How the largest digital camera ever made is revolutionizing our view of space
Bryan Walsh
Sat, June 28, 2025
Eye on the sky
Perched 8,660 feet up Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes, where the crystal-clear nights provide an exceptionally clear window into space, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory began construction in 2015 with funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy. Named for the pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin, whose work on galaxy rotation helped prove the existence of dark matter, the observatory was built to run a single, audacious experiment: the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
It will photograph the entire Southern Hemisphere sky every few nights to tackle four grand goals: unmask dark matter and dark energy, inventory the Solar System’s asteroids and comets, chart the Milky Way’s formation, and capture every transient cosmic event.
What makes Rubin so special is its eye, which is a marvel. At its core is a 27-foot-wide dual mirror cast from 51,900 pounds of molten glass that is still light enough to sweep across the sky in seconds. The mirror directs a flow of light from the cosmic depths to the 3.2-gigapixel LSST Camera, a 5-by-10-feet digital jumbotron that is the largest digital camera ever made. It’s like a massive magnifying glass paired with the world’s sharpest DSLR: Together they capture a swath of the night sky equivalent to 45 full moons every 30 seconds.
And those images, which will be continuously shared with the world, are jaw-dropping. The headlining shot from Rubin’s debut, nicknamed “Cosmic Treasure Chest,” stitches together 1,185 exposures of the Virgo Cluster, our nearest major collection of galaxies, some 55 million light-years away.
But the Rubin Observatory is about much more than producing pretty cosmic wallpaper. Its unprecedented scale gives it the ability to search for answers to grand questions about space science. The NSF notes that Rubin will gather more optical data in its first year than all previous ground telescopes combined, turning the messy, ever-changing sky into a searchable movie.
Cosmic Treasure Chest.
It’s not just pretty pictures
As I’ve written before, the world has made great strides in planetary defense: Our ability to detect and eventually deflect asteroids that could be on a collision course with Earth. Rubin has already begun paying dividends toward that goal.
In a mere 10 hours of engineering data, its detection software identified 2,104 brand-new asteroids — including seven near-Earth objects, heavenly bodies whose orbit will bring them near-ish our planet.
That haul came from just a thumbnail-sized patch of sky; once Rubin begins its nightly scan of the whole Southern Hemisphere, it’s projected to catalog over 5 million asteroids and roughly 100,000 NEOs over the next decade, tripling today’s inventory. That will help NASA finally reach its congressionally mandated target of identifying 90 percent of the 25,000 city-killer-class NEOs (those over 140 meters) estimated to be out there.
How powerful is Rubin’s eye? “It took 225 years of astronomical observations to detect the first 1.5 million asteroids,” Jake Kurlander, a grad student astronomer at the University of Washington, told Earth.com. “Rubin will double that number in less than a year.”
Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae.| RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA
And the images that Rubin captures will go out to the entire world. Its Skyviewer app will allow anyone to zoom in and out of the corners of space that catch Rubin’s eye, including celestial objects so new that most of them don’t have names. Looking at the app gives you a sense of what it must have been like to be one of the first human beings, gazing up at a sky filled with wonder and mystery.
Finding perspective in a pixel
It might seem strange to highlight a telescope at a moment when the world feels as if it is literally on fire. But the Vera Rubin Observatory isn’t just a triumph of international scientific engineering, or an unparalleled window on the universe. It is the ultimate perspective provider.
If you open the Virgo image and zoom all the way out, Earth’s orbit would be smaller than a single pixel. Yet that same pixel is where thousands of engineers, coders, machinists, and scientists quietly spent a decade building an eye that can watch the rest of the universe breathe, and then share those images with all of their fellow humans.
Seeing Rubin’s images brought to mind the lines of Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.”
I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
On days when life on our little world feels chaotic, Rubin’s first-light view offers a valuable reminder: We’re just one tiny part in a tapestry of 10 million galaxies, looking up from our planet at the endless stars.
Bryan Walsh
Sat, June 28, 2025
VOX
Ten areas in the sky were selected as “deep fields” that the Dark Energy Camera imaged several times during the survey, providing a glimpse of distant galaxies and helping determine their 3D distribution in the cosmos. The image is teeming with galaxies — in fact, nearly every single object in this image is a galaxy.
Last Thursday, I took my son to the Rose Center for Earth and Space at New York’s Museum of Natural History. In the Hayden Planetarium, we watched a simulation of the Milky Way bloom above us, while the actor Pedro Pascal — who truly is everywhere — narrated the galactic dance unfolding on the screen.
It was breathtaking. But it didn’t compare to what was blasted around the world just a few days later, as the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory began broadcasting its “first light” — its inaugural images of the cosmos. I found myself pinching-to-zoom through a picture that contains roughly 10 million galaxies in a single frame, a vista so vast it would take 400 4-K TVs to display at full resolution. I could hold the universe itself on my screen.
Ten areas in the sky were selected as “deep fields” that the Dark Energy Camera imaged several times during the survey, providing a glimpse of distant galaxies and helping determine their 3D distribution in the cosmos. The image is teeming with galaxies — in fact, nearly every single object in this image is a galaxy.
Last Thursday, I took my son to the Rose Center for Earth and Space at New York’s Museum of Natural History. In the Hayden Planetarium, we watched a simulation of the Milky Way bloom above us, while the actor Pedro Pascal — who truly is everywhere — narrated the galactic dance unfolding on the screen.
It was breathtaking. But it didn’t compare to what was blasted around the world just a few days later, as the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory began broadcasting its “first light” — its inaugural images of the cosmos. I found myself pinching-to-zoom through a picture that contains roughly 10 million galaxies in a single frame, a vista so vast it would take 400 4-K TVs to display at full resolution. I could hold the universe itself on my screen.
Eye on the sky
Perched 8,660 feet up Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes, where the crystal-clear nights provide an exceptionally clear window into space, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory began construction in 2015 with funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy. Named for the pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin, whose work on galaxy rotation helped prove the existence of dark matter, the observatory was built to run a single, audacious experiment: the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
It will photograph the entire Southern Hemisphere sky every few nights to tackle four grand goals: unmask dark matter and dark energy, inventory the Solar System’s asteroids and comets, chart the Milky Way’s formation, and capture every transient cosmic event.
What makes Rubin so special is its eye, which is a marvel. At its core is a 27-foot-wide dual mirror cast from 51,900 pounds of molten glass that is still light enough to sweep across the sky in seconds. The mirror directs a flow of light from the cosmic depths to the 3.2-gigapixel LSST Camera, a 5-by-10-feet digital jumbotron that is the largest digital camera ever made. It’s like a massive magnifying glass paired with the world’s sharpest DSLR: Together they capture a swath of the night sky equivalent to 45 full moons every 30 seconds.
And those images, which will be continuously shared with the world, are jaw-dropping. The headlining shot from Rubin’s debut, nicknamed “Cosmic Treasure Chest,” stitches together 1,185 exposures of the Virgo Cluster, our nearest major collection of galaxies, some 55 million light-years away.
But the Rubin Observatory is about much more than producing pretty cosmic wallpaper. Its unprecedented scale gives it the ability to search for answers to grand questions about space science. The NSF notes that Rubin will gather more optical data in its first year than all previous ground telescopes combined, turning the messy, ever-changing sky into a searchable movie.
Cosmic Treasure Chest.
It’s not just pretty pictures
As I’ve written before, the world has made great strides in planetary defense: Our ability to detect and eventually deflect asteroids that could be on a collision course with Earth. Rubin has already begun paying dividends toward that goal.
In a mere 10 hours of engineering data, its detection software identified 2,104 brand-new asteroids — including seven near-Earth objects, heavenly bodies whose orbit will bring them near-ish our planet.
That haul came from just a thumbnail-sized patch of sky; once Rubin begins its nightly scan of the whole Southern Hemisphere, it’s projected to catalog over 5 million asteroids and roughly 100,000 NEOs over the next decade, tripling today’s inventory. That will help NASA finally reach its congressionally mandated target of identifying 90 percent of the 25,000 city-killer-class NEOs (those over 140 meters) estimated to be out there.
How powerful is Rubin’s eye? “It took 225 years of astronomical observations to detect the first 1.5 million asteroids,” Jake Kurlander, a grad student astronomer at the University of Washington, told Earth.com. “Rubin will double that number in less than a year.”
Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae.| RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA
And the images that Rubin captures will go out to the entire world. Its Skyviewer app will allow anyone to zoom in and out of the corners of space that catch Rubin’s eye, including celestial objects so new that most of them don’t have names. Looking at the app gives you a sense of what it must have been like to be one of the first human beings, gazing up at a sky filled with wonder and mystery.
Finding perspective in a pixel
It might seem strange to highlight a telescope at a moment when the world feels as if it is literally on fire. But the Vera Rubin Observatory isn’t just a triumph of international scientific engineering, or an unparalleled window on the universe. It is the ultimate perspective provider.
If you open the Virgo image and zoom all the way out, Earth’s orbit would be smaller than a single pixel. Yet that same pixel is where thousands of engineers, coders, machinists, and scientists quietly spent a decade building an eye that can watch the rest of the universe breathe, and then share those images with all of their fellow humans.
Seeing Rubin’s images brought to mind the lines of Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.”
I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
On days when life on our little world feels chaotic, Rubin’s first-light view offers a valuable reminder: We’re just one tiny part in a tapestry of 10 million galaxies, looking up from our planet at the endless stars.
James Webb Discovers First-Ever Exoplanet by Taking a Picture of It
Sharon Adarlo
Sat, June 28, 2025
World's First
Scientists harnessing NASA's James Webb Space Telescope took what appears to be the first-ever direct picture of an exoplanet resulting in its discovery, in yet another accomplishment for the mighty space observatory.
An international team of astronomers published a paper on the historic finding in the prestigious journal Nature.
"If confirmed, this would represent Webb’s first direct image discovery of a planet," they wrote of the finding, "and the lightest planet ever seen with this technique outside the solar system."
The planet, dubbed TWA 7 b, orbits a young star and appears to be about the size of Neptune. Though the James Webb has directly imaged other exoplanets previously, they were previously known to exist; in this case, in an apparent first-ever accomplishment, the act of capturing the picture also established the existence of the distant world.
Fantastic Planets
Since its launch in 2021, the James Webb has been at the forefront of many exciting space discoveries, from plumbing the depths of the early universe to investigating how our solar system was formed. It's able to do all this because it's the largest space telescope ever built, even bigger than Hubble Space Telescope, with a primary mirror measuring over 21 feet in diameter.
TWA 7 b was difficult to detect due to the glare of the orbiting star, so the team developed a clever mechanism that mimics an eclipse in order to pick out any bodies that are lurking in the blinding light.
The exoplanet orbits the star TWA 7, a relatively young red dwarf at 6.4 million years of age that sports a sizable debris field.
"Here we’re looking at a system that is about 6 [million] years old, so we are really witnessing the youth of the planetary system," Anne-Marie Lagrange, astrophysicist and first author of the paper, told The Guardian.
Is the bar higher for scientific claims of alien life?
Oliver Swainston
Sat, June 28, 2025
Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, Wegener’s theory of plate tectonics, and human-made climate change all faced prolonged scrutiny before achieving consensus.
But does the nature of the search for extraterrestrial life mean that extraordinary claims require even more extraordinary evidence? We’ve seen groundbreaking evidence in this search beforehand, from claims of biosignatures (potential signs of life) in Venus’s atmosphere to NASA rovers finding “leopard spots” – a potential sign of past microbial activity – in a Martian rock.
Both stories generated a public buzz around the idea that we might be one step closer to finding alien life. But on further inspection, abiotic (non-biological) processes or false detection became more likely explanations.
In the case of the exoplanet, K2-18 b, scientists working with data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) announced the detection of gases in the planet’s atmosphere – methane, carbon dioxide, and more importantly, two compounds called dimethyl sulphide (DMS) and dimethyl disulphide (DMDS). As far as we know, on Earth, DMS/DMDS are produced exclusively by living organisms.
The ALH84001 meteorite was found in Antarctica in 1984 and believed to have originated from Mars. | Credit: NASA
Their presence, if accurately confirmed in abundance, would suggest microbial life. The researchers even suggest there’s a 99.4% probability that the detection of these compounds wasn’t a fluke – a figure that, with repeat observations, could reach the gold standard for statistical certainty in the sciences. This is a figure known as five sigma, which equates to about a one in a million chance that the findings are a fluke.
So why hasn’t the scientific community declared this the discovery of alien life? The answer lies in the difference between detection and attribution, and in the nature of evidence itself.
JWST doesn’t directly “see” molecules. Instead, it measures the way that light passes through or bounces off a planet’s atmosphere. Different molecules absorb light in different ways, and by analysing these absorption patterns – called spectra – scientists infer what chemicals are likely to be present. This is an impressive and sophisticated method – but also an imperfect one.
It relies on complex models that assume we understand the biological reactions and atmospheric conditions of a planet 120 light years away. The spectra suggesting the existence of DMS/DMDS may be detected because you cannot explain the spectrum without the molecule you’ve predicted, but it could also result from an undiscovered or misunderstood molecule instead.
An illustration shows what the exoplanet K2-18b might look like. | Credit: Hubble, M. Kornmesser via Wikimedia commons
Climate comparison
Given how momentous the conclusive discovery of extraterrestrial life would be, these assumptions mean that many scientists err on the side of caution. But is this the same for other kinds of science? Let’s compare with another scientific breakthrough: the detection and attribution of human-made climate change.
The relationship between temperature and increases in CO₂ was first observed by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1927. It was only taken seriously once we began to routinely measure temperature increases. But our atmosphere has many processes that feed CO₂ in and out, many of which are natural.
Credit: NASA/Ames/JPLCal-tech.
So the relationship between atmospheric CO₂ and temperature may have been validated, but the attribution still needed to follow.
Carbon has three so-called flavors, known as isotopes. One of these isotopes, carbon-14, is radioactive and decays slowly. When scientists observed an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide but a low volume of carbon-14, they could deduce that the carbon was very old – too old to have any carbon-14. Fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – are composed of ancient carbon and thus are devoid of carbon-14.
So the attribution of anthropogenic climate change was proven beyond reasonable doubt, with 97% acceptance among scientists. In the search for extraterrestrial life, much like climate change, there is a detection and attribution phase, which requires the robust testing of hypotheses and also rigorous scrutiny.
In the case of climate change, we had in situ observations from many sources. This means roughly that we could observe these sources close up. The search for extraterrestrial life relies on repeated observations from the same sensors that are far away. In such situations, systematic errors are more costly.
Further to this, both the chemistry of atmospheric climate change and fossil fuel emissions were validated with atmospheric tests under lab conditions from 1927 onwards. Much of the data we see touted as evidence for extraterrestrial life comes from light years away, via one instrument, and without any in situ samples.
The search for extraterrestrial life is not held to a higher standard of scientific rigor but it is constrained by an inability to independently detect and attribute multiple lines of evidence.
For now, the claims about K2-18 b remain compelling but inconclusive.
That doesn’t mean we aren’t making progress. Each new observation adds to a growing body of knowledge about the universe and our place in it. The search continues – not because we’re too cautious, but because we are rightly so.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Sharon Adarlo
Sat, June 28, 2025
World's First
Scientists harnessing NASA's James Webb Space Telescope took what appears to be the first-ever direct picture of an exoplanet resulting in its discovery, in yet another accomplishment for the mighty space observatory.
An international team of astronomers published a paper on the historic finding in the prestigious journal Nature.
"If confirmed, this would represent Webb’s first direct image discovery of a planet," they wrote of the finding, "and the lightest planet ever seen with this technique outside the solar system."
The planet, dubbed TWA 7 b, orbits a young star and appears to be about the size of Neptune. Though the James Webb has directly imaged other exoplanets previously, they were previously known to exist; in this case, in an apparent first-ever accomplishment, the act of capturing the picture also established the existence of the distant world.
Fantastic Planets
Since its launch in 2021, the James Webb has been at the forefront of many exciting space discoveries, from plumbing the depths of the early universe to investigating how our solar system was formed. It's able to do all this because it's the largest space telescope ever built, even bigger than Hubble Space Telescope, with a primary mirror measuring over 21 feet in diameter.
TWA 7 b was difficult to detect due to the glare of the orbiting star, so the team developed a clever mechanism that mimics an eclipse in order to pick out any bodies that are lurking in the blinding light.
The exoplanet orbits the star TWA 7, a relatively young red dwarf at 6.4 million years of age that sports a sizable debris field.
"Here we’re looking at a system that is about 6 [million] years old, so we are really witnessing the youth of the planetary system," Anne-Marie Lagrange, astrophysicist and first author of the paper, told The Guardian.
Is the bar higher for scientific claims of alien life?
Oliver Swainston
Sat, June 28, 2025
THE CONVERSATION
A close up of the ALH84001 meteorite, found in Antarctica in 1984. | Credit: NASA
The search for extraterrestrial life has long gone back and forth between scientific curiosity, public fascination and outright skepticism. Recently, scientists claimed the “strongest evidence” of life on a distant exoplanet – a world outside our solar system.
Grandiose headlines often promise proof that we are not alone, but scientists remain cautious. Is this caution unique to the field of astrobiology? In truth, major scientific breakthroughs are rarely accepted quickly.
A close up of the ALH84001 meteorite, found in Antarctica in 1984. | Credit: NASA
The search for extraterrestrial life has long gone back and forth between scientific curiosity, public fascination and outright skepticism. Recently, scientists claimed the “strongest evidence” of life on a distant exoplanet – a world outside our solar system.
Grandiose headlines often promise proof that we are not alone, but scientists remain cautious. Is this caution unique to the field of astrobiology? In truth, major scientific breakthroughs are rarely accepted quickly.
Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, Wegener’s theory of plate tectonics, and human-made climate change all faced prolonged scrutiny before achieving consensus.
But does the nature of the search for extraterrestrial life mean that extraordinary claims require even more extraordinary evidence? We’ve seen groundbreaking evidence in this search beforehand, from claims of biosignatures (potential signs of life) in Venus’s atmosphere to NASA rovers finding “leopard spots” – a potential sign of past microbial activity – in a Martian rock.
Both stories generated a public buzz around the idea that we might be one step closer to finding alien life. But on further inspection, abiotic (non-biological) processes or false detection became more likely explanations.
In the case of the exoplanet, K2-18 b, scientists working with data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) announced the detection of gases in the planet’s atmosphere – methane, carbon dioxide, and more importantly, two compounds called dimethyl sulphide (DMS) and dimethyl disulphide (DMDS). As far as we know, on Earth, DMS/DMDS are produced exclusively by living organisms.
The ALH84001 meteorite was found in Antarctica in 1984 and believed to have originated from Mars. | Credit: NASA
Their presence, if accurately confirmed in abundance, would suggest microbial life. The researchers even suggest there’s a 99.4% probability that the detection of these compounds wasn’t a fluke – a figure that, with repeat observations, could reach the gold standard for statistical certainty in the sciences. This is a figure known as five sigma, which equates to about a one in a million chance that the findings are a fluke.
So why hasn’t the scientific community declared this the discovery of alien life? The answer lies in the difference between detection and attribution, and in the nature of evidence itself.
JWST doesn’t directly “see” molecules. Instead, it measures the way that light passes through or bounces off a planet’s atmosphere. Different molecules absorb light in different ways, and by analysing these absorption patterns – called spectra – scientists infer what chemicals are likely to be present. This is an impressive and sophisticated method – but also an imperfect one.
It relies on complex models that assume we understand the biological reactions and atmospheric conditions of a planet 120 light years away. The spectra suggesting the existence of DMS/DMDS may be detected because you cannot explain the spectrum without the molecule you’ve predicted, but it could also result from an undiscovered or misunderstood molecule instead.
An illustration shows what the exoplanet K2-18b might look like. | Credit: Hubble, M. Kornmesser via Wikimedia commons
Climate comparison
Given how momentous the conclusive discovery of extraterrestrial life would be, these assumptions mean that many scientists err on the side of caution. But is this the same for other kinds of science? Let’s compare with another scientific breakthrough: the detection and attribution of human-made climate change.
The relationship between temperature and increases in CO₂ was first observed by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1927. It was only taken seriously once we began to routinely measure temperature increases. But our atmosphere has many processes that feed CO₂ in and out, many of which are natural.
Credit: NASA/Ames/JPLCal-tech.
So the relationship between atmospheric CO₂ and temperature may have been validated, but the attribution still needed to follow.
Carbon has three so-called flavors, known as isotopes. One of these isotopes, carbon-14, is radioactive and decays slowly. When scientists observed an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide but a low volume of carbon-14, they could deduce that the carbon was very old – too old to have any carbon-14. Fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – are composed of ancient carbon and thus are devoid of carbon-14.
So the attribution of anthropogenic climate change was proven beyond reasonable doubt, with 97% acceptance among scientists. In the search for extraterrestrial life, much like climate change, there is a detection and attribution phase, which requires the robust testing of hypotheses and also rigorous scrutiny.
In the case of climate change, we had in situ observations from many sources. This means roughly that we could observe these sources close up. The search for extraterrestrial life relies on repeated observations from the same sensors that are far away. In such situations, systematic errors are more costly.
Further to this, both the chemistry of atmospheric climate change and fossil fuel emissions were validated with atmospheric tests under lab conditions from 1927 onwards. Much of the data we see touted as evidence for extraterrestrial life comes from light years away, via one instrument, and without any in situ samples.
The search for extraterrestrial life is not held to a higher standard of scientific rigor but it is constrained by an inability to independently detect and attribute multiple lines of evidence.
For now, the claims about K2-18 b remain compelling but inconclusive.
That doesn’t mean we aren’t making progress. Each new observation adds to a growing body of knowledge about the universe and our place in it. The search continues – not because we’re too cautious, but because we are rightly so.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Hello, neighbor! See the Andromeda galaxy like never before in stunning new image from NASA's Chandra telescope
Robert Lea
Fri, June 27, 2025
Full version of an image of Andromeda created by an array of space and ground telescopes, including NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory. | Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXO/UMass/Z. Li & Q.D. Wang, ESA/XMM-Newton; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE, Spitzer, NASA/JPL-Caltech/K. Gordon (U. Az), ESA/Herschel, ESA/Planck, NASA/IRAS, NASA/COBE; Radio: NSF/GBT/WSRT/IRAM/C. Clark (STScI); Ultraviolet: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GALEX; Optical: Andromeda, Unexpected © Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner, Yann Sainty & J. Sahner, T. Kottary. Composite image processing: L. Frattare, K. Arcand, J.Major
As the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way, at just around 2.5 million light-years away, Andromeda has been vital in allowing astronomers to study aspects of galaxies that aren't accessible from our own galaxy. For example, from inside the Milky Way, we can't see our galaxy's spiral arms, but we can see the spiral arms of Andromeda.
Every wavelength of light that was brought together to create this incredible new image of Andromeda tells astronomers something different and unique about the galaxy next door.
For example, the X-ray data provided by Chandra has revealed the high-energy radiation released from around Andromeda's central supermassive black hole, known as M31*.
The different wavelengths of light that were brought together to create a stunning image of Andromeda. | Credit: Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXO/UMass/Z. Li & Q.D. Wang, ESA/XMM-Newton; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE, Spitzer, NASA/JPL-Caltech/K. Gordon (U. Az), ESA/Herschel, ESA/Planck, NASA/IRAS, NASA/COBE; Radio: NSF/GBT/WSRT/IRAM/C. Clark (STScI); Ultraviolet: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GALEX; Optical: Andromeda, Unexpected © Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner, Yann Sainty & J. Sahner, T. Kottary. Composite image processing: L. Frattare, K. Arcand, J.MajorMore
M31* is considerably larger than the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). While our home supermassive black hole has a mass 4.3 million times that of the sun, M31* dwarfs it with a mass 100 million times that of the sun. M31* is also notable for its occasional flares, one of which was observed in X-rays back in 2013, while Sgr A* is a much "quieter" black hole.
What connects Andromeda and Rubin?
Andromeda was chosen as a tribute to Rubin because this neighboring galaxy played a crucial role in the astronomer's discovery of a missing element of the universe. An element that we now call dark matter.
In the 1960s, Rubin and collaborators precisely measured the rotation of Andromeda. They found that the speed at which this galaxy's spiral arms spun indicated that the galaxy was surrounded by a vast halo of an unknown and invisible form of matter.
The mass of this matter provided the gravitational influence that was preventing Andromeda from flying apart due to its rotational speed. The gravity of its visible matter wouldn't have been sufficient to hold this galaxy together.
Since then, astronomers have discovered that all large galaxies seem to be surrounded by similar haloes of what is now known as dark matter. This has led to the discovery that the matter which comprises all the things we see around us — stars, planets, moons, our bodies, next door's cat — accounts for just 15% of the "stuff" in the cosmos, with dark matter accounting for the other 85%. The finding has also prompted the search for particles beyond the standard model of particle physics that could compose dark matter.
Thus, there's no doubt that Rubin's work delivered a watershed moment in astronomy, and one of the most important breakthroughs in modern science, fundamentally changing our concept of the universe.
June 2025 has been a brilliant month of recognition of Rubin's immense impact on astronomy and her lasting legacy. In addition to this tribute image, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first images of the cosmos as it gears up to conduct a 10-year observing program of the southern sky called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).
Additionally, in recognition of Rubin's monumental contributions to our understanding of the universe, the United States Mint recently released a quarter featuring Rubin as part of its American Women Quarters Program. She is the first astronomer to be honored in the series.
Robert Lea
Fri, June 27, 2025
SPACE.COM
A pink and purple cloud on a starry background. | Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXO/UMass/Z. Li & Q.D. Wang, ESA/XMM-Newton; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE, Spitzer, NASA/JPL-Caltech/K. Gordon (U. Az), ESA/Herschel, ESA/Planck, NASA/IRAS, NASA/COBE; Radio: NSF/GBT/WSRT/IRAM/C. Clark (STScI); Ultraviolet: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GALEX; Optical: Andromeda, Unexpected © Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner, Yann Sainty & J. Sahner, T. Kottary. Composite image processing: L. Frattare, K. Arcand, J.MajorMore
The galaxy next door to the Milky Way, Andromeda, has never looked as stunning as it does in a new image from NASA's Chandra X-ray space telescope.
The image of the galaxy, also known as Messier 31 (M31), was created with assistance from a range of other space telescopes and ground-based instruments including the European Space Agency (ESA) XMM-Newton mission, NASA's retired space telescopes GALEX and the Spitzer Space Telescope as well as the Infrared Astronomy Satellite, COBE, Planck, and Herschel, in addition to radio data from the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope.
All these instruments observed Andromeda in different wavelengths of light across the electromagnetic spectrum, with astronomers bringing this data together to create a stunning and intricate image. The image is a fitting tribute to astronomer Vera C. Rubin, who was responsible for the discovery of dark matter thanks to her observations of Andromeda.
A pink and purple cloud on a starry background. | Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXO/UMass/Z. Li & Q.D. Wang, ESA/XMM-Newton; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE, Spitzer, NASA/JPL-Caltech/K. Gordon (U. Az), ESA/Herschel, ESA/Planck, NASA/IRAS, NASA/COBE; Radio: NSF/GBT/WSRT/IRAM/C. Clark (STScI); Ultraviolet: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GALEX; Optical: Andromeda, Unexpected © Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner, Yann Sainty & J. Sahner, T. Kottary. Composite image processing: L. Frattare, K. Arcand, J.MajorMore
The galaxy next door to the Milky Way, Andromeda, has never looked as stunning as it does in a new image from NASA's Chandra X-ray space telescope.
The image of the galaxy, also known as Messier 31 (M31), was created with assistance from a range of other space telescopes and ground-based instruments including the European Space Agency (ESA) XMM-Newton mission, NASA's retired space telescopes GALEX and the Spitzer Space Telescope as well as the Infrared Astronomy Satellite, COBE, Planck, and Herschel, in addition to radio data from the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope.
All these instruments observed Andromeda in different wavelengths of light across the electromagnetic spectrum, with astronomers bringing this data together to create a stunning and intricate image. The image is a fitting tribute to astronomer Vera C. Rubin, who was responsible for the discovery of dark matter thanks to her observations of Andromeda.
Full version of an image of Andromeda created by an array of space and ground telescopes, including NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory. | Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXO/UMass/Z. Li & Q.D. Wang, ESA/XMM-Newton; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE, Spitzer, NASA/JPL-Caltech/K. Gordon (U. Az), ESA/Herschel, ESA/Planck, NASA/IRAS, NASA/COBE; Radio: NSF/GBT/WSRT/IRAM/C. Clark (STScI); Ultraviolet: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GALEX; Optical: Andromeda, Unexpected © Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner, Yann Sainty & J. Sahner, T. Kottary. Composite image processing: L. Frattare, K. Arcand, J.Major
As the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way, at just around 2.5 million light-years away, Andromeda has been vital in allowing astronomers to study aspects of galaxies that aren't accessible from our own galaxy. For example, from inside the Milky Way, we can't see our galaxy's spiral arms, but we can see the spiral arms of Andromeda.
Every wavelength of light that was brought together to create this incredible new image of Andromeda tells astronomers something different and unique about the galaxy next door.
For example, the X-ray data provided by Chandra has revealed the high-energy radiation released from around Andromeda's central supermassive black hole, known as M31*.
The different wavelengths of light that were brought together to create a stunning image of Andromeda. | Credit: Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXO/UMass/Z. Li & Q.D. Wang, ESA/XMM-Newton; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE, Spitzer, NASA/JPL-Caltech/K. Gordon (U. Az), ESA/Herschel, ESA/Planck, NASA/IRAS, NASA/COBE; Radio: NSF/GBT/WSRT/IRAM/C. Clark (STScI); Ultraviolet: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GALEX; Optical: Andromeda, Unexpected © Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner, Yann Sainty & J. Sahner, T. Kottary. Composite image processing: L. Frattare, K. Arcand, J.MajorMore
M31* is considerably larger than the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). While our home supermassive black hole has a mass 4.3 million times that of the sun, M31* dwarfs it with a mass 100 million times that of the sun. M31* is also notable for its occasional flares, one of which was observed in X-rays back in 2013, while Sgr A* is a much "quieter" black hole.
What connects Andromeda and Rubin?
Andromeda was chosen as a tribute to Rubin because this neighboring galaxy played a crucial role in the astronomer's discovery of a missing element of the universe. An element that we now call dark matter.
In the 1960s, Rubin and collaborators precisely measured the rotation of Andromeda. They found that the speed at which this galaxy's spiral arms spun indicated that the galaxy was surrounded by a vast halo of an unknown and invisible form of matter.
The mass of this matter provided the gravitational influence that was preventing Andromeda from flying apart due to its rotational speed. The gravity of its visible matter wouldn't have been sufficient to hold this galaxy together.
Since then, astronomers have discovered that all large galaxies seem to be surrounded by similar haloes of what is now known as dark matter. This has led to the discovery that the matter which comprises all the things we see around us — stars, planets, moons, our bodies, next door's cat — accounts for just 15% of the "stuff" in the cosmos, with dark matter accounting for the other 85%. The finding has also prompted the search for particles beyond the standard model of particle physics that could compose dark matter.
Thus, there's no doubt that Rubin's work delivered a watershed moment in astronomy, and one of the most important breakthroughs in modern science, fundamentally changing our concept of the universe.
June 2025 has been a brilliant month of recognition of Rubin's immense impact on astronomy and her lasting legacy. In addition to this tribute image, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first images of the cosmos as it gears up to conduct a 10-year observing program of the southern sky called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).
Additionally, in recognition of Rubin's monumental contributions to our understanding of the universe, the United States Mint recently released a quarter featuring Rubin as part of its American Women Quarters Program. She is the first astronomer to be honored in the series.
Japan launches a climate change monitoring satellite on mainstay H2A rocket's last flight
MARI YAMAGUCHI
Sat, June 28, 2025
NASA's Perseverance Drills Into 'Weird, Uncooperative' Martian Rock
Adrianna Nine
Fri, June 27, 2025
WATSON's close-up of Kenmore's abrasion patch. The lines etched into the rock were created by the percussive drill. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
NASA's Perseverance rover has encountered all sorts of bizarre Martian rocks, including this zebra-striped stone spotted in September 2024. But no rock has puzzled the Perseverance team—and posed a potential issue for the rover's scientific instruments—like Kenmore. Studied on Perseverance's 1,526th sol (June 5, 2025), Kenmore is considered the most "uncooperative" of the rover's 30 geological targets, thanks to its "weird" behavior during the grinding and investigative process.
Named for a rocky outcrop near the rim of Jezero Crater, Kenmore looked at first like a practical window into Mars' formation.
"Visually, it looked fine—the sort of rock we could get a good abrasion on and perhaps, if the science was right, perform a sample collection," Ken Farley, Perseverance's deputy project scientist, told NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
So Farley and his colleagues directed Perseverance to abrade Kenmore using its rotary percussive drill. The rover abraded a two-inch-wide patch—but not without running into some problems.
"Kenmore was a weird, uncooperative rock…during abrasion, it vibrated all over the place and small chunks broke off," Farley said. "Fortunately, we managed to get just far enough below the surface to move forward with an analysis."
Perseverance uses its abrading tool to expose Kenmore's inner material.
MARI YAMAGUCHI
Sat, June 28, 2025
AP
An H-2A rocket carrying Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle, or GOSAT-GW satellite, lifts off from a launch pad in Tanegashima Space Center in Tanegashima, southern Japan, early Sunday, June 29, 2025. (Takumi Sato/Kyodo News via AP)ASSOCIATED PRESS
An H-2A rocket carrying Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle, or GOSAT-GW satellite, lifts off from a launch pad in Tanegashima Space Center in Tanegashima, southern Japan, early Sunday, June 29, 2025. (Haruna Furuhashi/Kyodo News via AP)ASSOCIATED PRESS
In this long exposure photo, an H-2A rocket carrying Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle, or GOSAT-GW satellite, lifts off from Tanegashima Space Center, seen in Kagoshima, southern Japan, early Sunday, June 29, 2025. (Kotaro Ueda/Kyodo News via AP)ASSOCIATED PRESS
TOKYO (AP) — Japan on Sunday successfully launched a climate change monitoring satellite on its mainstay H-2A rocket, which made its final flight before it is replaced by a new flagship model designed to be more cost competitive in the global space market.
The H-2A rocket lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center in southwestern Japan, carrying the GOSAT-GW satellite as part of Tokyo’s effort to mitigate climate change. The satellite was safely separated from the rocket and released into a planned orbit about 16 minutes later.
Scientists and space officials at the control room exchanged hugs and handshakes to celebrate the successful launch, which was delayed by several days due to a malfunctioning of the rocket's electrical systems.
Keiji Suzuki, a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries official in charge of rocket launch operations, said he was more nervous than ever for the final mission of the rocket, which has been his career work. “I've spent my entire life at work not to drop H-2A rocket ... All I can say is I'm so relieved."
Sunday's launch marked the 50th and final flight for the H-2A, which has served as Japan’s mainstay rocket to carry satellites and probes into space with a near-perfect record since its 2001 debut. After its retirement, it will be fully replaced by the H3, which is already in operation, as Japan's new main flagship.
“It is a deeply emotional moment for all of us at JAXA as a developer,” Hiroshi Yamakawa, president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, told a news conference.
The GOSAT-GW, or Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle, is a third series in the mission to monitor carbon, methane and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Within one year, it will start distributing data such as sea surface temperature and precipitation with much higher resolution to users around the world, including the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, officials said.
The liquid-fuel H-2A rocket with two solid-fuel sub-rockets developed by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has so far had 49 flights with a 98% success record, with only one failure in 2003. Mitsubishi Heavy has provided its launch operation since 2007.
H-2A successfully carried into space many satellites and probes, including Japan’s moon lander SLIM last year, and a popular Hayabusa2 spacecraft in 2014 to reach a distant asteroid, contributing to the country’s space programs.
The completion of H-2A lets him put more resources into further development of the H3, Suzuki said.
Japan sees a stable, commercially competitive space transport capability as key to its space program and national security, and has been developing two new flagship rockets as successors of the H-2A series — the larger H3 with Mitsubishi, and a much smaller Epsilon system with the aerospace unit of the heavy machinery maker IHI. It hopes to cater to diverse customer needs and improve its position in the growing satellite launch market.
The H3, is designed to carry larger payloads than the H-2A at about half its launch cost to be globally competitive, though officials say more cost reduction efforts are needed to achieve better price competitiveness in the global market.
The H3 has made four consecutive successful flights after a failed debut attempt in 2023, when the rocket had to be destroyed with its payload.
An H-2A rocket carrying Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle, or GOSAT-GW satellite, lifts off from a launch pad in Tanegashima Space Center in Tanegashima, southern Japan, early Sunday, June 29, 2025. (Takumi Sato/Kyodo News via AP)ASSOCIATED PRESS
An H-2A rocket carrying Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle, or GOSAT-GW satellite, lifts off from a launch pad in Tanegashima Space Center in Tanegashima, southern Japan, early Sunday, June 29, 2025. (Haruna Furuhashi/Kyodo News via AP)ASSOCIATED PRESS
In this long exposure photo, an H-2A rocket carrying Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle, or GOSAT-GW satellite, lifts off from Tanegashima Space Center, seen in Kagoshima, southern Japan, early Sunday, June 29, 2025. (Kotaro Ueda/Kyodo News via AP)ASSOCIATED PRESS
TOKYO (AP) — Japan on Sunday successfully launched a climate change monitoring satellite on its mainstay H-2A rocket, which made its final flight before it is replaced by a new flagship model designed to be more cost competitive in the global space market.
The H-2A rocket lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center in southwestern Japan, carrying the GOSAT-GW satellite as part of Tokyo’s effort to mitigate climate change. The satellite was safely separated from the rocket and released into a planned orbit about 16 minutes later.
Scientists and space officials at the control room exchanged hugs and handshakes to celebrate the successful launch, which was delayed by several days due to a malfunctioning of the rocket's electrical systems.
Keiji Suzuki, a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries official in charge of rocket launch operations, said he was more nervous than ever for the final mission of the rocket, which has been his career work. “I've spent my entire life at work not to drop H-2A rocket ... All I can say is I'm so relieved."
Sunday's launch marked the 50th and final flight for the H-2A, which has served as Japan’s mainstay rocket to carry satellites and probes into space with a near-perfect record since its 2001 debut. After its retirement, it will be fully replaced by the H3, which is already in operation, as Japan's new main flagship.
“It is a deeply emotional moment for all of us at JAXA as a developer,” Hiroshi Yamakawa, president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, told a news conference.
The GOSAT-GW, or Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle, is a third series in the mission to monitor carbon, methane and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Within one year, it will start distributing data such as sea surface temperature and precipitation with much higher resolution to users around the world, including the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, officials said.
The liquid-fuel H-2A rocket with two solid-fuel sub-rockets developed by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has so far had 49 flights with a 98% success record, with only one failure in 2003. Mitsubishi Heavy has provided its launch operation since 2007.
H-2A successfully carried into space many satellites and probes, including Japan’s moon lander SLIM last year, and a popular Hayabusa2 spacecraft in 2014 to reach a distant asteroid, contributing to the country’s space programs.
The completion of H-2A lets him put more resources into further development of the H3, Suzuki said.
Japan sees a stable, commercially competitive space transport capability as key to its space program and national security, and has been developing two new flagship rockets as successors of the H-2A series — the larger H3 with Mitsubishi, and a much smaller Epsilon system with the aerospace unit of the heavy machinery maker IHI. It hopes to cater to diverse customer needs and improve its position in the growing satellite launch market.
The H3, is designed to carry larger payloads than the H-2A at about half its launch cost to be globally competitive, though officials say more cost reduction efforts are needed to achieve better price competitiveness in the global market.
The H3 has made four consecutive successful flights after a failed debut attempt in 2023, when the rocket had to be destroyed with its payload.
Time Is Three-Dimensional and Space Is Just a Side Effect, Scientist Says
Noor Al-Sibai
Sat, June 28, 2025
Obviously, there are an astonishing number of caveats to consider here. For one, Kletetschka is not a theoretical physicist — he's a geologist, and according to his university bio he also has some experience in astronomy.
Extraordinary claims all call for extraordinary evidence. And the claims here are already stirring controversy: as an editor's note added to the end of the press release cautions, the scientist's theory was published in the journal Reports in Advances of Physical Sciences, a "legitimate step," but one that isn't remotely sufficient to take it out of the realm of the fringe. That journal, the note adds, is "relatively low-impact and niche, and its peer review does not match the rigorous scrutiny applied by top-tier journals."
"The theory is still in the early stages of scrutiny," the note concluded, "and has not been published in leading physics journals or independently verified through experiments or peer-reviewed replication."
Still, it's a fascinating concept to consider — especially because we still don't know exactly how time works, anyway.
Noor Al-Sibai
Sat, June 28, 2025
FUTURISM
A fringe new theory suggests that time is the fundamental structure of the physical universe, and space is merely a byproduct.
According to Gunther Kletetschka, a geologist — not a physicist, you'll note, but more on that later — from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, time is three-dimensional and the dimensions of space are an emergent property of it, a press release from the university explains.
"These three time dimensions are the primary fabric of everything, like the canvas of a painting," Kletetschka said in the blurb. "Space still exists with its three dimensions, but it's more like the paint on the canvas rather than the canvas itself."
Three-dimensional time is a theory that has been proposed before, though generally in pretty inaccessible terms. Similarly to the explanation for three dimensions of space — length, width, and depth — 3D time theory claims that time can move forward in the linear progression we know, sideways between parallel possible timelines, and along each one of those as it unfolds.
Yes, it's a pretty mind-blowing concept — but scientists have long theorized that time, as the fourth dimension in Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, is less intuitive than it seems in everyday reality.
While other 3D time theories rely on traditional physics, Kletetschka suggests that his may help explain the many outstanding questions accepted physics still harbors. In a somewhat grandiose manner, the geologist even claims that his 3D time proposal could operate as a grand unifying theory or "theory of everything," the Holy Grail of quantum mechanics that would explain how the universe works on a sweeping level.
"The path to unification might require fundamentally reconsidering the nature of physical reality itself," the scientist said. "This theory demonstrates how viewing time as threedimensional can naturally resolve multiple physics puzzles through a single coherent mathematical framework."
A fringe new theory suggests that time is the fundamental structure of the physical universe, and space is merely a byproduct.
According to Gunther Kletetschka, a geologist — not a physicist, you'll note, but more on that later — from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, time is three-dimensional and the dimensions of space are an emergent property of it, a press release from the university explains.
"These three time dimensions are the primary fabric of everything, like the canvas of a painting," Kletetschka said in the blurb. "Space still exists with its three dimensions, but it's more like the paint on the canvas rather than the canvas itself."
Three-dimensional time is a theory that has been proposed before, though generally in pretty inaccessible terms. Similarly to the explanation for three dimensions of space — length, width, and depth — 3D time theory claims that time can move forward in the linear progression we know, sideways between parallel possible timelines, and along each one of those as it unfolds.
Yes, it's a pretty mind-blowing concept — but scientists have long theorized that time, as the fourth dimension in Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, is less intuitive than it seems in everyday reality.
While other 3D time theories rely on traditional physics, Kletetschka suggests that his may help explain the many outstanding questions accepted physics still harbors. In a somewhat grandiose manner, the geologist even claims that his 3D time proposal could operate as a grand unifying theory or "theory of everything," the Holy Grail of quantum mechanics that would explain how the universe works on a sweeping level.
"The path to unification might require fundamentally reconsidering the nature of physical reality itself," the scientist said. "This theory demonstrates how viewing time as threedimensional can naturally resolve multiple physics puzzles through a single coherent mathematical framework."
Obviously, there are an astonishing number of caveats to consider here. For one, Kletetschka is not a theoretical physicist — he's a geologist, and according to his university bio he also has some experience in astronomy.
Extraordinary claims all call for extraordinary evidence. And the claims here are already stirring controversy: as an editor's note added to the end of the press release cautions, the scientist's theory was published in the journal Reports in Advances of Physical Sciences, a "legitimate step," but one that isn't remotely sufficient to take it out of the realm of the fringe. That journal, the note adds, is "relatively low-impact and niche, and its peer review does not match the rigorous scrutiny applied by top-tier journals."
"The theory is still in the early stages of scrutiny," the note concluded, "and has not been published in leading physics journals or independently verified through experiments or peer-reviewed replication."
Still, it's a fascinating concept to consider — especially because we still don't know exactly how time works, anyway.
NASA satellite emits 'spark' decades after going dormant: Astronomers think they know why
Eric Lagatta,
What is NASA Relay 2 spacecraft?
NASA’s Relay 2 spacecraft orbits between 2091km and 7411km above Earth, and has been offline since 1967.
Astronomers tracked the source of the radio waves to a location that matches that of NASA’s defunct Relay 2 spacecraft, a communications satellite that launched into orbit in 1964 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The spacecraft operated until June 1967 after both of its onboard transponders failed.
So, has the long-dead satellite has suddenly sprung back to life after nearly six decades? Astronomers say that's unlikely.
Rather, the waves more likely came from a "spark" of built up electricity, which emitted a pulse as it jumped from one part of the spacecraft to another while passing through charged environment above Earth’s atmosphere, according to the researchers.
Strange signal originated in Milky Way
The blurry image of the burst indicated the source was not in the distant universe.
The team of astronomers discovered the strange signal while hunting for bright, powerful flashes of electromagnetic radiation in the distant universe known as fast radio bursts.
Most surprising to the researchers, all of whom are from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, was that the signal spotted June 13, 2024, didn't originate from a far-flung galaxy. Instead, it originated in our own cosmic neighborhood in the Milky Way.
While incredibly bright, the event only lasted less than 30 nanoseconds. The astronomers detected it using Australia's national science agency's (CSIRO) ASKAP radio telescope.
Clancy James, an astrophysicist at Curtin University in Australia's Perth campus, then led a team that studied the extremely bright source of radio waves to determine its source.
CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope on Wajarri Yamaji Country.
While the satellite signal is one possible explanation, the researchers have also theorized that an impact with a tiny particle of space debris, known as a "micrometeoroid," could have caused the anomaly. Such impacts can create short-lived clouds of hot, charged gas that produce bursts of radio waves.
Electrostatic discharges could pose threats in Earth's orbit
The discovery marks the first time that a spark of built-up electricity has been observed to be both so bright and so short in duration.
Now that the detection has been made, the finding not only demonstrates how astronomers can help identify the origin of these kinds of signals in the future, but could even help humanity better understand how electrostatic discharges can pose a danger to satellites in Earth's orbit.
"Detections like this show how the tools developed to study the distant Universe can help scientists understand the increasingly crowded and critically important space environment close to Earth," the researcher said in a statement.
The research has been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters. A pre-print version of the paper is available on arXiv.
Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@gannett.com
Eric Lagatta,
USA TODAY
Fri, June 27, 2025
A NASA satellite that had been dead for nearly six decades issued a surprising sign of life.
In June 2024, a team of astronomers were perplexed when a radio telescope in Australia scanning the sky over the southern hemisphere came across unusual radio waves. The burst of radiation was very bright, exceedingly quick – and much closer to Earth than the scientists would have thought.
After studying the source of the strange cosmic phenomena, the researchers were even more mystified when it appeared to be originating from the same location as a NASA spacecraft that went offline about 58 years ago, according to a press release about the discovery released June 25, 2025.
Don't be fooled, though: The defunct spacecraft that operated for about three years in the 1960s isn't kicking back on to resume operations anytime soon.
So, what's going on? Here's what to know about the strange signal, and how astronomers tracked it to a defunct NASA satellite.
Fri, June 27, 2025
A NASA satellite that had been dead for nearly six decades issued a surprising sign of life.
In June 2024, a team of astronomers were perplexed when a radio telescope in Australia scanning the sky over the southern hemisphere came across unusual radio waves. The burst of radiation was very bright, exceedingly quick – and much closer to Earth than the scientists would have thought.
After studying the source of the strange cosmic phenomena, the researchers were even more mystified when it appeared to be originating from the same location as a NASA spacecraft that went offline about 58 years ago, according to a press release about the discovery released June 25, 2025.
Don't be fooled, though: The defunct spacecraft that operated for about three years in the 1960s isn't kicking back on to resume operations anytime soon.
So, what's going on? Here's what to know about the strange signal, and how astronomers tracked it to a defunct NASA satellite.
What is NASA Relay 2 spacecraft?
NASA’s Relay 2 spacecraft orbits between 2091km and 7411km above Earth, and has been offline since 1967.
Astronomers tracked the source of the radio waves to a location that matches that of NASA’s defunct Relay 2 spacecraft, a communications satellite that launched into orbit in 1964 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The spacecraft operated until June 1967 after both of its onboard transponders failed.
So, has the long-dead satellite has suddenly sprung back to life after nearly six decades? Astronomers say that's unlikely.
Rather, the waves more likely came from a "spark" of built up electricity, which emitted a pulse as it jumped from one part of the spacecraft to another while passing through charged environment above Earth’s atmosphere, according to the researchers.
Strange signal originated in Milky Way
The blurry image of the burst indicated the source was not in the distant universe.
The team of astronomers discovered the strange signal while hunting for bright, powerful flashes of electromagnetic radiation in the distant universe known as fast radio bursts.
Most surprising to the researchers, all of whom are from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, was that the signal spotted June 13, 2024, didn't originate from a far-flung galaxy. Instead, it originated in our own cosmic neighborhood in the Milky Way.
While incredibly bright, the event only lasted less than 30 nanoseconds. The astronomers detected it using Australia's national science agency's (CSIRO) ASKAP radio telescope.
Clancy James, an astrophysicist at Curtin University in Australia's Perth campus, then led a team that studied the extremely bright source of radio waves to determine its source.
CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope on Wajarri Yamaji Country.
While the satellite signal is one possible explanation, the researchers have also theorized that an impact with a tiny particle of space debris, known as a "micrometeoroid," could have caused the anomaly. Such impacts can create short-lived clouds of hot, charged gas that produce bursts of radio waves.
Electrostatic discharges could pose threats in Earth's orbit
The discovery marks the first time that a spark of built-up electricity has been observed to be both so bright and so short in duration.
Now that the detection has been made, the finding not only demonstrates how astronomers can help identify the origin of these kinds of signals in the future, but could even help humanity better understand how electrostatic discharges can pose a danger to satellites in Earth's orbit.
"Detections like this show how the tools developed to study the distant Universe can help scientists understand the increasingly crowded and critically important space environment close to Earth," the researcher said in a statement.
The research has been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters. A pre-print version of the paper is available on arXiv.
Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@gannett.com
NASA's Perseverance Drills Into 'Weird, Uncooperative' Martian Rock
Adrianna Nine
Fri, June 27, 2025
WATSON's close-up of Kenmore's abrasion patch. The lines etched into the rock were created by the percussive drill. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
NASA's Perseverance rover has encountered all sorts of bizarre Martian rocks, including this zebra-striped stone spotted in September 2024. But no rock has puzzled the Perseverance team—and posed a potential issue for the rover's scientific instruments—like Kenmore. Studied on Perseverance's 1,526th sol (June 5, 2025), Kenmore is considered the most "uncooperative" of the rover's 30 geological targets, thanks to its "weird" behavior during the grinding and investigative process.
Named for a rocky outcrop near the rim of Jezero Crater, Kenmore looked at first like a practical window into Mars' formation.
"Visually, it looked fine—the sort of rock we could get a good abrasion on and perhaps, if the science was right, perform a sample collection," Ken Farley, Perseverance's deputy project scientist, told NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
So Farley and his colleagues directed Perseverance to abrade Kenmore using its rotary percussive drill. The rover abraded a two-inch-wide patch—but not without running into some problems.
"Kenmore was a weird, uncooperative rock…during abrasion, it vibrated all over the place and small chunks broke off," Farley said. "Fortunately, we managed to get just far enough below the surface to move forward with an analysis."
Perseverance uses its abrading tool to expose Kenmore's inner material.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
To clear away debris, Perseverance used its gaseous Dust Removal Tool, or gDRT, to fire puffs of nitrogen at the rock. (This prevents dust from being carried between various investigation sites, as would occur with a brush.) Then WATSON (the rover's Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) imager took close-up photos before SuperCam examined Kenmore's composition with its laser and spectrometer. Every time SuperCam fired the laser, the spectrometer captured what material comprised the resulting plume of dust
Finally, Perseverance's SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) and PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) studied the rock, finding that it contained clay, feldspar, and a manganese hydroxide mineral that hadn't previously been identified during the rover's travels.
"The data we obtain now from rocks like Kenmore will help future missions so they don’t have to think about weird, uncooperative rocks," Farley said. "Instead, they’ll have a much better idea whether you can easily drive over it, sample it, separate the hydrogen and oxygen contained inside for fuel, or if it would be suitable to use as construction material for a habitat."
Since its encounter with Kenmore, Perseverance has continued its trek across the Martian surface, topping its previous autonomous travel record by driving 1,348 feet in a single go.
To clear away debris, Perseverance used its gaseous Dust Removal Tool, or gDRT, to fire puffs of nitrogen at the rock. (This prevents dust from being carried between various investigation sites, as would occur with a brush.) Then WATSON (the rover's Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) imager took close-up photos before SuperCam examined Kenmore's composition with its laser and spectrometer. Every time SuperCam fired the laser, the spectrometer captured what material comprised the resulting plume of dust
Finally, Perseverance's SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) and PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) studied the rock, finding that it contained clay, feldspar, and a manganese hydroxide mineral that hadn't previously been identified during the rover's travels.
"The data we obtain now from rocks like Kenmore will help future missions so they don’t have to think about weird, uncooperative rocks," Farley said. "Instead, they’ll have a much better idea whether you can easily drive over it, sample it, separate the hydrogen and oxygen contained inside for fuel, or if it would be suitable to use as construction material for a habitat."
Since its encounter with Kenmore, Perseverance has continued its trek across the Martian surface, topping its previous autonomous travel record by driving 1,348 feet in a single go.
Scientists discover rare planet at the edge of the Milky Way using space-time phenomenon predicted by Einstein
Ben Turner
Fri, June 27, 2025
An artist's illustration of the Gaia space telescope, which first spotted the microlensing event in 2021. | Credit: ESA/ATG medialab; background: ESO/S. Brunier
Astronomers have used a space-time phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein to discover a rare planet hiding at the edge of our galaxy.
The exoplanet, dubbed AT2021uey b, is a Jupiter-size gas giant located roughly 3,200 light-years from Earth. Orbiting a small, cool M dwarf star once every 4,170 days, the planet's location is remarkable — it is only the third planet in the entire history of space observation to be discovered so far away from our galaxy's dense center.
Yet perhaps more exceptional than the planet's location is the method used to discover it. The effect, known as microlensing, occurs when the light of a host star is magnified by the warping of space-time due to a planet's gravity. The researchers published their findings May 7 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
"This kind of work requires a lot of expertise, patience, and, frankly, a bit of luck," study co-author Marius Maskoliūnas, an astronomer at Vilnius University in Lithuania, said in a statement. "You have to wait for a long time for the source star and the lensing object to align and then check an enormous amount of data. Ninety percent of observed stars pulsate for various other reasons, and only a minority of cases show the microlensing effect."
Nearly 6,000 alien worlds beyond our solar system have been discovered since the first exoplanet was detected in 1992. The two most common detection methods, called transmit photometry and radial velocity, detect planets through the dimming of host stars as they pass in front of them, or from the wobble that the planets' gravitational tugs impart upon them.
A rarer method, known as microlensing, is derived from Einstein's theory of general relativity and is produced by massive objects as they warp the fabric of the universe, called space-time. Gravity, Einstein discovered, isn't produced by an unseen force but by space-time curving and distorting in the presence of matter and energy.
This curved space, in turn, determines how energy and matter move through it. Even though light travels in a straight line, light traveling through a curved region of space-time also travels in a curve. This means that when a planet passes in front of its host star, its gravity acts as a lens — magnifying the star's light and causing its brightness to spike.
"What fascinates me about this method is that it can detect those invisible bodies," Maskoliūnas said, essentially by measuring the bodies' shadows. "Imagine a bird flying past you. You don't see the bird itself and don't know what color it is — only its shadow. But from it, you can, with some level of probability, determine whether it was a sparrow or a swan and at what distance from us. It's an incredibly intriguing process."
AT2021uey b's cosmic shadow was first spotted in 2021 in data taken by the European Space Agency's Gaia telescope, revealing its presence by a momentary spike in the brightness of its host star.
The astronomers then took detailed follow-up observations using Vilnius's Molėtai Astronomical Observatory, from which they calculated its source as a planet 1.3 times the mass of Jupiter. Its host star burns at about half the temperature of our own, and the gas giant sits four times farther than Earth's distance from the sun.
According to the researchers, the planet's discovery so far from the Milky Way's central bulge, in a region that is comparatively sparse in heavier elements needed to form planets, offers a fresh hint of the unlikely places where planets can be found.
"When the first planet around a sun-like star was discovered, there was a great surprise that this Jupiter-type planet was so close to its star," Edita Stonkutė, another Vilnius University astronomer and leader of the microlensing project that found the planet, said in the statement. "As data accumulated, we learned that many types of planetary systems are completely unlike ours — the solar system. We've had to rethink planetary formation models more than once."
Ben Turner
Fri, June 27, 2025
An artist's illustration of the Gaia space telescope, which first spotted the microlensing event in 2021. | Credit: ESA/ATG medialab; background: ESO/S. Brunier
Astronomers have used a space-time phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein to discover a rare planet hiding at the edge of our galaxy.
The exoplanet, dubbed AT2021uey b, is a Jupiter-size gas giant located roughly 3,200 light-years from Earth. Orbiting a small, cool M dwarf star once every 4,170 days, the planet's location is remarkable — it is only the third planet in the entire history of space observation to be discovered so far away from our galaxy's dense center.
Yet perhaps more exceptional than the planet's location is the method used to discover it. The effect, known as microlensing, occurs when the light of a host star is magnified by the warping of space-time due to a planet's gravity. The researchers published their findings May 7 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
"This kind of work requires a lot of expertise, patience, and, frankly, a bit of luck," study co-author Marius Maskoliūnas, an astronomer at Vilnius University in Lithuania, said in a statement. "You have to wait for a long time for the source star and the lensing object to align and then check an enormous amount of data. Ninety percent of observed stars pulsate for various other reasons, and only a minority of cases show the microlensing effect."
Nearly 6,000 alien worlds beyond our solar system have been discovered since the first exoplanet was detected in 1992. The two most common detection methods, called transmit photometry and radial velocity, detect planets through the dimming of host stars as they pass in front of them, or from the wobble that the planets' gravitational tugs impart upon them.
A rarer method, known as microlensing, is derived from Einstein's theory of general relativity and is produced by massive objects as they warp the fabric of the universe, called space-time. Gravity, Einstein discovered, isn't produced by an unseen force but by space-time curving and distorting in the presence of matter and energy.
This curved space, in turn, determines how energy and matter move through it. Even though light travels in a straight line, light traveling through a curved region of space-time also travels in a curve. This means that when a planet passes in front of its host star, its gravity acts as a lens — magnifying the star's light and causing its brightness to spike.
"What fascinates me about this method is that it can detect those invisible bodies," Maskoliūnas said, essentially by measuring the bodies' shadows. "Imagine a bird flying past you. You don't see the bird itself and don't know what color it is — only its shadow. But from it, you can, with some level of probability, determine whether it was a sparrow or a swan and at what distance from us. It's an incredibly intriguing process."
AT2021uey b's cosmic shadow was first spotted in 2021 in data taken by the European Space Agency's Gaia telescope, revealing its presence by a momentary spike in the brightness of its host star.
The astronomers then took detailed follow-up observations using Vilnius's Molėtai Astronomical Observatory, from which they calculated its source as a planet 1.3 times the mass of Jupiter. Its host star burns at about half the temperature of our own, and the gas giant sits four times farther than Earth's distance from the sun.
According to the researchers, the planet's discovery so far from the Milky Way's central bulge, in a region that is comparatively sparse in heavier elements needed to form planets, offers a fresh hint of the unlikely places where planets can be found.
"When the first planet around a sun-like star was discovered, there was a great surprise that this Jupiter-type planet was so close to its star," Edita Stonkutė, another Vilnius University astronomer and leader of the microlensing project that found the planet, said in the statement. "As data accumulated, we learned that many types of planetary systems are completely unlike ours — the solar system. We've had to rethink planetary formation models more than once."
