Astronomy

This month, an exciting mission takes off from the launchpad. The JUpiter Icy Moons Explorer, better known as JUICE, heads for an encounter with our largest planet’s satellites, beginning with its arrival in the jovian system in 2031. With all of our hopes, dreams, aspirations, and wonder about life elsewhere in the cosmos, it’s possible that life exists right here in other places in our solar system. JUICE will explore three of Jupiter’s moons — Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa — all of which have subsurface oceans that hypothetically could host microbial or even somewhat more complex life. Our frequent contributor, British space journalist Ben Evans, a provides a detailed look at JUICE beginning on page 12. The eight-year journey to jovian worlds will give us lots of time to contemplate the…

Exploration versus colonization Seth Shostak’s article on photographing the worlds of our solar system (“Oh the spaces we’ll go,” October 2022) is all very nice, except human travel to these places will not be funded for the sake of photography. Many wishful thinkers tend to confuse the 15th and 16th centuries’ Age of Exploration, which was funded to seek riches and to acquire and exploit land for colonization, with this century’s exploration of the solar system, which will never be funded for those reasons. Also, technology already provides superb photography of the solar system, and robotic systems can certainly be improved to remotely add the artistic touch to photography. —Christopher Jekeli, Brunswick, ME Feeling small The concept of ego that Bob Berman discusses in his November 2022 column is indeed interesting. In general,…

A stunning hourglass shape surrounds dark cloud L1527, located some 460 light-years away in Taurus and seen in one of the latest spectacular images taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The view reveals giant clouds of material that are feeding the growth of a fledgling protostar located in the neck of the hourglass figure. The protostar itself remains hidden due to copious dust, but JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera was able to reveal the surrounding region in incredible detail. Strings of gas and dust highlight cavities in the cloud carved out by the wind and radiation from the protostar within. Regions where the dust is thinnest appear blue, while thicker pockets take on an orange hue. With images like these, astronomers not only get a deeper understanding of the wild region around…

HIGH-WAY MILEAGE After a 4.5-month journey, South Korea’s first deep-space mission, Danuri, entered lunar orbit Dec. 16 using a ballistic lunar transfer. This fuel-efficient trajectory took it out to nearly the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point before it fell back to the Moon’s vicinity. RECORD GULP A bright event detected in February 2020 was caused by a black hole swallowing a star, new research shows. Named AT2022cmc, it is the most distant known example of such an occurrence; its light traveled for about 8.5 billion years to reach us. FAREWELL, INSIGHT On Dec. 21, NASA said the Mars InSight lander had reached the end of its mission. The craft, which studied marsquakes and the planet’s interior, ran out of power after dust coated its solar panels. Its last communication was Dec. 15.…

In 2021, a flash of high-energy gamma rays attracted the attention of both NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and its Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Because gammaray bursts are both rare and short-lived — sometimes as brief as milliseconds — an automated alert shot out to telescopes around the world, inviting them to immediately scour the area for further signals. Telescopes from Hawaii to Spain turned their eyes to a spot in space a billion light-years away in the constellation Bootes. They collected data at multiple wavelengths, from X-rays to visible to infrared. Together, the data told a shocking story. The event, known as GRB211211A, did not fit into either of the two neat categories astronomers usually use to sort gamma-ray bursts. Instead, it contained elements of both, and is now causing…

THIS FAINT DWARF GALAXY, which measures just 1,200 light-years across, has the official name HIPASS J1131–31. But because it only emerged from behind a fast-moving foreground star in the past 50 to 100 years, astronomers have given it the nickname Peekaboo. An analysis published Nov. 12 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society found that it severely lacks elements heavier than helium, or what astronomers call metals. This trait is usually seen only in young galaxies in the distant, early universe. But the Hubble Space Telescope managed to resolve about 60 stars in Peekaboo, allowing astronomers to pin its distance at just around 22 million light-years. Spectroscopic data captured by the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) indicates the tiny galaxy’s stars only started forming in the last billion years or…