Space News & Blog Articles

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched last December, has been slowly powering up its instruments and unfurling its sunshield, and is now in the process of aligning its mirrors in preparation for operation. Within a few months, the most powerful space telescope ever built is going to set its sights on the stars. Astronomers are hoping that what JWST sees will change the way we understand our universe, just as the Hubble Space Telescope did decades before.

Gravity is a funny force.  The gravity of every given object technically impacts every other given object, though, in practice, large distance and small masses make those forces negligible for such interactions.  But in some cases, especially when large groups are floating in empty space, gravity can still hold sway over considerable distances.  Such is the case with a new pair of brown dwarfs found by astronomers at the Keck Observatory.

The connection between relativity and quantum mechanics has been a black box for the world of physics for decades.  That partially stems from the difficulty in collecting data on systems that interface between the two of them.  Relativity is the realm of the supermassive, while quantum mechanics can best be described as the realm of the minuscule.  But, there is, in fact, one particular realm where they overlap.  One of the results of relativity is that gravity can affect the flow of time.  Commonly known as “time dilation,” this effect has now been studied by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US using an extraordinarily accurate atomic clock.

The inner 600 light years of our galaxy is a maelstrom of cosmic radiation, turbulent swirling gas clouds, intense star formation, supernovae, huge bubbles of radio energy, and of course a giant supermassive black hole. This bustling downtown of the Milky Way is a potential treasure trove of discovery but has been difficult to study as the galaxy’s central regions are obscured by dust and glaring radiation. But a new image of this region with unprecedented detail reveals more than we’ve ever seen before. We find some familiar objects like supernovae but also some mysterious structures – gaseous filaments dozens of light years long channeling electrons at near light speed.

Pictures of galaxies never cease to amaze, and astronomers are consistently coming up with new ones that provide a different viewpoint on the universe and maybe some exciting science along with it.  A recent picture of the galaxy NGC 7582, taken with the Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows an active supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core. However, something appears to be redirecting its “wind” away from the rest of the spiral galaxy.