Over the last two years, scientists have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (also called Webb or JWST) to explore what astronomers refer to as Cosmic Dawn – the period in the first few hundred million years after the big bang where the first galaxies were born. These galaxies provide vital insight into the ways in which the gas, stars, and black holes were changing when the universe was very young. In October 2023 and January 2024, an international team of astronomers used Webb to observe galaxies as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program. Using Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph), they obtained a spectrum of a record-breaking galaxy observed only two hundred and ninety million years after the big bang. This corresponds to a redshift of about 14, which is a measure of how much a galaxy’s light is stretched by the expansion of the universe
Voyager 1, the farthest human-made craft from the Earth, is finally sending back data from all four of its scientific instruments, NASA said this week.
That means the agency is once more receiving its readings on plasma waves, magnetic fields, and space-bound particles.
In April, the agency got it to start sending back health and status information, then science data from two of its instruments in May.
Now, NASA says Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles from Earth, is “conducting normal science operations” and the agency just needs to resync its timekeeping software and do some maintenance on a sparingly-used digital tape recorder.
And despite occasional issues with it and Voyager 2, NASA keeps figuring out ways to squeeze more life out of the probes, like tapping into reserve power or firing up thrusters that hadn’t been used in nearly three decades.
Now seems like a great time to either remind you of or point you to the sick Voyager posters, like the one above, that NASA has published on its site.
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With two exceptions*, the names are from Roman mythology. So I'd expect the new planet to get a definitive name from the same template. (Please be Janus. It's the gate of the solar system!)
*Uranus is from Greek mythology, with no good Latin equivalent. Terra is trickier; you could argue that it fits the template for Latin and the Romance languages, but most others simply use local words for soil, without a connection to the goddess. That is also called Tellus to add confusion.
I thought the torus shape was the accepted theory? Guess I haven't been keeping up on this.
Near the bottom of the article they mention that if the universe wasn't flat, we would see multiple copies of the universe in the sky. I'm not sure that is exactly true? Given the speed at which the universe is expanding, especially during the early period after the big bang, it seems reasonable that the light from most stars wouldn't have had a chance to loop back around yet. Even the light from the earliest stars is just reaching us, so I don't know why they think it would have had time to loop back around multiple times, unless there's something I'm missing?
And nothing in the article really touched on the "holes" mentioned in the title. Are they referring to the center of a torus, which isn't really a hole that we could observe? I don't get it.
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