Pic of the Week: Close-Up View of the Helix Nebula

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Part of the Helix Nebula as captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

This week’s image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows an up-close view of the Helix Nebula, which is about 650 light years away. Taken by the JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera, we see the colors of the gases moving away from the exploding star.

NASA notes:

Here, blistering winds of fast-moving hot gas from the dying star are crashing into slower moving colder shells of dust and gas that were shed earlier in its life, sculpting the nebula’s remarkable structure…A blazing white dwarf, the leftover core of the dying star, lies right at the heart of the nebula…Its intense radiation lights up the surrounding gas, creating a rainbow of features: hot ionized gas closest to the white dwarf, cooler molecular hydrogen farther out, and protective pockets where more complex molecules can begin to form within dust clouds. This interaction is vital, as it’s the raw material from which new planets may one day form in other star systems.

Below is a wider view of the nebula from which the image above is taken.

Image (Credit): The full view of the Helix Nebula, taken by the ground-based Visible and Infrared Telescope for Astronomy as well as the JWST’s more focused view. (ESO, VISTA, NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Emerson (ESO); Acknowledgment: CASU)

Video: Brian Cox Talks About Alien Life – A 2026 Special

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Professor Brian Cox discussing the evolution of intelligence. (Science Time channel)

If you have followed the career of English physicist Brian Cox, then you know he is a dynamic speaker who has hosted several series on astronomy, including Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of the Universe.

In this short video from Science Time channel, “Brian Cox Talks About Alien Life – A 2026 Special,” Professor Cox walks the viewer through the chances of finding intelligent life among the 60 billion exoplanets in our galaxy that lie within the habitable zone. To be clear, he is not very optimistic.

The series does not cover much new ground except for some hopeful comments about the James Webb Space Telescope investigating the atmospheres of exoplanet (with Professor Cox wondering whether we will find life on an exoplanet before we find it on Mars). Even so, it is still enjoyable to spend a little bit of time playing around with the Fermi Paradox again.

One of the more intriguing ideas being discussed here and elsewhere is the idea that we may not want to limit our ideas to biological life. The longevity of a civilization may be dependent on its ability to evolve from carbon-based to silicon-based lifeforms. While not explicitly discussed in the video, that could broaden our search beyond a star’s habitable zone yet also frustrate our attempts to find biological signatures in an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

Again, it is worth your time to listen in. I would just ignore the goofy animations that accompany the discussion.

Space Stories: A Dead Galaxy, Newly Discovered Cloud-9, and Preparing for Artemis II

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): GS-10578, also called Pablo’s Galaxy. (JADES Collaboration)

Here are some recent space-related stories of interest.

—innovation News Network: “Astronomers Discover Ancient “Dead Galaxy” Starved by its Supermassive Black Hole“

Using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), researchers found that a growing supermassive black hole can slowly starve a galaxy rather than destroy it outright. The galaxy, catalogued as GS-10578 and nicknamed Pablo’s Galaxy, existed just three billion years after the Big Bang. Despite this early stage in cosmic history, it is enormous – around 200 billion times the mass of the Sun. Most of its stars formed between 12.5 and 11.5 billion years ago, indicating a rapid burst of star formation before the galaxy suddenly shut down.

—CNN: “‘Cloud-9’ is a Newly Discovered Celestial Object. It Could Help Solve a Cosmic Mystery“

Astronomers may have discovered a previously unknown type of astronomical object, nicknamed “Cloud-9,” that could shed light on dark matter, one of the biggest mysteries in the universe. …Cloud-9 is thought to be a dark matter cloud that could be a remnant of galaxy formation from the early days of the universe, according to new research published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

—Space.com: “NASA to Roll Out Rocket for Artemis 2 Moon Mission on Jan. 17“

The first crewed moon mission in more than 50 years remains on track to launch as soon as Feb. 6. NASA announced on Friday evening (Jan. 9) that it plans to roll the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft that will fly the Artemis 2 moon mission out to the pad for prelaunch checks on Jan. 17, weather and technical readiness permitting.

Study Findings: A Carbon-rich Atmosphere on a Windy Pulsar Planet

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of of an exoplanet orbiting a rapidly spinning neutron star called a pulsar. (NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI))

Abstract of pre-publication study findings:

A handful of enigmatic Jupiter-mass objects have been discovered orbiting pulsars. One such object, PSR\,J2322-2650b, uniquely resembles a hot Jupiter exoplanet due to its minimum density of 1.8 g/cm^3 and its ~1900 K equilibrium temperature. We use JWST to observe PSR J2322-2650b’s emission spectrum across an entire orbit. In stark contrast to every known exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star, we find an atmosphere rich in molecular carbon (C3, C2) with strong westward winds. Our observations open up new exoplanetary chemical (ultra-high C/O and C/N ratios of >100 and >10,000, respectively) and dynamical regimes (ultra-fast rotation with external irradiation) to observational study. The extreme carbon enrichment poses a severe challenge to the current understanding of “black widow” companions, which were expected to consist of a wider range of elements due to their origins as stripped stellar cores.

Citation: Michael Zhang et al. A carbon-rich atmosphere on a windy pulsar planet. ApJL (2025).

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.04558

Study-related stories:

University of Chicago – “NASA’s Webb Telescope Finds Bizarre Atmosphere on a Lemon-shaped Exoplanet”

Scientific American – “This Planet Is the Shape of a Lemon. That May Be the Least Weird Thing about It”

Space Daily – “Webb Maps Carbon Rich Atmosphere on Distorted Pulsar Planet”

Pic of the Week: Wolf-Rayet Apep

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Dust spirals surrounding Wolf-Rayet Apep, as captured by the JWST. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Y. Han (Caltech), R. White (Macquarie University), A. Pagan (STScI))

This week’s embryonic image comes from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It shows what NASA calls “four serpentine spirals of dust” around a pair of Wolf-Rayet stars. Such stars are rare, with NASA estimating that only a thousand can be found in our galaxy consisting of hundreds of billions of stars. And binary Wolf-Rayet stars are even rarer.

NASA notes that the JWST, or Webb, provided a much better image of the spiraling dust:

Observations taken prior to Webb only detected one shell, and while the existence of outer shells was hypothesized, searches using ground-based telescopes were unable to uncover any. These shells were emitted over the last 700 years by two aging Wolf-Rayet stars in a system known as Apep, a nod to the Egyptian god of chaos...Webb also confirmed that there are three stars gravitationally bound to one another in this system. The dust ejected by the two Wolf-Rayet stars is “slashed” by a third star, a massive supergiant, which carves holes into each expanding cloud of dust from its wider orbit. (All three stars are shown as a single bright point of light in Webb’s image.)