From star births to deaths and a party in a black hole, here are some of the reports we’ve been getting back from the universe.
From a Musk spacecraft exploding and Gaia’s final farewell to Vodafone having its own ‘ET phone home’ moment and Irish tech promised to the moon, it’s been a cosmic couple of months for space enthusiasts.
Here are a few of the other top space stories that may have been sucked into the black hole of your newsfeed in recent weeks.
A windy giant
Tylos is a gaseous, giant exoplanet in the constellation Puppis. Image: ESO/M Kornmesser
A large, gassy exoplanet has been found to have a climate unlike any previously observed, challenging scientists’ understanding of how weather works.
WASP-121b, also known as Tylos, orbits close to its sun in the constellation Puppis, 900 light-years from Earth.
By combining all four telescope units of the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers were able to observe Tylos in unprecedented detail and found distinct winds, carrying chemical elements including hydrogen, sodium and iron, in three layers of its atmosphere. These layers intertwine, creating a powerful jet stream and intricate weather patterns.
“Even the strongest hurricanes in the solar system seem calm in comparison,” said Dr Julia Victoria Seidel, lead author of the study, recently published in Nature.
“This planet’s atmosphere behaves in ways that challenge our understanding of how weather works – not just on Earth, but on all planets. It feels like something out of science fiction.”
The research team has created a 3D map of the planet’s atmosphere, the first of such detail for an exoplanet.
“It’s truly mind-blowing that we’re able to study details like the chemical make-up and weather patterns of a planet at such a vast distance,” said study co-author Bibiana Prinoth.
This research was only possible due to the technological advances of the VLT. However, to probe the atmospheres of smaller, Earth-like exoplanets, larger telescopes will be needed, the researchers noted. One such instrument is currently under construction – the ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope – in the Atacama Desert in Chile.
“The ELT will be a game-changer for studying exoplanet atmospheres,” said Prinoth. “This experience makes me feel like we’re on the verge of uncovering incredible things we can only dream about now.”
A ring of light
The ring of light surrounding the centre of the galaxy NGC 6505. Image: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J-C Cuillandre, G Anselmi, T Li (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
Described as a dark universe detective, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid mission blasted off in July 2023 and began a detailed survey to create the most extensive 3D map of the universe yet.
Since then, its instruments have enabled scientists to study many celestial wonders including massive galaxy clusters and vibrant stellar nurseries.
Euclid’s latest discovery is an Einstein ring, a rare phenomenon spotted in a galaxy, NGC 6505, not so far, far away (in cosmic terms).
Euclid’s high-resolution instruments were able to capture the ring of light surrounding the galaxy’s centre – in an example of gravitational lensing.
“All strong lenses are special, because they’re so rare, and they’re incredibly useful scientifically,” said Dr Conor O’Riordan, lead author of the first scientific paper analysing the ring.
“This one is particularly special because it’s so close to Earth and the alignment makes it very beautiful.”
According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, massive objects cause spacetime to curve, focusing light like a lens. When light from a distant object passes by a gravitational lens, it curves, and a distorted image of the distant object can be observed. This gravitational lensing effect is bigger for more massive objects, such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies. And if the alignment is just right, a spectacular ring of light forms.
The ring around the foreground galaxy comes from the light of a bright galaxy much further away, which has not been observed by scientists before and does not have a name.
Einstein rings help scientists learn about the expansion of the universe and the effects of dark matter and dark energy.
“I find it very intriguing that this ring was observed within a well-known galaxy, which was first discovered in 1884,” says Dr Valeria Pettorino, Euclid project scientist.
“The galaxy has been known to astronomers for a very long time. And yet this ring was never observed before. This demonstrates how powerful Euclid is, finding new things even in places we thought we knew well.”
From births…
The ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) has captured in detail the RCW 38 stellar nursery. At less than a million years old, the 2,000 stars in this cluster are bustling with youthful activity, making it an important region for astronomers to observe.
Star clusters are like giant pressure cookers, the ESO said, containing the dense gas clouds and opaque clumps of cosmic dust necessary for star formation. When this mixture collapses under its own gravity, a star is born.
The glow from this cluster comes from the radiation of these newborn stars, which is only visible to us because of the VISTA’s infrared camera technology. The camera can observe infrared light which passes through the dust that blocks visible light. The camera captures young stars in dusty cocoons and cold ‘failed’ stars known as brown dwarfs.
To compare the visible and infrared light images of the star cluster, see the ESO’s website.
…to deaths
Palomar telescope, with an image of the Milky Way in the background. Each yellow star represents a single new supernova discovered and the size is the distance from the Earth, with bigger meaning closer to us. The inset is images obtained by the Zwicky transient facility of a galaxy after (left) and before (right) a supernova exploded. Image: Mickael Rigault and the Palomar Observatory/Caltech
No one style suits all white dwarf stars when it comes to their end-of-life fireworks, scientists have discovered.
White dwarfs are what stars like our sun become when they reach the end of their nuclear burning stage. Without the outward pressure created from the star’s fusion, gravity causes the star to collapse it on itself.
The extremely dense and hot conditions present when white dwarf stars explode at the end of their life create many elements including titanium, iron and nickel.
Observations from the Zwicky Transient Facility, a Caltech-led astronomical sky survey, have enabled researchers to study a dataset of nearly 4,000 white dwarf explosions in deep space. And what they have found is that white dwarf stars explode in numerous ways, including in collisions of two stars and in cannibalising of stars by their companions in double-star systems.
“The diversity of ways that white dwarf stars can blow up is much greater than previously expected, resulting in explosions that range from being so faint they are barely visible to others that are bright enough to see for many months to years afterwards,” says Prof Kate Maguire, a member of the research team, who works in Trinity College Dublin’s School of Physics.
The diversity of explosions may have implications for the use of these supernovae to measure distances in the universe, the researchers said, because constraints in the properties of dark energy demand that these explosions can be standardised.
Party at the black hole
An artist’s impression of the black hole surrounding by an accretion disk of hot gas. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)
The largest and most powerful space observatory ever built, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has enabled major developments in our understanding of the universe since its first image – of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 – was taken in 2022.
From giving a deeper view of the pillars of creation to developing a soundscape of the Cosmic Cliffs, JWST is helping scientists solve mysteries of the universe.
Its latest discovery is that the supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A*, at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy appears to be having a party.
Using JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera to observe the black hole in 8- to 10-hour increments over the course of a year, researchers were able to track how this massive astronomical object changes over time. What they found was a constant stream of flares – some of which were faint flickers lasting seconds, while others were bright eruptions spewing daily.
“In our data, we saw constantly changing, bubbling brightness,” said Prof Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, who led the study.
“And then boom! A big burst of brightness suddenly popped up. Then, it calmed down again. We couldn’t find a pattern in this activity. It appears to be random. The activity profile of this black hole was new and exciting every time that we looked at it.”
Although the team want more uninterrupted time to observe the phenomena, the current theory is that the flares are the result of two processes at play. Yusef-Zadeh posits that the faint flickers are caused by fluctuations in the accretion disk around the black hole which compresses plasma and creates a burst of radiation. He thinks that the big, bright flares occur when two magnetic fields collide, releasing particles that emit bright bursts of radiation.
“When you are looking at such weak flaring events, you have to compete with noise,” Yusef-Zadeh said.
“If we can observe for 24 hours, then we can reduce the noise to see features that we were unable to see before. That would be amazing. We also can see if these flares repeat themselves or if they are truly random.”
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