If you have a little bit of time left in your day, maybe you want to help NASA classify a few galaxies captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. The NASA site has more than 500,000 that need to be classified, and volunteers can make this process faster. For instance, you can help determine if a galaxy is round or has spiral arms.
While a lot of this classification work can be accomplished with artificial attention (AI), the program bumps into numerous images where human eyes can really help. Plus, you will be training the AI as you go.
If this sounds like fun, check out the site. You may be the first human to set eyes on a new galaxy. That sounds like a fun way to end the day.
A space observatory designed to map the entire sky over a period of two years to further our understanding of the early universe has started snapping images. SPHEREx, which launched in early March, got started with its observations this past week after over a month of setup procedures and system checks, according to NASA. The space telescope will complete about 14.5 orbits of Earth per day, capturing roughly 3,600 images daily and observing the sky in an unprecedented 102 wavelengths of infrared light. Its observations will eventually be combined to create four “all-sky” maps.
Sub-Neptunes are high-occurrence exoplanets that have no solar system analog. Much smaller than gas giants and typically cooler than hot-Jupiter exoplanets, these worlds were extremely challenging to observe before the launch of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Many of sub-Neptunes appear to be very highly obscured by clouds and hazes, which have made it impossible to determine their atmospheric makeup. Now, astronomers using Webb have captured the transmission spectrum of the sub-Neptune TOI-421b and uncovered the chemical fingerprints of its atmosphere.
The gold in your wedding ring may have come from a star’s explosive death. For decades, scientists have hunted for the factories that produce the universe’s heaviest elements, and now they’ve found an unexpected one: magnetar giant flares, cosmic explosions that release more energy in a millisecond than our Sun does in 100,000 years. Researchers have confirmed that these titanic blasts create the elements that make up our jewelry, electronics, and even our bodies.
The news is filled this week with a story about possible life on a distant exoplanet? What did scientists find?
The exoplanet is named K2-18b, and it orbits a red star that is about 124 light-years away. It is also about 2.6 times larger than the Earth and 8.6 times as massive.
Scientists using data from the James Webb Space Telescope have detected a biosignature similar to molecules – dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) – associated with marine phytoplankton on our planet.
Nikku Madhusudhan, professor of astrophysics and exoplanetary science at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, stated:
Earlier theoretical work had predicted that high levels of sulfur-based gases like DMS and DMDS are possible on Hycean worlds…And now we’ve observed it, in line with what was predicted. Given everything we know about this planet, a Hycean world with an ocean that is teeming with life is the scenario that best fits the data we have.
A Hycean planet is basically a world with liquid oceans and a hydrogen-rich atmosphere. Such planets are also more common around red dwarf stars.
Of course, more work is necessary to determine whether this finding could relate to something other than biological life, but its does offer exciting possibilities and a clear target for more study.
Image (Credit): Herbig-Haro 49/50 captured by the JWST. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)
This week’s image is from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The transparent red cloud in the middle of the image, nicknamed the “cosmic tornado,” is outflow of gas and dust from a newly formed star. Moreover, the bright blue glow at the top of the cloud has nothing to do with what you are seeing. The blue glow is a distant spiral galaxy.
Angled from the upper left corner to the lower right corner of the image is a cone-shaped orange-red cloud known as Herbig-Haro 49/50. This feature takes up about three-fourths of the length of this angle. The tip of the cone positioned at the upper left appears translucent with a rounded end. Coincidently, a background spiral galaxy appears right near the tip too. The galaxy has a concentrated blue center that fades outwards to blend in with red spiral arms. The cones-shaped feature widens slightly from tip down to the lower right. Along the way there are additional rounded edges, like edges of a wave, and intricate foamy-like details. The nebula appears even more translucent to the lower right providing a clearer view of the black background of space. The black background of space is clearer, speckled with some white stars and smaller, more numerous, fainter white galaxies.
Image (Credit): Infrared view of the 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. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, W. Balmer (JHU), L. Pueyo (STScI), M. Perrin (STScI))
Here are some recent stories of interest related to exoplanets.
The first planet outside our solar system was discovered in the 1990’s, but it wasn’t until more than a decade later astronomers actually obtained a direct image of one. It’s extremely difficult to image an exoplanet, as stars in other planetary systems can be thousands of times brighter and bigger than their planets. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is equipped with a highly sensitive coronagraph, a tiny mask that blocks the light of the star, allowing Webb to image exoplanets. Webb’s new images of two iconic systems, HR 8799 and 51 Eridani, and their planets have stunned researchers, and provided additional information into the chemical make-up of the young gas giants.
Astronomers have confirmed the existence of four planets orbiting a star less than 6 light-years away with help from some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. Research published in October 2024 revealed that one planet was rotating around Barnard’s Star, the second-closest single star system to Earth. But a combination of telescopes all over the world confirmed the presence of four small exoplanets, according to a study published last week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The search for life has become one of the holy grails of science. With the increasing number of exoplanet discoveries, astronomers are hunting for a chemical that can only be present in the atmosphere of a planet with life! A new paper suggests that methyl halides, which contain one carbon and three hydrogen atoms, may just do the trick. Here on Earth they are produced by bacteria, algae, fungi and some plants but not by any abiotic, non biological processes. There is a hitch, detecting these chemicals is beyond the reach of current telescopes.
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