Future Timeline

A team of astronomers, led by Arizona State University undergraduate student Emma Softich, has discovered a rare pair of brown dwarfs that has the widest separation of any brown dwarf binary system found to date.

Brown dwarfs are celestial objects that are smaller than a normal star and without sufficient mass to sustain nuclear fusion, but that are hot enough to radiate energy. Many brown dwarfs have been discovered with data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) via the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project, which solicits help from the public to search the WISE image data bank to find brown dwarfs and low-mass stars, some of the sun's nearest neighbors.

For this study, the team of astronomers inspected images of Backyard Worlds discoveries, where companion brown dwarfs may have been overlooked. In so doing, they discovered a rare brown dwarf binary system (CWISE J014611.20 050850.0AB).

"Wide, low-mass systems like CWISE J014611.20-050850.0AB are usually disrupted early on in their lifetimes, so the fact that this one has survived until now is pretty remarkable," said co-author Adam Schneider of the U.S. Naval Observatory, Flagstaff Station and George Mason University.

NASA may need more astronauts to meet its human spaceflight goals over the coming years, according to a new report from the agency's investigative office.

Currently, NASA only flies astronauts to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsules and Russia's Soyuz vehicles. But the agency's ambitious Artemis program to return humans to the moon is set to change that, with the program's first crewed mission targeting 2024. That flight is meant to be the first stage in developing a long-term lunar exploration program that supports future human exploration of Mars.

As a result, NASA is looking at sending more astronauts off-Earth — perhaps more than the agency can expect to have available, according to a report from the Office of Investigator General released on Tuesday (Jan. 11) that evaluates how NASA manages its astronauts.

"After reaching its peak of nearly 150 astronauts in 2000, the size of the corps has diminished with the end of space shuttle missions in 2011 and now stands at 44, one of the smallest cadres of astronauts in the past 20 years," officials wrote in the report. "As NASA enters a new era of human space flight, including returning to the moon and eventually landing humans on Mars, effective management of its astronaut corps — the people who fly its space flight missions — is critical to the agency’s success."

raklian wrote: ↑Sat Jan 08, 2022 9:52 pm Damn (referring to the second tweet below). Kepler was wearing his futurist hat when he wrote that piece.

Yuli Ban wrote: ↑Fri Jan 14, 2022 2:18 am Pre-modern future predictions are always so fascinating!! I wonder just how Kepler thought it would be done or if he had any concept of outer space as we understand it

Three weather satellites captured the massive underwater volcanic eruption that tore apart the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai island in the South Pacific Ocean on Saturday (Jan. 15), revealing the sheer force of the blast from different angles.

Black holes are often described as the monsters of the universe—tearing apart stars, consuming anything that comes too close, and holding light captive. Detailed evidence from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, however, shows a black hole in a new light: Fostering rather than suppressing star formation. Hubble imaging and spectroscopy of the dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10 clearly show a gas outflow stretching from the black hole to a bright star birth region like an umbilical cord, triggering the already dense cloud into forming clusters of stars. Astronomers have previously debated that a dwarf galaxy could have a black hole analogous to the supermassive black holes in larger galaxies. Further study of dwarf galaxies, which have remained small over cosmic time, may shed light on the question of how the first seeds of supermassive black holes formed and evolved over the history of the universe.

Often portrayed as destructive monsters that hold light captive, black holes take on a less villainous role in the latest research from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. A black hole at the heart of the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 is creating stars rather than gobbling them up. The black hole is apparently contributing to the firestorm of new star formation taking place in the galaxy. The dwarf galaxy lies 30 million light-years away, in the southern constellation Pyxis.

A decade ago this small galaxy set off debate among astronomers as to whether dwarf galaxies were home to black holes proportional to the supermassive behemoths found in the hearts of larger galaxies. This new discovery has little Henize 2-10, containing only one-tenth the number of stars found in our Milky Way, poised to play a big part in solving the mystery of where supermassive black holes came from in the first place.