Pic of the Week: The Heart of Our Galaxy

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Image of our Milky Way galaxy’s center in visible light taken on March 23, 2025 by ESA’s Euclid space telescope. (ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CFHT, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin (CEA Paris-Saclay))

This week’s image is from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid space telescope. It shows the center of the Milky Way Galaxy with its more than 60 million stars.

Here is more from ESA pertaining to what you are seeing above:

The galactic bulge – the central region of our galaxy – is a vast, tightly packed structure filled mainly with old, cooler stars, giving it its characteristic yellow colour. Seen from some 26 000 light-years away, Euclid observes the galaxy’s centre through a complex foreground of material along its line of sight.

This ultra-wide view towards the bulge reveals not only stars, but also seemingly empty dark regions. The dark patches are not devoid of stars: they mark dense, dust-rich molecular clouds that absorb and scatter light from the bulge behind them. As Euclid looks through two of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, it also encounters regions of active star formation, traced by newly formed, massive blue stars. Their intense ultraviolet radiation ionises surrounding hydrogen gas, producing the faint red glow clearly visible in one of the cutouts.

The image below provides more context about the location of the image shown above. Go to this link for more information on the Euclid’s survey.

Image (Credit): Location of Euclid’s galactic bulge survey. (ESA)

Audit Report: NASA Launch Facilities in Need of Repair and Sustainable Financing

Posted on by onespaceman2000

First, let’s note the good news. NASA has more and more launches on its current launch pads (see figure above). Now, the bad news. NASA is running out of functioning launch pads.

That’s the story from NASA’s Office of Inspector General in its latest audit report, NASA’s Launch Infrastructure. The June 22nd audit report concludes that:

NASA’s launch infrastructure is dated and lacks the capacity to meet the growing demands of the Agency and government and commercial partners. The number of launches supported by Kennedy and Wallops has increased dramatically since 2020 and is projected to grow even further by 2030 due to a surge in commercial launches. The growing number of projected launches from Kennedy and Wallops could eventually outpace each site’s capacity to support the launches. Based on current launch projections, Kennedy and Wallops are expected to operate near capacity in the 2028 to 2029 time frame.

The report also notes that the Kennedy Space Center is in tough shape (see figure below). For example, the auditors stated:

Kennedy’s roadway and bridge infrastructure was largely constructed in the 1960s and was not designed to accommodate the volume, frequency, and weight of modern heavy transport operations. Roadways and bridges are in marginal to poor condition and are expected to receive further strain as launch rates increase and generate approximately 19,000 additional truck trips annually to transport flight hardware, propellants, and related materials.

Why is this the situation in a nation that seems to want a strong space program? The report highlights a number of causes, including budget cuts and NASA’s inability to seek sufficient reimbursement from commercial users. It seems we want the private sector to be involved, but we are subsidizing all of the infrastructure, thereby not showing the true cost of these missions. The auditors noted that Congress is aware of this problem, but still unable to pass legislation to correct this reimbursement issue.

The report has a number of recommendations addressed to NASA, which is the auditee. Yet a few recommendations are also needed for Congress. My first recommendation would be for Congress to get off its butt and put legislation in place to ensure the commercial sector is reimbursing the government for the services it is using. That seems easy enough with a serious Congress, and NASA certainly has enough bipartisan support to make this happen.

Study Findings: Isotopic Evidence for a Cold and Distant Origin of 3I/ATLAS

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: NASA

Nature abstract of study findings:

Interstellar objects provide the only directly observable samples of icy planetesimals formed around other stars, and can therefore provide insight into the diversity of physical and chemical conditions occurring during exoplanet formation. Here we report isotopic measurements of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, which reveal an elemental composition unlike any Solar System body. The water in 3I/ATLAS is enriched in deuterium, at a level of D/H = (0.98 ± 0.06)%, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than in known comets, while its range of 12C/13C ratios (141–191 for CO2 and 123–172 for CO) exceeds typical values found in the Solar System, as well as nearby interstellar clouds and protoplanetary disks. Such extreme isotopic signatures indicate formation at temperatures ≲ 30 K in a relatively metal-poor environment. When interpreted with respect to models for Galactic chemical evolution, the carbon isotopic composition implies that 3I/ATLAS may have accreted as long ago as 12 billion years, following a period of intense, early star formation. 3I/ATLAS thus represents a preserved fragment of an ancient planetary system.

Citation: Cordiner, M., Roth, N.X., Micheli, M. et al. Isotopic evidence for a cold and distant origin of 3I/ATLAS. Nature (2026).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10771-6

Study-related stories:

Scientific American – “Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS is Almost as Old as the Universe Itself”

CBS News – “Interstellar Comet that Zoomed Past Earth Could Be Oldest and Coldest Object Ever Seen in Solar System, Astronomers Say”

Live Science – “’Interstellar Messenger’ 3I/ATLAS Could Be Nearly as Old as the Universe Itself, James Webb Telescope Observations Reveal”

Space Stories: A New Player in the Race for Mars, Swarming Exoplanet Seekers, and a Over-sized Pink Exoplanet

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Martian dunes at Endurance Crater as viewed by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. (NASA/JPL/Cornell)

Here are some recent space-related stories.

—Techcrunch: “NASA Picks Eric Schmidt’s Rocket Company for Mars Mission, Setting Up a Race with SpaceX“

Relativity Space — a rocket maker acquired by former Google executive chair Eric Schmidt last year after stumbling on the path to orbit — might just beat SpaceX to Mars. On Tuesday, NASA said it hired the company to build a spacecraft to house a suite of scientific instruments, launch it into space, and fly it to Mars. The structure of the contract is akin to the deals that NASA made with SpaceX to fly cargo to the International Space Station, or Firefly Aerospace to put a lander on the moon. The government agency handles the science, while the private company provides low-cost infrastructure.

—Universe Today: “Astronomers Want to Build a Swarm of Telescopes to Find LIFE“

Current plans for flagship telescopes in the 2040s are focused on answering a simple question – are we alone? Our best telescopes to date, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have only given us tantalizing glimpses into the atmospheres or other worlds, but not enough to truly determine whether or not life as we know it exists there. Astronomers have been waiting for technology to catch up to their dreams of what is possible in terms of new types of telescopes, and recently the W.M. Keck Institute for Space Studies released a report detailing the Large Interferometer For Exoplanets (LIFE) mission, which they hope will help provide a definitive answer to that simple question.

—BBC Sky at Night: “The Pink Planet is So Weird, Astronomers Struggle to Define It. And They’ve Just Found It’s Covered in Salty Clouds“

There’s a pink planet, just a stone’s throw from Earth, that astronomers have been trying to decipher for over a decade. Known as the Pink Planet or, officially, GJ504b, this strange world orbits a Sun-like star 57 lightyears from Earth. Astronomers aren’t even sure if it’s a planet at all. About 25 times the mass of Jupiter, it’s so massive it’s on the boundary between giant planets and brown dwarfs (a type of failed star). But observations with the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed direct evidence for something rather strange at the Pink Planet: salty clouds.

Note: Here is the podcast version of this post.