The James Webb Space Telescope has measured the expansion rate of the Universe, and the results are not great news for the biggest crisis in cosmology.
The finding is in agreement with measurements made by the Hubble Space Telescope. This means that there’s no error in the Hubble data, and we’re still at an impasse.
Galaxies come in many shapes and sizes, from giant, slowly rotating ovals and fast-whirling spiral disks to faint ball-shaped blobs and dwarf irregulars. Most large, bright galaxies — including our own Milky Way — are orbited by a gang of much smaller dwarf galaxies.
Most of this we know from optical images, whether taken with small backyard telescopes or much bigger dedicated ground- and space-based telescopes that reveal the light from billions of distant suns. However, as we are discovering, what happens beyond the bright disk of stars may be even more interesting.
Did the James Webb Space Telescope spot signs of life on a distant planet? On September 11, 2023, NASA announced that Webb made some exciting discoveries while observing an exoplanet called K2-18 b. They said the planet has methane and carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, which indicates it might be a Hycean world, one with a deep hydrogen atmosphere and global water ocean. But the extraordinary news is that Webb found hints of a molecule called dimethyl sulfide (DMS). On Earth, only life produces dimethyl sulfide, such as bacteria and phytoplankton in oceans.
This striking image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures the interacting galaxy pair known as Arp-Madore 2339-661. The Arp-Madore catalog is a collection of peculiar galaxies, and this group’s particular peculiarity might be odder than first meets the eye, as there are three galaxies interacting here, not just two.
The two clearly defined galaxies are NGC 7733 (smaller, lower right) and NGC 7734 (larger, upper left). The third galaxy is currently referred to as NGC 7733N and is visible if you look carefully at the upper arm of NGC 7733.
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Imagine you could go back in time 4.6 billion years and take a picture of our Sun just as it was being born. What would it look like?
Well, you can get a clue from this glorious new image acquired by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Towards the centre of this object, called HH212, is a star coming into existence that is probably no more than 50,000 years old.
The scene would have looked much the same when our Sun was a similar age.
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Link contributed by Gene Savoy, Jr.
Billions of light years away, there is a giant ball of hot gas that is brighter than hundreds of billions of suns. It is hard to imagine something so bright. So what is it? Astronomers are not really sure, but they have a couple theories.
They think it may be a very rare type of supernova — called a magnetar — but one so powerful that it pushes the energy limits of physics, or in other words, the most powerful supernova ever seen as of today.
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Japanese researchers said this month (September 7, 2023) that a possible Earthlike planet – with a mass some 1.5 to 3 times that of our home world – is lurking in the far, frozen reaches of our own solar system. And its presence could explain the unexpected behaviors of some of the strangest objects orbiting our star.
Astronomers Takashi Ito and Patryk Sofia Lykawa probed this realm of space using a special computer program – called an N-body simulation – that simulates the gravitational interactions of solar system bodies.
A planet located 950 light years from Earth is explosively losing its atmosphere and creating a tail that is around 18 times the size of Jupiter in the process. This makes the gaseous tail one of the largest planetary structures seen outside the solar system.
The extra-solar planet, or exoplanet, known as HAT-P-32 b has a mass around 68% that of Jupiter but is twice as wide as the solar system’s largest planet. HAT-P-32 exists just 3.2 million miles from its parent star, or about 3% of the distance between Earth and the sun, and completes an orbit every 2.2 days. This proximity means the gas giant is roasted by radiation from its parent star, classifying HAT-P-32 b as a “hot Jupiter” planet.
Astronomers in Hawaii said this week (September 5, 2023) that they’ve discovered an immense bubble 820 million light-years from Earth. They called it:
… a fossil-like remnant of the birth of the universe.
And they said its size – a billion-light-years in diameter – is:
… beyond theoretical expectations.