A Glitch in Einstein's Theory

This James Webb Space Telescope deep-field image shows some of the earliest and most distant galaxies ever seen. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI)





There is no denying the awesome predictive power of Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of gravity, general relativity — yet, the theory still has inconsistencies when it comes to calculating its effect on vast distances. And new research suggests these inconsistencies could be the result of a "cosmic glitch" in gravity itself.


In the 109 years since it was first formulated, general relativity has remained our finest description of gravity on a galactic scale; time and again, experiments have confirmed its accuracy. This theory has also been used to predict aspects of the universe that would later be observationally confirmed. This includes the Big Bang, the existence of black holes, the gravitational lensing of light and tiny ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves.


Yet, like the Newtonian theory of gravity that it surpassed, general relativity may not offer us the full picture of this enigmatic force.  READ MORE...

The Cat's Paw Nebula

An illustration of 2-Methoxyethanol found in space for the first time using radio telescope observations of the star-forming region NGC 6334I. (Image credit: Fried, et al)





Scientists have discovered a hitherto unknown space molecule while investigating a relatively nearby region of intense star birth, a cosmic spot about 5,550 light-years away. It's part of the Cat's Paw Nebula, also known as NGC 6334.


The team, led by Zachary Fried, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), examined a section of the nebula known as NGC 6334I with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). This revealed the presence of a complex molecule known as 2-methoxyethanol, which had never been seen before in the natural world, though its properties had been simulated in labs on Earth.     READ MORE...

Superfast Drone

The drone, which resembled a rocket, flew 10 miles (16 km) at Mach 0.9 — over 680 miles per hour — using 80% of the engine's available thrust. This image is purely illustrative. (Image credit: Alexyz3d/Getty Images)




Venus Aerospace has completed the inaugural test flight of a drone fitted with its "rotating detonation rocket engine" (RDRE) — accelerating it to just under the speed of sound. The company wants to one day build superfast commercial jets using this new type of engine.


In the test flight, conducted Feb. 24, the company flew the drone, which is 8 feet (2.4 meters) long and weighs 300 pounds (136 kilograms) to an altitude of 12,000 ft (3658 m) by an Aero L-29 Delfín plane, before it was deployed and the RDRE was activated, company representatives said in a statement.


The drone flew 10 miles (16 km) at Mach 0.9 — over 680 miles per hour — using 80% of the RDRE’s available thrust. The successful flight proved the viability of RDRE and the associated onboard flight systems. Three weeks earlier, Venus Aerospace demonstrated the viability of its RDRE technology with a long-duration test burn — during which engineers showed their engine worked for the duration of this test flight.  READ MORE...

Humanoid Robot Crew Operates India's Spacecraft

ISRO's Launch Vehicle Mark-3 (LVM3) will ferry a humanoid robot to space on a test flight later this year and carry three astronauts next year. (Image credit: ISRO)



India is steadily inching toward the first uncrewed flight in its human spaceflight program, Gaganyaan (Sanskrit for "celestial vehicle"). Early last week, the nation's space agency successfully completed the final test to qualify the test flight's rocket engine, approving it to be capable of safely ferrying astronauts to space.


This engine test was the seventh of its kind in which flight conditions were simulated to assess the device's endurance and performance under normal, and abnormal, conditions including varying thrust and propellant tank pressure, officials said in a statement on Wednesday (Feb. 21). These tests are being carried out at the ISRO Propulsion Complex (IPRC) in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.


Since 2014, seven years after the Gaganyaan program was first initiated, ISRO has has been perfecting its homegrown flight hardware including engines, solid rocket boosters, crew escape systems and parachutes ahead of the uncrewed Gaganyaan-1 (G1) mission, tentatively scheduled for the third quarter of this year.  READ MORE...

A Dark Primordial Galaxy

Hydrogen gas in the primordial galaxy J0613+52 with red indicating regions turning away from Earth and blue showing regions turning toward us (Image credit: STScI POSS-II with additional illustration by NSF/GBO/P.Vosteen.)



Astronomers have accidentally discovered a dark galaxy filled with primordial gas untouched that appears to have no visible stars.


The researchers behind the discovery say this galaxy, designated J0613+52, could be "the faintest galaxy found to date." Interestingly, scientists using the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) discovered the "dark" galaxy through a complete error.

"The GBT was accidentally pointed to the wrong coordinates and found this object. It's a galaxy made only out of gas — it has no visible stars," Green Bank Observatory senior scientist Karen O'Neil said in a statement. "Stars could be there. We just can't see them."  READ MORE..

Dark Matter Hiding in Collider's Particle Jets

A new search for dark matter has turned up empty handed — but, in a silver lining, the effort provided important limits that will help future experiments narrow down the hunt for this elusive substance.

Most astronomers believe that dark matter accounts for 85 percent of all mass in the universe, and that its existence would explain the apparent extra gravity detectable around galaxies and within huge galaxy clusters. However, so far, no one has been able to identify what dark matter is made of.    READ MORE...

SpaceX to Launch 2nd Starship

SpaceX's next Starship test launch could lift off as early as Nov. 17, pending regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies.

The potential launch from SpaceX's Starbase test site at Boca Chica Beach near Brownsville, Texas will mark the company's second test flight of an orbital class Starship and Super Heavy booster — the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. SpaceX launched its first Starship test flight in April, but it exploded shortly after liftoff.

"Starship preparing to launch as early as November 17, pending final regulatory approval," SpaceX wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, late Friday (Nov. 10).  READ MORE...

Software Updates Millions of Miles Away

About 46 years after NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched on an epic journey to explore space, the probes’ antique hardware continues to receive tweaks from afar.

One update, a software fix, ought to tend to the corrupted data that Voyager 1 began transmitting last year, and another set aims to prevent gunk from building up in both spacecraft's thrusters. Together, these updates intend to keep the spacecraft in contact with Earth for as long as possible.

"This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook," Linda Spilker, project scientist for the mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. "But they continue to come up with creative solutions."  READ MORE...

Space Force to Guard the Moon

Artist's illustration of NASA astronauts near the moon's south pole, a region thought to be rich in water ice, a key resource that could help humanity extend its footprint out into the solar system. (Image credit: NASA)




It's been reported that United States Space Force Commander Gen. Chance Saltzman surveyed the Force's members to develop a mission statement for America's newest military branch. Aside from the novelty of crowdsourcing soldiers as to their interpretation of their mission (which I like but could draw criticism from more constitutionalist folks), the result seems to be on target: "Secure our nation's interests in, from and to space."


However — and with all due respect to the general from this son of a sergeant — I believe his interpretation of at least a part of this statement may be incorrect and informed by a bias that is all too common in the sometimes overly conservative and hallowed halls of the Pentagon.

First, having a simple and concise statement is essential. Shorter is better. Having that statement be co-generated by those forming the first cadres of the Force is an excellent idea to encourage buy-in and ownership.

The term "secure" is also essential. Protecting U.S. national interests is the chief priority of all our military branches, from under the sea to above the sky and all places in between.


He interprets securing that national interest "from space" as the defense of systems and technologies such as communications, navigation and missile warning. In other words, protecting those elements of the defense infrastructure vital to what the military refers to as the "Joint Force" (i.e., all the branches that might be part of a combined military action or activity on Earth).

So far, this is all great stuff. However, what the good general is missing in his reading and interpretation, and perhaps, in what his soldiers are saying (although I bet not, given their probable age demographic), is anything referring to the outward-facing phase of developing space activities without reference to direct support of our on-the-planet military posture and capabilities. In other words, the Space Force's role in securing our national interests beyond low Earth orbit (LEO).   READ MORE...

Carrying Astronauts to the Moon

From left to right: The Orion spacecraft for the Artemis 2, Artemis 3 and Artemis 4 moon missions at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Image credit: NASA/Marie Reed)

Three crew-carrying spacecraft are getting ready for their big moon missions.

The Orion capsules for the Artemis 2, Artemis 3 and Artemis 4 moon missions are coming together at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida under stewardship of contractor Lockheed Martin.

"The future of @NASA_Orion is looking pretty good," Lockheed officials wrote on Twitter Friday (July 14) of the three spacecraft, each of which is expected to ferry astronauts to the moon starting in late 2024 or so.

Artemis 2 will send Orion the moon in November 2024 with an already-named crew of four astronauts, while we are still awaiting word of who will fly the Artemis 3 and 4 missions for later in the decade.

Artemis 2 includes NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Artemis 3 and 4 will both include astronauts from NASA and the European Space Agency.

Artemis 3 is currently scheduled to launch in 2025 or 2026, pending readiness of the SpaceX Starship system that will ferry some of the crew to the surface. Artemis 4 would then follow later in the 2020s, if current schedules hold.

Lockheed Martin is under contract to deliver Orion spacecraft for future Artemis moon missions across several delivery orders. In recent years, the orders for Artemis 3 through 5 had values of $2.7 billion, while Artemis 6 through 9's order is worth $1.9 billion. Lockheed officials previously stressed that building the spacecraft in groups allows them the company realize cost savings via production efficiencies.  READ MORE...

Space-Time Distortions

Observing time distortions could show whether Einstein's theory of general relativity accounts for the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

Scientists could soon test Einstein's theory of general relativity by measuring the distortion of time.


According to new research published June 22 in the journal Nature Astronomy, the newly proposed method turns the edge of space and time into a vast cosmic lab to investigate if general relativity can account for dark matter  -  a mysterious, invisible form of matter that can only be inferred by its gravitational influence on the universe's visible matter and energy -  as well as the accelerating expansion of the universe due to dark energy. The method is ready to be tested on future surveys of the deep universe, according to the study authors.

General relativity states that gravity is the result of mass warping the fabric of space and time, which Einstein lumped into a four-dimensional entity called space-time. According to relativity, time passes more slowly close to a massive object than it does in a mass-less vacuum. This change in the passing of time is called time distortion.

Since its introduction in 1915, general relativity has been tested extensively and has become our best description of gravity on tremendous scales. But scientists aren't yet sure if it can explain invisible dark matter and dark energy, which together account for around 95% of the energy and matter in the universe.  READ MORE...

Earth's Water Came From Space

Earth may have formed much more rapidly than previously believed after born as tiny millimeter-sized pebbles that accumulated over a period of just a few million years.

The new theory also implies that rather than water being delivered to Earth by icy comets, this vital ingredient for life is present on our planet due to our young planet thirstily sucking up water from its space environment. 

The theory could have important implications for the search for life outside the solar system, indicating that watery and habitable planets around other stars may be more common than currently theorized.

The new theory put forward by the team suggests that around 4.5 billion years ago when the sun was an infant star surrounded by a disk of gas and dust, known as a proto-planetary disk, tiny particles of dust would be quickly sucked up by forming planets once they reached a certain size. 

In the case of the infant Earth, this "vacuuming up" of disk material ensured our planet was supplied with water.  READ MORE...

PENTAGON: Alien Mothership Could be Lurking

Department of Defense official floats the idea that an alien mothership is cruising our solar system.

 (Image credit: Marc Ward/Stocktrek Images via Getty Images)

A draft paper by a Harvard scientist and the head of the Pentagon's UFO office has raised the idea an alien mothership could be in the solar system, sending out tiny probes dubbed "dandelion seeds" to explore the planets within.

Could an alien mothership be hovering around the solar system, sending out tiny probes to explore planets? According to a Harvard scientist and a Pentagon official, it's possible.

In a draft paper, the pair said it is feasible an extraterrestrial spaceship could be in our galactic neighborhood, exploring the region by the means of "dandelion seeds" — small spacecraft that can gather and send back information, similar to the way humans send out spacecraft to explore planets.

Avi Loeb(opens in new tab), an astronomer at Harvard University, and Sean M. Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — established in July 2022 by the Department of Defense (DoD) to detect and study "objects of interest" — released the draft, Physical Constraints on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena(opens in new tab), on March 7. It is not an official Pentagon document but was carried out in partnership with the DoD. It has not been peer-reviewed.  READ MORE...

Primordial Fractures in Space Time

The early universe may have been such a violent place that space-time itself fractured like a pane of glass. Those fractures would have released floods of gravitational waves, and a team of astronomers has discovered that we may have already detected these ripples in the fabric of space-time.

The team, who reported their results recently in a paper submitted for publication in the Journal of Computational Astrophysics and published on arXiv.org(opens in new tab), claim that they have seen evidence for so-called domain walls in the early universe.

When our universe was incredibly young, it was also incredibly exotic. The four forces of nature were bound up into a single, unified force. We do not know what that force looked like or how it operated, but we know that as the universe cooled and expanded, that unified force fractured into the four familiar forces we have today. First came gravity, then the strong nuclear force splintered off, and lastly, the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces split from each other.

With each of these splittings, the universe completely remolded itself. New particles arose to replace ones that could exist only in extreme conditions previously. The fundamental quantum fields of space-time that dictate how particles and forces interact with each other reconfigured themselves. We do not know how smoothly or roughly these phase transitions took place, but it's perfectly possible that with each splitting, the universe settled into multiple identities at once.

This fracturing isn't as exotic as it sounds. It happens with all kinds of phase transitions, like water turning into ice. Different patches of water can form ice molecules with different orientations. No matter what, all the water turns into ice, but different domains can have differing molecular arrangements. Where those domains meet walls, or imperfections, fracturing will appear.  READ MORE...

A Change in Jupiter's Orbit

A shift in Jupiter's orbit could make Earth's surface even more hospitable to life than it already is, new research suggests.

University of California-Riverside (UCR) scientists simulated alternative arrangements of our solar system, finding that when Jupiter's orbit was more flattened  —  or 'eccentric'  —  it would cause major changes in our planet's orbit too.

And this change caused by the orbit of Jupiter  —  the solar system's most massive planet by far  —  could impact Earth's ability to support life for the better.  READ MORE...

A New Class of ExoPlanet

Artist's illustration of a half-rock, half-water world orbiting a red dwarf star. 

(Image credit: Pilar Montañés (@pilar.monro))

A new type of exoplanet — one made half of rock and half of water — has been discovered around the most common stars in the universe, which may have great consequences in the search for life in the cosmos, researchers say.


Red dwarfs are the most common type of star, making up more than 70% of the universe's stellar population. These stars are small and cold, typically about one-fifth as massive as the sun and up to 50 times dimmer.

The fact that red dwarfs are so very common has made scientists wonder if they might be the best chance for discovering planets that can possess life as we know it on Earth. For example, in 2020, astronomers that discovered Gliese 887, the brightest red dwarf in our sky at visible wavelengths of light, may host a planet within its habitable zone, where surface temperatures are suitable to host liquid water.

However, whether the worlds orbiting red dwarfs are potentially habitable remains unclear, in part because of the lack of understanding that researchers have about these worlds' composition. Previous research suggested that small exoplanets — ones less than four times Earth's diameter — orbiting sun-like stars are generally either rocky or gassy, possessing either a thin or thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium.


In the new study, astrophysicists sought to examine the compositions of exoplanets around red dwarfs. 

They focused on small worlds found around closer — and thus brighter and easier to inspect — red dwarfs observed by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).  READ MORE...

Coldest Matter in The Universe

An illustration shows trapped ytterbium atoms cooled to temperatures about 3 billion times 

colder than deep space (Image credit: Ella Maru Studio/Courtesy of K. Hazzard/Rice University)

A team of researchers has cooled matter to within a billionth of a degree of absolute zero, colder than even the deepest depths of space ,  far away from any stars.


Interstellar space never gets this cold due to the fact that it is evenly filled with the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a form of radiation left over from an event that occurred shortly after the Big Bang when the universe was in its infancy. 

The chilled matter is even colder than the coldest known region of space, the Boomerang Nebula, located 3,000 light-years from Earth, which has a temperature of just one degree above absolute zero.

The experiment, run at the University of Kyoto in Japan and used fermions, which is what particle physicists call any particle that makes up matter, including electrons, protons and neutrons. 

The team cooled their fermions — atoms of the element ytterbium — to around a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, the hypothetical temperature at which all atomic movement would cease.

"Unless an alien civilization is doing experiments like these right now, anytime this experiment is running at Kyoto University it is making the coldest fermions in the universe," Rice University researcher Kaden Hazzard, who took part in the study, said in a statement(opens in new tab).  READ MORE...

Obiter Hit By A Coronal Mass Ejection

The sun-observing Solar Orbiter spacecraft makes regular flybys at Venus, taking measurements 

of the planet's magnetic field as a side project. (Image credit: ESA)

The sun-exploring Solar Orbiter spacecraft came face to face with a massive eruption of plasma from the sun, just ahead of a pivotal flyby of Venus.


An enormous coronal mass ejection (CME), a burst of charged particles from the sun's upper atmosphere, the corona, shot out from the sun on Aug. 30 in the direction of Venus. Shortly after that, the bubble of solar material reached Solar Orbiter, which was just preparing for its latest orbital flyby of the second planet of the solar system.

Fortunately, the ESA-NASA observatory is designed to measure the very kind of violent outburst it just encountered and thus could withstand the solar assault with ease.

The spacecraft carries 10 science instruments to observe the sun's surface and collect data on CMEs, the solar wind and the sun’s magnetic field. Some of these instruments were turned off during the close approach to Venus, due to the potential risk from sunlight bouncing off the highly reflective Venusian atmosphere, ESA said in a statement.  READ MORE...

Photos of an Alien World

The HIP 65426 b gas giant planet photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope on the 

background of the Digitized Sky Survey (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA, A Carter (UCSC), 

the ERS 1386 team, and A. Pagan (STScI))

The James Webb Space Telescope took its first direct image of a planet orbiting a distant star, proving its potential to revolutionize exoplanet research.


The absolute majority of exoplanets have only been observed through temporary dips in brightness of the stars they orbit; only about two dozen have been imaged directly. But that might soon change. Less than two months after it started its science operations, the James Webb Space Telescope has delivered its first direct photo of a planet beyond our solar system.


The planet, a gas giant orbiting the star called HIP 65426 some 385 light-years from Earth, appears in the image as a tiny splotch close to the glowing star. Webb photographed the exoplanet using its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), each of which focuses on a different flavor of infrared light.

"This is a transformative moment, not only for Webb but also for astronomy generally," Sasha Hinkley, an astronomer at the University of Exeter in the U.K. who led these observations, said in a statement(opens in new tab).


Scientists had discovered the planet in 2017 with the Very Large Telescope in Chile; Webb isn't tailored to discovering new exoplanets and will instead excel at teaching scientists about worlds other observatories identified.

Exoplanets are extremely difficult to observe directly because they are so much fainter than the stars they orbit. This one, HIP 65426 b, could only be spotted thanks to a combination of factors. First, it's extremely far away from its parent star, 100 times the distance from the sun to Earth (for comparison, Pluto orbits only 40 sun-Earth distances from the sun). Second, HIP 65426 b is also extremely massive — 12 times the size of Jupiter, the solar system's largest planet.  READ MORE...

Mysterious Rings in Space

The James Webb Space Telescope captured the star WR 140 surrounded by strange concentric shells. (Image credit: NASA/ESA /CSA /Ryan Lau /JWST ERS Team /Judy Schmidt)

The James Webb Space Telescope captured mysterious concentric rings around a distant star that astronomers are still working to explain.


The image, taken in July, was released on Twitter by citizen scientist Judy Schmidt, prompting a torrent of comments and head-scratching. It shows a star known as WR140 surrounded by regular ripple-like circles that gradually fade away. The circles, however, are not perfectly round, but have a somewhat square-like feel to them, prompting speculations about possible alien origins.

"I think it's just nature doing something that is simple, but when we look at it from only one viewpoint it seems impossible, at first, to understand that it is a natural phenomenon," Schmidt told Space.com in an email. "Why is it shaped the way it is? Why is it so regular?"

Mark McCaughrean, an interdisciplinary scientist in the James Webb Space Telescope Science Working Group and a science advisor to the European Space Agency, called the feature "bonkers" in a Twitter thread.


"The six-pointed blue structure is an artifact due to optical diffraction from the bright star WR140 in this #JWST MIRI image," he wrote. "But red curvy-yet-boxy stuff is real, a series of shells around WR140. Actually in space. Around a star."

He noted that WR140 is what astronomers call a Wolf-Rayet star, which have spat much of their hydrogen into space. These objects are also surrounded by dust, he added, which a companion star is sculpting into the strange shells.

Astronomers will know more soon thanks to a scientific paper currently under review about this mysterious phenomenon.  READ MORE...