Astronomers have discovered a huge reservoir of cold molecular gas, the direct fuel for star formation, in REBELS-25, a massive, star-forming galaxy.The team, led from Leiden University, focused on REBELS-25, seen when the universe was only about 700 million years old, around 5% of its current age. Astronomers use “redshift” to describe this distance, which measures how much the universe’s expansion has stretched a galaxy’s light to redder wavelengths.
On 17 June at 09:21 local time (13:21 BST, 14:21 CEST) Ariane 6 flight VA269 soared to orbit from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. 36 satellites for Amazon’s Leo constellation were placed into their orbit just over an hour after liftoff – the eighth successful mission insertion in a row for Europe’s newest rocket.
It feels like every few months we get to report on another academic paper coming out singing the praises of the Solar Gravitational SGL (SGL). Partly, this is due to Dr. Slava Turyshev’s astounding productivity in terms of pumping out academic articles, but partly because such a ground-breaking mission has lots of positive aspects, but also challenges that need to be addressed. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Dr. Turyshev, stresses an often overlooked feature of the SGL - how useful it can be at imaging things other than far away exoplanets.
A proposal to create a new network for monitoring cosmic threats to off-world infrastructure has won this year's Schweickart Prize, which recognizes bright ideas for planetary defense.
Astronomers have detected a flickering quasar called J0439+1634 as it appeared only 850 million years after the Big Bang. That discovery raises fresh questions about black hole formation and activity in the early Universe. The flickering light of this distant cosmic lighthouse showed that black hole at the heart of the quasr has a flat, pancake-shaped accretion disk. That shape is more familiar in modern-day quasars, which leads astronomers to wonder how these objects formed so quickly in the infant cosmos?
The JWST found a galaxy cluster from 10 billion years ago that's far more developed than it should be, according to cosmological models. The cluster is also the most distant strong gravitational lens that we know of. Detailed observations across the spectrum show that the cluster is still undergoing mergers.
There are multiple ways to form black holes. The one most commonly taught in high school physics classes is that they are created from the collapse of a dying star. But there are another class of black holes, known as Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) that could have been created immediately after the Big Bang by matter collapsing in on it. Or that’s the theory at least. Though long theorized, we’ve never actually seen one of them, though scientists have suggested that they might account for the missing mass of the universe, which we otherwise describe as “dark matter”. But a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at Oakland University in Michigan and Rice University in Texas, calls that theory into question, at least for a certain type of PBH.
