RenoVous

 The Pillars of Creation. Hubble vs Webb

  The James Webb Telescope celebrated its 4th year in space yesterday. And it recently discovered something surprising - a Jupiter sized exoplanet with diamonds and soot in the atmosphere. The planet doesn't have the familiar helium-hydrogen combination, but is helium-carbon instead.  There are no common molecules of water, methane, or carbon dioxide. "It's very hard to imagine how you get this extremely carbon-enriched composition.  It seems to rule out every known formation mechanism," says lead author, Michael Zhang. Even more weird is the host star, which is a neutron sun.  No other pulsar is known to have a gas-giant planet, and few pulsars have planets at all. The planet is also closer to its star than Earth is to our Sun, whereas gas giants in our system are much farther out.  It is lemon-shaped because the gravitational forces of the pulsar are pulling so strongly. Molecular carbon doesn't appear in planets that are very close to their sun, due to extrem...

 This is, of course, an artist's rendering, but astronomers did spot a record-breaking black hole eruption, brighter than 10 trillion suns. It may be consuming a star 30 times more massive than our sun. It is the most powerful and distant energy flare ever recorded.  Classified as TDE J2245+3743, this active galactic nucleus is 10 billion light years away, and yet its brightness was still clearly visible above the black hole's usual activity. The newly completed Vera C. Rubin Observatory should help researchers find more events like this.  It will conduct a 10 year survey of the sky, mapping the Milky Way. Rubin

  Neutrinos are subatomic particles that are very small, neutral, and have almost no mass.  They are called "ghost particles" because they rarely interact with other matter. But recently, a cosmic neutrino plunged into the Mediterranean Sea with an energy that blows all other neutrinos out of the water. With some 220 million billion electron volts, this particle was around 20 times as energetic as the highest seen before. It was seen thanks to the partially built Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope located at the bottom of the sea. The neutrino detectors are three-dimensional arrays of light sensor modules or optical modules distributed over large volumes of the transparent water.  The optical modules register the faint Cherenkov light from charged particles induced by neutrino interactions in the seawater. There's more. The neutrino's interaction with matter spawns charged particles such as muons.  As these careen through the water, that is what the detectors pick up...

  The James Webb Telescope observed 19 nearby spiral galaxies in near- and mid-infrared light. Webb's NIRCam (Near-infrared) captured millions of stars in these images, which sparkle in blue tones.  The MIRI (mid-infrared instrument) highlights the glowing dust, and the stars that aren't fully formed, still encased in gas, as the red dots. This is part of an ongoing project with the PHANGS program (Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS).  The team also has data from Hubble, the Very Large Telescope's Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, which includes observations in ultraviolet, visible, and radio light. Here we have NGC 628 split diagonally with Webb imagery at top left and Hubble at bottom right. This galaxy is 32 million lightyears away, in the constellation Pisces. Article

  Since I'll be off on Friday, I wanted to touch base on this Science today. James Webb has captured new images of Jupiter. We can see Northern and Southern auroras, and around the middle, a slight glimpse of the rings. Further out, we can see the moon, Amalthea. "The numerous bright white spots and streaks are likely very high-altitude cloud tops of condensed convective storms," said Heidi Hammel, Webb interdisciplinary scientist. The Great Red Spot also appears white as it is reflecting sunlight. Of course, this image is produced from multiple images and various filters.  Jupiter is even more difficult to map because of how fast it rotates. NASA

 Launch day has been postponed (again) due to adverse weather in Kourou, French Guiana. It is now set for December 25, but since I won't be here posting that day, I wanted to set a spot for us. James Webb is the successor to Hubble, with missions to find the first galaxies formed in the universe and to peer through dusty clouds to see stars forming planetary systems. Ultraviolet and visible light emitted by the very first luminous objects has been stretched, or "redshifted" by the continual expansion of the universe and arrives today as infrared light.  Webb is designed to see this light with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity. Using a technique called transmission spectroscopy, Webb will examine starlight filtered through planetary atmospheres to learn about their chemical compositions.  It will observe exoplanets to determine if and where signatures of habitability may be present. After launch, Webb will travel about a million miles from Earth and undergo six mont...

The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has produced the highest resolution image of the sun's surface. The cell-like structures, which contain boiling plasma and are each about the size of Texas, are the signature of violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the sun to the surface.  Hot solar material rises in the bright centers, cools off, and then sinks below the surface in dark lanes in a process known as convection. In the dark lanes, we can also see the tiny bright markers of magnetic fields.  These spots might be why the corona (outer layers of the solar atmosphere) is more than a million degrees. The motions of the plasma twist and tangle the magnetic fields which leads to solar storms.  The more we can learn about this space weather, the more prepared we can be for potentially harmful solar activity. On the summit of Haleakala in Maui, Hawaii. The National Science Foundation here will be studying the sun and space weather ...