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NASA’s JWST Reveals 700 Galaxies from the Early Universe

[DrCaleb]

BepiColombo's third Mercury flyby

[DrCaleb]

NANOGrav hears “hum” of gravitational wave background, louder than expected

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Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, first detected in 2015. But an expected corresponding low-frequency gravitational wave background—a kind of "hum" comprised of a chorus of gravitational waves, most likely emanating from binary pairs of supermassive black holes—has proven more elusive. Now the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has announced the first evidence of this gravitational wave background. The results and related analyses are described in several new papers published in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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The idea behind NANOGrav is that as gravitational waves stretch and shrink spacetime, this will disrupt the pulsars' ultra-precise "ticking." There should be a telltale signature in the form of a kind of “shimmering” effect, produced because pulses affected by gravitational waves should arrive slightly earlier or later in response to those ripples in spacetime. By studying the timing of the regular signals produced by many individual millisecond pulsars scattered over the sky at the time—called a "pulsar timing array"—NANOGrav tries to detect minute changes in the Earth's position due to the effects of gravitational waves. It just takes many years to do so.

[DrCaleb]

Planet that shouldn’t exist found

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The exoplanet 8 Ursae Minoris b should not exist. It orbits its host star at just half the Earth-Sun distance, and by all indications, the star should have gone through a phase in which it bloated up enough to engulf that entire orbit and then some. Yet 8 Ursae Minoris b definitely appears to exist.

There is a handful of potential explanations, none of them especially likely. The people who discovered the planet suggest it survived because its host star got distracted by swallowing a white dwarf instead.

[DrCaleb]

Branson’s Virgin Galactic flies its first commercial mission

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Quasar 'clocks' show the universe was five times slower soon after the Big Bang

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Scientists have for the first time observed the early universe running in extreme slow motion, unlocking one of the mysteries of Einstein's expanding universe. The research is published in Nature Astronomy.

Einstein's general theory of relativity means that we should observe the distant—and hence ancient—universe running much slower than the present day. However, peering back that far in time has proven elusive. Scientists have now cracked that mystery by using quasars as "clocks."

"Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower," said lead author of the study, Professor Geraint Lewis from the School of Physics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney.

"If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second—but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag."

Professor Lewis and his collaborator, Dr. Brendon Brewer from the University of Auckland, used observed data from nearly 200 quasars—hyperactive supermassive black holes at the centers of early galaxies—to analyze this time dilation.

"Thanks to Einstein, we know that time and space are intertwined and, since the dawn of time in the singularity of the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding," Professor Lewis said.

[DrCaleb]

Saturn’s rings steal the show in new image from Webb telescope

[DrCaleb]

You Up? Mars Helicopter Finally Makes Contact After Two Months of Silence

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[DrCaleb]

NASA decides not to launch two already-built asteroid probes

[DrCaleb]

JWST early Universe observations and ΛCDM cosmology

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We present a model with covarying coupling constants (CCC), starting from the modified FLRW metric and resulting Einstein and Friedmann equations, and a CCC + TL hybrid model. They fit the Pantheon + data admirably, and the CCC + TL model is compliant with the JWST observations. It stretches the age of the universe to 26.7 Gyr with 5.8 Gyr at |$z\,\, = \,\,10$| and 3.5 Gyr at |$z\,\, = \,\,20$|⁠, giving enough time to form massive galaxies.

Translation: We might not yet have seen the early Universe yet, it may be twice as old as we thought it was.

[DrCaleb]

A better explanation of ^^

New research puts age of universe at 26.7 billion years, nearly twice as old as previously believed

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For years, astronomers and physicists have calculated the age of our universe by measuring the time elapsed since the Big Bang and by studying the oldest stars based on the redshift of light coming from distant galaxies. In 2021, thanks to new techniques and advances in technology, the age of our universe was thus estimated at 13.797 billion years using the Lambda-CDM concordance model.

However, many scientists have been puzzled by the existence of stars like the Methuselah that appear to be older than the estimated age of our universe and by the discovery of early galaxies in an advanced state of evolution made possible by the James Webb Space Telescope. These galaxies, existing a mere 300 million years or so after the Big Bang, appear to have a level of maturity and mass typically associated with billions of years of cosmic evolution. Furthermore, they're surprisingly small in size, adding another layer of mystery to the equation.

[DrCaleb]

Researchers discover stardust sprinkled on a nearby asteroid

[DrCaleb]

Something in space has been lighting up every 20 minutes since 1988