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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Latest dark energy survey data suggest possible variations in dark energy over time

    March 20, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space, Physics

    Latest dark energy survey data suggest possible variations in dark energy over time
    The Dark Energy Camera (DECam), fabricated by the Department of Energy (DOE), is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in north-central Chile. Telescope construction started in 1969 with the casting of the primary mirror. The assembly at the Cerro Tololo mountaintop was finished in 1974. Upon completion of construction it was the 3rd largest telescope in the world, behind the 200-inch Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory in California and the BTA-6 in southern Russia, and was the largest in the Southern Hemisphere (a title that it held for 22 years). It was later named in 1995 in honor of Víctor M. Blanco, Puerto Rican astronomer and former director of CTIO. Credit: DOE/FNAL/DECam/R. Hahn/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA 

    A new...

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    JWST captures its first direct images of carbon dioxide outside solar system

    March 18, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    HR 8799
    The clearest look yet in the infrared at the iconic multi-planet system HR 8799. Colors are applied to filters from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera). A star symbol marks the location of the host star HR 8799, whose light has been blocked by the coronagraph. In this image, the color blue is assigned to 4.1 micron light, green to 4.3 micron light, and red to the 4.6 micron light.
    Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, W. Balmer (JHU), L. Pueyo (STScI), M. Perrin (STScI)

    The James Webb Space Telescope has captured its first direct images of carbon dioxide in a planet outside the solar system in HR8799, a multiplanet system 130 light-years away that has long been a key target for planet formation studies.

    The observations provide strong evidence that the system’s four giant planets ...

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    Atmospheric wave-studying mission releases data from first 3,000 orbits

    March 18, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This image shows AWE data combined from two of the instrument’s passes over the United States. The red and orange wave-structures show increases in brightness (or radiance) in infrared light produced by airglow in Earth’s atmosphere.
    NASA/AWE/Ludger Scherliess

    Following the 3,000th orbit of NASA’s AWE (Atmospheric Waves Experiment) aboard the International Space Station, researchers publicly released the mission’s first trove of scientific data, crucial to investigating how and why subtle changes in Earth’s atmosphere cause disturbances, as well as how these atmospheric disturbances impact+ technological systems on the ground and in space.

    “We’ve released the first 3,000 orbits of data collected by the AWE instrument in space and transmitted back to Earth,” said Ludger Scherliess...

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    Signs of alien life may be hiding in these gases

    March 17, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Hycean planet illustration
    Artist’s illustration of a Hycean world, where methyl halide gases would be detectable in the atmosphere. (Pablo Carlos Budassi)

    -Advancing the search for weird life on weird planets

    Scientists have identified a promising new way to detect life on faraway planets, hinging on worlds that look nothing like Earth and gases rarely considered in the search for extraterrestrials.

    In a new Astrophysical Journal Letters paper, researchers from the University of California, Riverside, describe these gases, which could be detected in the atmospheres of exoplanets – planets outside our solar system – with the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST.

    Called methyl halides, the gases comprise a methyl group, which bears a carbon and three hydrogen atoms, attached to a halogen atom such as chlo...

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