Space News & Blog Articles

The early stage of giant telescope development involves a lot of horse-trading to try to appease all the different stakeholders that are hoping to get what they want out of the project, but also to try to appease the financial managers that want to minimize its cost. Typically this horse-trading takes the form of a series of white papers that describe what would be needed to meet the stated objectives of the mission and suggest the type of instrumentation and systems that would be needed to achieve them. One such white paper was recently released by the Living Worlds Working Group, which is tasked with speccing out the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), one of the world’s premiere exoplanet hunting telescopes that is currently in the early development stage. Their argument in the paper, which is available in pre-print on arXiv, shows that, in order to meet the objectives laid out in the recent Decadal survey that called for the telescope, it must have extremely high signal-to-noise ratio, but also be able to capture a very wide spectrum of light.

Inside the cores of ice giant planets, the pressure and temperature are so extreme that the water residing there transitions into a phase completely unfamiliar under the normal conditions of Earth. Known as “superionic water”, this form of water is a type of ice. However, unlike regular ice it’s actually hot, and also black. For decades, scientists thought that the superionic water in the core of Neptune and Uranus is responsible for the wild, unaligned magnetic fields that the Voyager 2 spacecraft saw when passing them. A series of experiments described in a paper published in Nature Communications by Leon Andriambariarijaona and his co-authors at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Sorbonne provide experimental evidence of why exactly the ice causes these weird magnetic fields - because it is far messier than anyone expected.

They are known as Active Galactic Nuclei (aka. quasars), the core regions of galaxies that are so bright that they temporarily outshine all the stars in the galactic disk combined. This is the result of the Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) at their centers, which accelerate infalling gas and dust in their accretion disks to near the speed of light. This produces intense radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, from visible light and infrared to microwaves and X-rays. For decades, astronomers have known that SMBHs reside at the centers of many massive galaxies, and the same was thought to be true of dwarf galaxies.