Tag: outerspace

SpaceX launches Starship on giant rocket’s first flight to orbit

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SpaceX launched the company’s Super Heavy-Starship on its first flight to orbit Monday — an abbreviated three-hour mission that marked a major step toward perfecting the world’s most powerful rocket for commercial flights and NASA moon missions. One of the Starship upper stage’s six Raptor engines shut down early during the climb to an initially suborbital trajectory. After assessing telemetry, Elon Musk’s flight control team decided the spacecraft was otherwise healthy and a second engine firing using a single Raptor engine completed the climb to orbit.

Right after that, the Starship upper stage deployed 26 third-generation Starlink internet satellites that will join the company’s ever-growing constellation in the first use of the new rocket to launch operational satellites in low-Earth orbit. After the satellites were away, SpaceX controllers opted to bring the Starship back to Earth well ahead of schedule, ending the mission three hours after launch with a Pacific Ocean splashdown north of Hawaii just before noon EDT. For NASA, getting the Starship into orbit and back are critical steps on the road to perfecting the system in time to support a planned Artemis moon landing, using a variant of the Starship, in 2028. A future moon mission will require multiple Super Heavy-Starship tanker flights to fuel the lander for its flight to the moon before docking with a NASA Orion crew capsule in lunar orbit, picking up two astronauts and carrying them down to the surface and back.

“Congrats @SpaceX!,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a post on the social media platform X. “Gorgeous launch, getting Ship to orbit and managing every step in a safe, responsible, and especially inspirational way. @NASA, along with the rest of the interested public, is excited to help where we can and for Starship missions to become routine!” Few doubt SpaceX will eventually get the Super Heavy-Starship flying reliably, but it’s not yet known whether the company will be able to meet NASA’s ambitious 2028 target date for the Artemis IV moon landing.

SpaceX Starship mission plan

Monday’s mission got off to a spectacular start. The Super Heavy booster’s 33 methane-burning Raptor engines ignited with a rush of flame at 8:49 a.m. EDT, quickly propelling the 400-foot-tall rocket away from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site on the Texas Gulf Coast. The Super Heavy first stage booster, generating some 16 million pounds of thrust — twice the power of NASA’s Space Launch System moon rocket — rapidly accelerated as it consumed propellant and lost weight, climbing out of the thick lower atmosphere along a southeasterly trajectory. One of the engines shut down early, but the Super Heavy was designed to reach space despite the loss of one or two engines.

Two minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff, the rest of the first stage engines began shutting down while the six Raptors powering the Starship upper stage began firing up in a “hot staging” maneuver seconds before the booster separated and fell away. While the Starship continued toward space, the Super Heavy booster flipped around, restarted its engines to reverse course and then flew itself back to the Texas Gulf Coast. A second engine apparently shut down early during the so-called boost-back burn, but the huge rocket was able to execute a seemingly normal vertical splashdown a few miles off shore. During the most recent previous test flight, three engines suffered problems that prevented a full-duration boost-back burn and only eight of 13 engines fired for the landing burn. The result was a “hard” splashdown.

SpaceX implemented multiple upgrades and software changes to ensure a successful return this time around. The first stage is designed to be captured by giant mechanical arms on its launch gantry, a feat SpaceX has accomplished four times to date. But until upgrades and improvements have been tested, SpaceX has opted to stick with ocean splashdowns as a safety precaution. The Starship upper stage also is designed to be captured back at the pad after a trip to space and back, but that milestone has not yet been attempted. The Starship upper stage launched Monday climbed into a 180-mile-high orbit with two engine firings. The first, ending a minute after the booster’s splashdown, was intended to put the Starship onto a sub-orbital trajectory similar to past flights that would result in a safe splashdown even if SpaceX lost control of the rocket.

Despite the premature shutdown of one engine, the Starship was cleared to proceed with the orbit-insertion burn and eight-and-a-half minutes after that, a Pez-like dispenser in the rocket’s nose began launching 26 third-generation Starlink internet satellites, each with 10 times the capacity of the previous generation. The mission was initially expected to last six orbits, leading to a splashdown off the coast of Chile around 6:40 p.m. But with the Starlink satellites safely on their way, mission managers opted to bring the ship down early with a Pacific Ocean splashdown north of Hawaii. As with earlier test flights, the Starship fell back into the discernible atmosphere belly-first, rapidly slowing in a fireball of electrically charged plasma before using its fins and flaps to control its orientation during the descent.

As the ship neared the ocean, three Raptor’s re-ignited, the spacecraft flipped up to vertical and settled to a controlled, tail first splashdown in the Pacific Ocean at 11:57 a.m. EDT.  As is usually the case with ocean splashdowns, the rocket tipped over, fell onto its side and exploded as residual propellants ignited.

Future role in Artemis moon program

SpaceX currently has two Super Heavy-Starship pads at its Starbase facility in Texas and three more under construction in Florida, including one at historic pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center and the others at the adjacent Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. SpaceX plans its initial launch from Florida late this year or early next. And multiple pads will be needed. SpaceX is building a variant of the Starship to serve as a lander for Artemis astronauts. For moon missions, the company will need to launch up to 15 or so Super Heavy-Starship tankers to refuel the company’s lunar lander before it can head for the moon to await the arrival of astronauts in a Lockheed Martin-built Orion capsule. From there, the 165-foot-tall lander will carry two crew members down to the surface, landing vertically near the moon’s south pole.

The astronauts then will ride an external elevator down to the surface and back up again when their exploration is complete. With the first such landing targeted for 2028, SpaceX must ramp up its Super Heavy-Starship test schedule to get the vehicle certified for human spaceflight and to demonstrate the reliability required to safely launch more than a dozen tankers within days of the lander’s launch. Many observers with past experience at NASA and elsewhere in the aerospace industry doubt SpaceX can deliver a tested “human landing system” Starship variant by 2028.

NASA is hedging its bets, funding development of an alternative lander designed by Blue Origin. During a test flight in low Earth orbit next year — Artemis III — NASA plans to launch four astronauts in an Orion capsule who will attempt to rendezvous and dock with prototype landers launched separately by SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Source: SpaceX launches Starship on giant rocket’s first flight to orbit – CBS News

Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law.
Romans 13:8

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Roman Space Telescope, NASA’s next “great observatory,” launches into space

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Using a donated Hubble-class mirror originally built for a spy satellite, NASA’s Roman Space Telescope launched Sunday on a $4.3 billion mission to open a new window on the universe, taking wide-angle, ultra-sharp images that would require a half million 4K TVs to show in full. Put another way, officials say a single full-resolution image from Roman’s 300-megapixel wide-field camera would cover 45 city blocks or the entirety of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. And it will collect that data faster than any previous NASA spacecraft. The Hubble Space Telescope has beamed back about 172 terabytes of data over 30 years while Roman will downlink a staggering 2,500 terabytes over its five-year primary mission.

Put yet another way, Roman’s sensitive wide-field camera and advanced detectors will scan broad swaths of the cosmos 1,000 times faster than Hubble, collecting as much data in one month as its older cousin could manage in a century. A “sheer powerhouse” of a telescope The flood of data is expected to shed new light on the nature of “dark matter, dark energy and the structure of the universe itself and accelerate the … discovery of potentially habitable planets outside our solar system,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Roman will give the Earth a new atlas of the universe,” he added. NASA science chief Niki Fox described the telescope as “a sheer powerhouse” and “literally a speed machine.” “The speed at which we’ll be scanning the sky, delivering vast amounts of data and returning results will be at an unprecedented rate, never done before,” Fox added.

The 42-foot-long, 18,000-pound telescope is named for the late Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, who championed the value of space telescopes throughout her career and was instrumental in the development of the Hubble Space Telescope. As such, she is often referred to as “the mother of Hubble.” The new telescope launched atop a triple-core SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at the Kennedy Space Center at 7:26 a.m. EDT. It is bound for Lagrange Point No. 2 (L2), a gravitational eddy of sorts about a million miles on the opposite side of Earth from the Sun, where it will remain in place with minimal use of fuel. The James Webb Space Telescope is stationed in the same region for the same reason.

From the vantage point of L2, Roman will study the effects of dark matter, the mysterious substance that pervades the universe, holds galaxies together and accounts for most of the mass in the cosmos, acting as a brake on the expansion of space itself, which is carrying galaxies farther and farther apart. At the same time, Roman will work to gain statistically significant insights into the nature of the equally mysterious dark energy, a repulsive force presumably present since the Big Bang that became dominant about 5 billion years ago as the universe expanded and thinned out. Ever since, the expansion of the cosmos has been speeding up. A new understanding of the universe Roman may help resolve a conflict between the strength of dark energy in the very early universe, as measured by probes studying the remnant 3-degree glow of the Big Bang’s immediate aftermath, compared to Hubble observations of a specific type of supernova that indicate a slightly different value.

When the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990, estimates for the age of the universe, from its Big Bang birth to the present, ranged from about 10 billion years to 20 billion years. Hubble was able to determine the speed of that expansion — the Hubble Constant — and thus the time that has passed since the Big Bang to an accuracy within 1%: 13.8 billion years. But detailed studies by researchers using spacecraft studying the afterglow of the bang — the 3-degree cosmic background radiation — came up with a different number. The mismatch — known as “the Hubble Tension” — suggests some critical element is missing in the current understanding of the universe and the forces driving its evolution. “We’re seeing evidence that the Hubble constant, as inferred from very early times, is not consistent with the Hubble constant that we measure closer to now, which is telling us that the model that connects those two things might not be quite right,” said project scientist Julie McEnery.

“We have a slight tension in our expectations for how structure should grow and evolve.” That “slight tension” indicates a potentially serious flaw in the standard model of cosmology, the current understanding of how the universe, and everything in it, has evolved. It might even indicate dark energy is not the constant force it is thought to be, but might somehow change over time. “We’re probably not going to confirm the standard model of how the universe works,” McEnery said. “We’re very likely to demonstrate that our standard model is wrong, and to set ourselves on a path to figuring out how does our universe really work. It’s hard to get [a better question than] the fundamental nature of your universe!” Roman’s wide-field camera is one of two instruments aboard the spacecraft. The other is an advanced coronagraph equipped with deformable mirrors that can block out the glare of a star to detect the vastly dimmer light reflected from the atmosphere of an orbiting planet.

Roman’s coronagraph is expected to detect Jupiter-size planets orbiting Earth-like stars. By analyzing that reflected light, researchers may be able to tease out the elemental composition of those atmospheres. “We think that we will be capable of detecting exoplanets that are about 100 million times fainter than their stars, and with that capability, we are hoping to see … a Jupiter twin around a nearby star using visible light reflected from its cloud tops for the first time,” said Vanessa Bailey, the Roman coronagraph instrument scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Then, we can use that light to study the composition of its atmosphere.” About 6,200 exoplanets have been discovered to date using smaller instruments like NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. Roman is expected to discover more than 100,000 exoplanets over 18 months of observations. It will take three to four months to “commission” the spacecraft, calibrating its instruments and testing its myriad subsystems before science operations can begin in earnest.

The solar-powered Roman is built around a 7.9-foot-wide, 410-pound primary mirror — one of two donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office, the secretive agency that manages many of the nation’s high-end spy satellites. The mirrors, the same size as Hubble’s, were built for a classified project that later was canceled. But both were ground to near-perfect prescriptions, allowing them to look down and focus on Earth, not out into deep space. NASA has no plans or funding to utilize the second mirror, focusing instead on building a single “flagship” observatory. The donated mirror’s curvature, smoothness and polish had to be modified to ensure the desired astronomical prescription, and the telescope’s trusses and other components had to be altered to enable them to withstand the ultra-low temperatures at Lagrange Point 2. “I think our engineering team thinks of it as we received a set of well-tested parts that included highly calibrated optical systems,” said project manager Jackie Townsend.

“But we really had to sort of start over and make it our own to work at our operating temperatures.” In the end, the project came in ahead of schedule and under budget. But even with an effectively “free” primary mirror, the telescope will still cost taxpayers some $4.3 billion to build, launch and operate for its five-year primary mission.

A wide view of the sky

Three “core” surveys are planned over the course of Roman’s planned five-year mission. The High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey will focus on a huge swath of the sky looking out of the plane of the Milky Way — 12% of the entire sky — avoiding obscuring star clouds and dust marking the galactic disk. The goal is to catalog the distribution of a billion or more galaxies. Those data, collected over 520 days, will help researchers better understand how dark matter and energy have combined over cosmic time to drive the evolution of structure in the universe. The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will require 180 days of observations over two years.

The telescope will repeatedly image the same regions in an area of 90 full moons to make movies capturing short-duration events ranging from supernova blasts to the radiation emitted when stars fall into black holes. McEnery described such transient events as “things that go bump in the night.” The Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will focus on the core of the Milky Way, the central bulge of stars, gas and dust where a supermassive black hole affects the trajectories of nearby stars. Imaging across an area spanning 8.5 full moons, Roman is expected to find tens of thousands of exoplanets by watching hundreds of millions of stars and looking for signs of “microlensing,” a phenomenon in which the light of a background star is enhanced, or magnified, by the gravity of an intervening object. Mission managers have also left room for “general astrophysics” topics not covered in Roman’s three core surveys.

The first such program, known as the Galactic Plane Survey, will monitor the disk of the Milky Way from one side to the other, covering an area of 3,455 full moons. Some 20 billion stars will be mapped along the way, providing the most complete portrait of the galaxy and its structure ever captured. “What makes me most excited about Roman is the discovery potential,” McEnery said. “With 2 billion galaxies, we’ll have 2,000 objects that are one in a million. We’ll be exploring patches of sky as a function of time with exquisite sensitivity. We’ll find new things that go bump in the night. “I very much hope, and in fact expect, that the most exciting science from Roman will be a surprise, something we couldn’t predict. And that will set the stage for the next deeper set of questions for future missions to address.”

Source: Roman Space Telescope, NASA’s next “great observatory,” launches into space – CBS News

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
John 1:1

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U.S. confirms for the first time that it has deployed weapons in space. China and Russia have responded.

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Retro-futuristic spacecraft above the Moon, surrounded by stars and a galaxy

The United States has confirmed for the first time that it has deployed weapons in space, prompting separate warnings from China and Russia. Air Force Secretary Troy Meink told the Air and Space Cyber Conference in Maryland on Monday that the U.S. has fielded “on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action.” Meink did not detail what the weapons were or how they work. In 2024 the U.S. said Russia was developing a new anti-satellite weapon that could be launched from space. At the time, the White House said the danger wasn’t imminent.

But reports of the anti-satellite weapon reflected longstanding worries about space threats from Russia and China, given that much U.S. infrastructure is dependent on satellite communications. In his remarks, Meink also said the Air Force was adding more autonomous systems to its capabilities and predicted the service would look “radically different” by 2032. For example, he foresaw one-way attack drones replacing artillery as the “primary killer.” “We are increasing readiness against existing threats,” he said. Meink also said that AI “competes with some of the world’s top programmers, cyber operators and hackers. And these technologies are revolutionizing the battlefield.

They allow countries that would not have had the resources in the past to quickly adapt and scale their combat capabilities.” As a result, the U.S. military “must increase our combat power and innovate faster than anyone else, affordably,” Meink said. President Trump created the Space Force in 2019.

China and Russia issue warnings

China on Tuesday warned against turning outer space into a “battlefield” and Russia said it must be “free from any weapon” after the United States confirmed that it has arms deployed in orbit above the Earth. Analysts said that the revelation by Washington confirmed an open secret but the timing of the announcement risked exacerbating tensions with Beijing and the risk of a weapons race in space. China’s foreign ministry opposed the move, warning against the “weaponization of outer space, turning it into a battlefield, as well as an arms race there.”

“We urge the U.S. side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space,” ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told a news briefing. Russia called Tuesday for space to be kept “free of any weapons.” “We are counting on broad international consolidation to continue working toward the complete demilitarization of space,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

What are the U.S. capabilities?

The U.S. statement did not provide concrete details about what weapons are deployed in space and how many. “Space control encapsulates the mission areas required to contest and control the space domain — employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities,” the statement said. “These capabilities can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes,” it added. Non-kinetic means could include lasers to blind satellites, or even electromagnetic or cyber jamming of their data links.

Why does the U.S. want weapons in space?

For Washington, both Russia and China — its two main geopolitical rivals — pose potential threats to U.S. interests in space. China “develops and operates space and counterspace capabilities as part of a military modernization strategy,” according to the U.S. Space Force. Russia, meanwhile, “views space as a warfighting domain and believes space supremacy will be a decisive factor in future conflicts,” it said.

The militarization of space is as old as the space race itself — as soon as the USSR’s Sputnik was launched into orbit as the first probe in space in 1957, Washington and Moscow began exploring ways to both arm and destroy satellites. India in March 2019 said it had destroyed a low-orbiting satellite, following in the footsteps of Russia, China and the U.S., in a missile test that proved the nation was among the world’s most advanced space powers.

“China will not stand by and do nothing”  

Song Zhongping, an independent military commentator based in Hong Kong and former Chinese army instructor, told AFP the announcement was “no surprise at all” as the fact that the U.S possesses such weapons “has long been an open secret.” “The only difference is that the U.S. used to keep it ambiguous, whereas now it has gone public, which shows that Washington is no longer trying to hide it,” he added.  

“China will not stand by and do nothing,” he warned, noting Beijing already has its own space station in orbit. “Whether China deploys weapons in space will depend entirely on whether the United States moves in that direction,” he said. The Wall Street Journal reported Beijing supplied Iran with satellite imagery that enabled Tehran to precisely target military facilities and kill U.S. servicemembers in Jordan in July — a claim China has denied.

Can weapons in outer space be regulated?

The biggest worry was once about nuclear weapons in space, but the superpowers and other countries signed the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, banning weapons of mass destruction in orbit. Since then, Russia, the United States, China and India have explored ways to fight in space outside of that treaty, including by targeting rivals’ satellites, which are key for military communications, surveillance and navigation. “There is a regulatory vacuum because Article 4 of the 1967 treaty only forbids weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons in orbit,” said space law expert Laetitia Cesari.

She said the topic would likely be on the agenda at the next U.N. disarmament meeting in November. “Moscow and Beijing have been wanting to work for about 20 years on a treaty to prevent the placement of weapons in space,” while “Western states are trying instead to work on the notion of responsible behavior,” Cesari said. The U.S. announcement “will likely give impetus to the restrictive approach that Moscow and Beijing are pushing for,” she added.

Source: U.S. confirms for the first time that it has deployed weapons in space. China and Russia have responded. – CBS News

Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
1 Peter 1:13

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NASA plans unpiloted Starliner test flight after astronauts got stuck at space station in 2024

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NASA is working with Boeing to launch an unpiloted Starliner capsule in the December-to-January time frame to test upgrades and improvements ordered in the wake of a 2024 mission that suffered multiple propulsion system failures, stranding two astronauts on the space station for more than nine months.  If the unpiloted test flight goes well, NASA and Boeing hope to launch a piloted Starliner flight in the mid-2028 time frame, officials said Monday, incorporating redesigned propulsion system valves, more robust subsystems and other modifications expected to prevent the sort of failures that occurred in 2024.

Veteran astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg will command the mission. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule is the only currently operational U.S. astronaut ferry ship. NASA wants to bring Boeing back into the mix as soon as possible to ensure a sustained U.S. capability to carry astronauts and researchers to the International Space Station through its planned retirement in 2030. Equally important, NASA managers want to make sure an American spacecraft will be available to support flights to commercial space stations later in the 2030s, after SpaceX phases out its Falcon 9 rockets and Crew Dragon spacecraft. “It’s always been the Commercial Crew Program’s goal to have two crew transportation providers to ensure commercial access to low Earth orbit,” said Dana Weigel, manager of NASA’s low-Earth orbit operations.

“As SpaceX has publicly stated, the Dragon and the Falcon won’t be around forever. Certifying Boeing’s Starliner is important for both supporting ISS and also for follow-on future commercial destinations,” Weigel said. Said Boeing in a post on X: “Together with @NASA, we’re making Starliner hardware enhancements and adding resources for human spaceflight certification. These changes support the spacecraft as a long-term provider of crewed missions to low Earth orbit.”  Astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams, both now retired from NASA, blasted off aboard a Starliner on June 5, 2024, for what was billed as a 10-day test flight to the International Space Station. It was the first piloted launch of a Starliner after two uncrewed test flights, both of which had problems. During their rendezvous with the space station, Wilmore and Williams ran into multiple propulsion system helium leaks and thruster failures.

They were able to dock, but their return to Earth was repeatedly delayed while NASA and Boeing worked to resolve the technical issues. An independent review board later classified the propulsion mishaps as a “close call” that put the astronauts in jeopardy. When all was said and done, the Starliner returned to Earth without its crew three months after launch. Wilmore and Williams stayed an additional six months aboard the station in order to hitch a ride home aboard a Crew Dragon on March 18, 2025. All told, the 10-day flight they expected ended up lasting 286 days. An independent review board identified three major problems with the Starliner, along with a host of less severe shortcomings that had to be addressed.

During the rendezvous with the space station, five thrusters in the capsule’s service module failed, resulting in a temporary loss of full maneuverability. The failures were blamed on trouble with Teflon “poppets” extruding in propellant valves that restricted flow. A thruster in the Starliner crew module failed during the ship’s unpiloted descent to Earth, leaving the ship without redundancy in a critical system, the board said. The third major issue involved helium leaks in the propulsion system pressurization plumbing. In addition, the review board concluded, the Starliner design did not have the required redundancy in the system responsible for the rocket firing needed to drop the spacecraft out of orbit. Boeing said all of those issues are being addressed, along with operational changes intended to further reduce unexpected heating that contributed to the thruster problems.

The company is replacing the valves in all 12 crew module maneuvering thrusters, along with implementing measures to prevent erosion. The service module thruster poppets are being redesigned. A faster flight data recorder is being added to more precisely measure thruster performance, along with upgraded batteries and improved parachutes. NASA and Boeing now plan to launch an unpiloted mission — Starliner 1 — in December or January that will rendezvous and dock with the space station. Along the way, flight controllers will thoroughly exercise the thrusters and their pressurization systems, putting the fixes to the test. “Our goal is to fly Starliner One as soon as the vehicle and the team is ready,” Weigel said. “We really need to see how those thermal modifications perform on the spacecraft, and we intend to put the propulsion system through its paces.”

“We’ll do a series of on-orbit demonstrations and tests, stress the thrusters, and we’ll take that set of data coming out of the mission combined with redesign, and that’s what will inform the final crewed vehicle certification,” she continued. “We will fly the Starliner One mission with stricter performance parameters in place when we’re flying closer to [the] space station.” “Long term, we are committed to Starliner certification and ensuring commercial crew access to low Earth orbit,” Weigel added. The Starliner has relied on United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rockets for the ride to space, but only a half dozen of the venerable boosters remain in ULA’s inventory. As a result, NASA plans to help get ULA’s new Vulcan rocket certified to carry astronauts aboard Starliner capsules.

For its part, ULA said in a post on X that “we are already working towards the Starliner-1 mission and look forward to our continued work with @BoeingSpace and @NASA to integrate and certify our #VulcanRocket for human spaceflight.” “We are committed to being a long-term launch provider of human spaceflight capability to low Earth orbit,” ULA added.

Source: NASA plans unpiloted Starliner test flight after astronauts got stuck at space station in 2024 – CBS News

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.
Matthew 7:15

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Newly discovered “black hole star” could solve mystery of strange red dots spotted in the early universe

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Black hole surrounded by a glowing, swirling accretion disk in space

Astronomers announced Wednesday they had discovered a new type of astronomical object called a “black hole star,” potentially solving a mystery involving strange red dots spotted in the early universe. The object looks like a star the size of our solar system, but produces 100 billion times more energy than any star — a mighty blast of power closer to what is produced by a black hole. The black hole star, which dates from 660 million years after the Big Bang, was spotted by a U.S.-led team of astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Since history’s most powerful telescope went online in 2022, it has been spotting many extremely bright cosmic objects dubbed “little red dots” in the early universe that have baffled scientists.

“What exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era,” lead study author Rohan Naidu of the University of Hawaii said in a statement. The team had been trying to find clues for a different mystery: why JWST keeps finding bright galaxies in the universe’s infancy, when it was thought to have been too early for them to have become so huge. But while looking through the images, they spotted a little red dot. “Pure black hole star light” “When we see something very red in the universe, we often assume that it is surrounded by dust, like soot or ash,” said Robert Simcoe, a study co-author from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The same way that the wildfire smoke from Canada recently made the sky in Boston look bright red, astronomical objects can also appear redder than their intrinsic color when you see them through a veil of dust,” he added.

However, when the team sifted through their data, they found that at certain wavelengths, the object’s light simply disappeared. To their surprise, this suggested that it is not dust making this object appear red — it is hydrogen gas. This explained the object’s color, but not how it could be pumping out so much energy. “You can’t be powering this by nuclear fusion, which is the energy source that sits at the heart of all the stars,” Naidu explained. Using modeling simulations, they determined the most likely scenario was that the object is powered by a central black hole surrounded by a cocoon of gas that makes it resemble a star. The team named the object MoM-BH*-1. The BH and asterisk are for black hole star — and the number one suggests they believe there are more out there. “Every little red dot is consistent with being a black hole star,” Naidu said. “What is special about MoM-BH*-1 is, the black hole star is essentially completely outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we’re seeing pure black hole star light.”

Webb reveals dust and water surviving near Milky Way’s central black hole Separately, a team of astronomers announced on Tuesday that the Webb telescope revealed dust and water surviving in the extreme environment of a star located near the Milky Way’s central black hole. Scientists say the new observations provide the most detailed mid-infrared view yet of the star IRS 3, which is located just 0.55 light-years from Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way galaxy’s central supermassive black hole. By analyzing the star’s infrared light with the Webb telescope, the research team identified signs of oxygen-rich dust and, for the first time, detected water in the star’s surrounding envelope. The results show that evolved stars like IRS 3 can still produce dust and other materials important for the creation of future stars – even under the harsh conditions near a supermassive black hole. Webb’s mid-infrared data revealed the clear signature of oxygen-rich silicate dust, as well as, for the first time, water, in IRS 3’s dust envelope. Even under the harsh conditions of its environment, stars can produce dust, which will help create future generations of stars!

“Galactic centers are among the most extreme environments, so understanding whether stars can continue enriching their surroundings there is an important question,” said lead author Florian Peißker of the University of Cologne in Germany. “With Webb, we can directly observe how stars behave under these conditions and see that dust production remains remarkably resilient.”

Source: Newly discovered “black hole star” could solve mystery of strange red dots spotted in the early universe – CBS Chicago

‘And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment.
Mark 12:30

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