Image (Credit): Chart showing the planned travel of the JUICE spacecraft. (ESA, work performed by ATG under contract to ESA)
I wanted to start out the new year by first remembering all of the great missions from 2023. I also decided to group this work rather than focus on single missions.
NASA Asteroid Missions: Asteroids were the big news this year, with Lucy encountering a surprise pair of asteroids, OSIRIS-REx bringing back a sample from the asteroid Bennu, and NASA launching the Psyche mission.
JWST Discoveries: This year we celebrated the anniversary of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which has been better than ever imaged. It is helping to change our understanding of the origin of the universe while poking and prodding at exoplanets to review their secrets.
ESA Missions: The European Space Agency (ESA) has also been very busy in 2023. For instance, the launch of the Euclid mission to study dark matter and dark energy, as well as the JUICE mission to study Jupiter and its moons, will assist with our understanding of the big picture as well as our own neighborhood.
That’s an impressive record, and I look forward to even more great news in 2024.
Image (Credit): Expedition 70 astronauts from left: Andreas Mogensen of ESA, Jasmin Moghbeli of NASA, Satoshi Furukawa of JAXA,and Loral O’Hara of NASA. (NASA)
You can watch a holiday video from International Space Station astronauts associated with three space programs provide greetings in three languages. They are away from family during the holidays, yet on the job to keep our space program going.
Did you have a chance to attend the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Space Summit 2023 earlier this month in Seville, Spain? Well, neither did I, but from what I hear it appears the Europeans are trying to address some shortfalls in their space program.
We already know that Europe is having difficulties timely developing its own rockets for space missions, and the Russians are no help these days. So SpaceX and others are helping out for now. But the Europeans can see they need to set things right, and soon.
The Guardianreports that the 22 ESA members agreed to encourage competition among private sector companies to build cargo spacecraft to support the International Space Station (ISS). Moreover, the competition may expand to crewed spacecraft.
This is similar to President Obama’s commercial competition initiatives years ago, helping to create a web of companies that NASA now relies on for the ISS and its Artemis program.
A crewed spacecraft would be something new for the ESA and suggests greater investment and involvement in future space missions, which is good for everyone.
Could we see an ESA lunar station one day? It seems more possible now.
Image (Credit): Galaxy cluster MACS0416. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Diego (Instituto de Física de Cantabria, Spain), J. D’Silva (U. Western Australia), A. Koekemoer (STScI), J. Summers & R. Windhorst (ASU), and H. Yan (U. Missouri))
This week’s image combines the talents of the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope to create a dazzling show of light. The galaxy cluster, known as MACS0416, is about 4.3 billion light-years from Earth.
The image reveals a wealth of details that are only possible by combining the power of both space telescopes. It includes a bounty of galaxies outside the cluster and a sprinkling of sources that vary over time, likely due to gravitational lensing — the distortion and amplification of light from distant background sources.
This cluster was the first of a set of unprecedented, super-deep views of the Universe from an ambitious, collaborative Hubble programme called the Frontier Fields, inaugurated in 2014. Hubble pioneered the search for some of the intrinsically faintest and youngest galaxies ever detected. Webb’s infrared view significantly bolsters this deep look by going even farther into the early Universe with its infrared vision.
To make the image, in general the shortest wavelengths of light were colour-coded blue, the longest wavelengths red, and intermediate wavelengths green. The broad range of wavelengths, from 0.4 to 5 microns, yields a particularly vivid landscape of galaxies.
Those colours give clues to galaxy distances: the bluest galaxies are relatively nearby and often show intense star formation, as best detected by Hubble, while the redder galaxies tend to be more distant and are best detected by Webb. Some galaxies also appear very red because they contain copious amounts of cosmic dust that tends to absorb bluer colours of starlight.
While the new Webb observations contribute to this aesthetic view, they were taken for a specific scientific purpose. The research team combined their three epochs of observations, each taken weeks apart, with a fourth epoch from the CANUCS (CAnadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey) research team. The goal was to search for objects varying in observed brightness over time, known as transients.
They identified 14 such transients across the field of view. Twelve of them were located in three galaxies that are highly magnified by gravitational lensing, and they are likely to be individual stars or multiple-star systems that are briefly very highly magnified. The remaining two transients are within more moderately magnified background galaxies and are likely to be supernovae.
The finding of so many transients with observations spanning a relatively short timeframe suggests that astronomers could find many more transients in this cluster and others like it through regular monitoring with Webb.
Among the transients the team identified, one stood out in particular. Located in a galaxy that existed about 3 billion years after the Big Bang, it is magnified by a factor of at least 4000. The team nicknamed the star system Mothra in a nod to its ‘monster nature’, being both extremely bright and extremely magnified. It joins another lensed star that the researchers previously identified and that they nicknamed Godzilla. Both Godzilla and Mothra are giant monsters known as kaiju in Japanese cinema.
Interestingly, Mothra is also visible in the Hubble observations that were taken nine years earlier. This is unusual, because a very specific alignment between the foreground galaxy cluster and the background star is needed to magnify a star so greatly. The mutual motions of the star and the cluster should have eventually eliminated that alignment.
The most likely explanation is that there is an additional object within the foreground cluster that is adding more magnification. The team was able to constrain its mass to be between 10 000 and 1 million times the mass of our Sun. The exact nature of this ‘milli-lens’, however, remains unknown. It is possible that the object is a globular star cluster that’s too faint for Webb to observe directly.
Euclid shows us a spectacularly panoramic and detailed view of the Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33 and part of the constellation Orion. In Euclid’s new observation of this stellar nursery, scientists hope to find many dim and previously unseen Jupiter-mass planets in their celestial infancy, as well as young brown dwarfs and baby stars.
Our Awesome Universe 