed the Universe existed in a Steady State. By the 1960s, the first measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) indicated that the former was the most likely scenario. And by the 1990s, the Hubble Deep Fields provided the deepest images of the Universe ever taken, revealing galaxies as they appeared just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

Over time, these discoveries led to an astounding realization: the rate at which the Universe is expanding (aka. the Hubble Constant) has not been constant over time! This led to the theory of Dark Energy, an invisible force that counteracts gravity and causes this expansion to accelerate. In a series of papers, an international team of researchers led by the University of Hawaii reported that black holes in ancient and dormant galaxies were growing more than expected. This constitutes (they claim) the first evidence that black holes could be the source of Dark Energy.

The research was made up of astronomers and astrophysicists from the University of Hawai’i, the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, the Enrico Fermi Institute, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON), the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA), the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, and multiple universities. Their findings appeared in two papers published in The Astronomical Journal and The Astronomical Journal Letters.

Cosmological Crisis

According to the most widely accepted model of the Universe, Dark Energy accounts for 68% of the mass-energy content in the Universe. This theory resurrected an idea Einstein had proposed but later rejected – that there was a “Cosmological Constant” (represented by the scientific symbol delta) that “held back” gravity and prevented the Universe from collapsing in on itself. The force and Dark Matter (which accounts for 26.8% of the mass-energy content) are integral to the most widely held cosmological model today, known as the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model.

The main argument behind Dark Energy is that there is a special type of energy within spacetime (called vacuum energy) pushing the Universe apart. There are a few problems with this theory, though, not the least of which has to do with the fact that no direct evidence exists for this mysterious energy. Moreover, while this vacuum energy is consistent with quantum mechanics, all attempts to calculate it using quantum field theory have come up dry. On top of that, there is the question of how this energy coincides with supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in our Universe.

Astronomers have studied the star formation process for decades. As we get more and more capable telescopes, the intricate details of one of nature’s most fascinating processes become clearer. The earliest stages of star formation happen inside a dense veil of gas and dust that stymies our observations.

But the James Webb Space Telescope sees right through the veil in its images of nearby galaxies.

The PHANGS (Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby Galaxies) collaboration is a large survey of nearby spiral galaxies. Its goal is to ” … understand the interplay of the small-scale physics of gas and star formation with galactic structure and galaxy evolution,” according to the PHANGS website.

Telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and ALMA have contributed to PHANGS and resolved individual gas clouds and star-forming complexes in galaxies that are the cradles of star birth and the engines of galactic evolution. Now that the JWST is operational, it’s also taking part in PHANGS.

In these PHANGS images, the James Webb Space Telescope is displaying its impressive power once again. The Webb’s high resolution and infrared capabilities reveal new details in the distant spiral galaxies, including intricate networks of gaseous and dusty features. Its observations have led to no fewer than 21 new papers. This is after the telescope has imaged only 5 of its 19 total targets: