"For-profit companies are pushing the narrative that they can do space inexpensively," writes Slashdot reader RUs1729 in response to an opinion piece from SpaceNews. "Their track record reveals otherwise: cutting corners won't do it for the foreseeable future." Here's an excerpt from the article, written by Robert N. Eberhart: The headlines in the space industry over the past month have delivered a sobering reminder: space is not forgiving, and certainly not friendly to overpromising entrepreneurs. From iSpace's second failed lunar landing attempt (making them 0 for 2) to SpaceX's ongoing Starship test flight setbacks -- amid a backdrop of exploding prototypes and shifting goalposts -- the evidence is mounting that the commercialization of space is not progressing in the triumphant arc that press releases might suggest. This isn't just a series of flukes. It points to a structural, strategic and cultural problem in how we talk about innovation, cost and success in space today. Let's be blunt: 50 years ago, we did this. We sent humans to the moon, not once but repeatedly, and brought them back. With less computational power than your phone, using analog systems and slide rules, we achieved feats of incredible precision, reliability and coordination. Today's failures, even when dressed up as "learning opportunities," raises the obvious question: Why are we struggling to do now what we once achieved decades ago with far more complexity and far less technology? Until very recently, the failure rate of private lunar exploration efforts underscored this reality. Over the past two decades, not a single private mission had fully succeeded -- until last March when Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander touched down on the moon. It marked the first fully successful soft landing by a private company. That mission deserves real credit. But that credit comes with important context: It took two decades of false starts, crashes and incomplete landings -- from Space IL's Beresheet to iSpace's Hakuto-R and Astrobotic's Peregrine -- before even one private firm delivered on the promise of lunar access. The prevailing industry answer -- "we need to innovate for lower cost" -- rings hollow. What's happening now isn't innovation; it's aspiration masquerading as disruption... "This is not a call for a retreat to Cold War models or Apollo-era budgets," writes Eberhart, in closing. "It's a call for seriousness. If we're truly entering a new space age, then it needs to be built on sound engineering, transparent economics and meaningful technical leadership -- not PR strategy. Let's stop pretending that burning money in orbit is a business model." "The dream of a sustainable, entrepreneurial space ecosystem is still alive. But it won't happen unless we stop celebrating hype and start demanding results. Until then, the real innovation we need is not in spacecraft -- it's in accountability." Robert N. Eberhart, PhD, is an associate professor of management and the faculty director of the Ahlers Center for International Business at the Knauss School of Business of University of San Diego. He is the author of several academic publications and books. He is also part of Oxford University's Smart Space Initiative and contributed to Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory. Before his academic career, Prof. Eberhart founded and ran a successful company in Japan.

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Just four weeks after an early June flight to the edge of space, Blue Origin has again carried six more passengers there and back again, reports CBS News, noting that the 10-minute ride was Blue Origin's 13th flight "out of the discernible atmosphere." The New Shepard capsule's stubby single-stage booster roared to life just after 9:38 a.m. EDT, throttled up to full thrust and smoothly climbed away from Blue Origin's launch site near Van Horn, Texas. The hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine powering the New Shepard fired for about two-and-a-half minutes, accelerating the spacecraft to just under three times the speed of sound. The capsule then separated from the booster and continued coasting upward along its up-and-down trajectory. At that point, the passengers — Allie and Carl Kuehner, Leland Larson, Freddie Rescigno Jr., Jim Sitkin and Owolabi Salis, the first Nigerian to fly in space — began enjoying about three minutes of weightlessness. Free to unstrap and float about the cabin, the passengers were able to take in the view through the largest windows in any operational spacecraft as the ship climbed to an altitude of just above 65 miles. That's about three miles higher than the internationally recognized boundary between the discernible atmosphere and space. The capsule then began falling back to Earth and the passengers returned to their seats for the descent to touchdown. The reusable booster, meanwhile, made its own return to the launch site, dropping tail first to a rocket-powered touchdown... The company has now launched 74 passengers, including Bezos' wife Lauren Sánchez, and four who have flown twice. By April nearly 120 civilians had already travelled to the edge of space, CBS News reported earlier — while Virgin Galactic is expected to resume flights next year. You can replay the webcast of the mission on Blue Origin's YouTube channel.

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In its first 10 hours the Rubin space telescope found 2,104 never-before-seen asteroids in our solar system. And Gizmodo reports the data went directly to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC), which "plays an essential role in the early detection and monitoring of asteroids that threaten Earth." The MPC has spent years preparing for the deluge of data from Rubin, ramping up its software to process massive amounts of observations. When the first round officially came flooding in on Monday, it was "nerve-racking and exciting simultaneously," Matthew Payne, MPC director, told Gizmodo. But Space.com explains how extraordinary that is. "There are approximately a million known asteroids in our cosmic neighborhood; over the next few years, Rubin could very well hike that figure up to five million." "This is five times more than all the astronomers in the world discovered during the last 200 years since the discovery of the first asteroid," Željko IveziÄ, Deputy Director of Rubin's Legacy Survey of Space and Time, said during the conference. "We can outdo two centuries of effort in just a couple of years...." The plan is for Rubin to capture such massive, high-resolution images of the southern sky once every three nights for at least the next 10 years. You can therefore consider it to be a super-fast, super-efficient and super-thorough cosmic imager. Indeed, those qualities are perfect for spotting some of the smallest details trailing through the space around our planet: asteroids. "We make movies of the night sky to see two things: objects that move and objects that change brightness," IveziÄ said. "Objects that move come in two flavors. Stars in our galaxy move, and they move slowly. Much faster objects are asteroids...." [I]t's tremendously difficult to record an asteroid at all. "Asteroids, they disappear after you get one picture of them," IveziÄ said, calling Rubin's ability to image small objects orbiting the sun "unprecedented." Space.com notes that the ten million galaxies in its first image are just 0.05% of around 20 billion galaxies that Rubin will have imaged by the end of its 10-year "Legacy Survey of Space and Time" investigating dark energy. In fact, in its first year of regular operations, the Observation "will collect more data than all previous optical observatories combined," reports Earth.com. That torrent of information — petabytes of images and catalogs — will be processed in near-real time. Alerts will be issued to the worldwide astronomy community within 60 seconds of any detected change in the sky. By democratizing access to its enormous dataset, Rubin Observatory will empower both professionals and citizen scientists. This will foster discoveries that range from mapping the structure of the Milky Way to refining the rate at which the universe is expanding. Reuters explains just how much data is being generated: The number of alerts the telescope will send every night is equivalent to the inboxes of 83,000 people. It's impossible for someone to look at that one by one," said astrophysicist Francisco Foster. "We're going to have to use artificial intelligence tools." And New Atlas shares some of the "first look" videos released by the Observatory, including one titled The Cosmic Treasure Chest and another on the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae (which Space.com describe as clouds of gas and dust condensing to birth new stars).

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On the International Space Station, air has been slowly leaking out for years from a Russia-controlled module, reports CNN. But recently "station operators realized the gradual, steady leak had stopped. And that raised an even larger concern." It's possible that efforts to seal cracks in the module's exterior wall have worked, and the patches are finally trapping air as intended. But, according to NASA, engineers are also concerned that the module is actually holding a stable pressure because a new leak may have formed on an interior wall — causing air from the rest of the orbiting laboratory to begin rushing into the damaged area. Essentially, space station operators are worried that the entire station is beginning to lose air. Much about this issue is unknown. NASA revealed the concerns in a June 14 statement. The agency said it would delay the launch of the private Ax-4 mission, carried out by SpaceX and Houston-based company Axiom Space, as station operators worked to pinpoint the problem. "By changing pressure in the transfer tunnel and monitoring over time, teams are evaluating the condition of the transfer tunnel and the hatch seal," the statement read. More than a week later, the results of that research are not totally clear. After revealing the new Wednesday launch target Monday night, NASA said in a Tuesday statement that it worked with Roscosmos officials to investigate the issue. The space agencies agreed to lower the pressure in the transfer tunnel, and "teams will continue to evaluate going forward," according to the statement... The cracks are minuscule and mostly invisible to the naked eye, hence the difficulty attempting to patch problem areas. Axiom Space launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Wednesday. But its four-person crew had previously "remained locked in quarantine in Florida for about a month, waiting for their chance to launch," notes CNN, as NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos "attempted to sort through" the leak issue.

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The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered its first new exoplanet, TWA 7b -- a young, low-mass planet about 100 times the mass of Earth, making it the lightest planet ever directly imaged beyond the solar system. Space.com reports: TWA 7b was discovered in the debris rings that surround the low-mass star CE Antilae, also known as TWA 7, located around 111 light-years from Earth. CE Antilae is a very young star, estimated to be around just a few million years old. If that seems ancient, consider the sun, a "middle-aged" star, is around 4.6 billion years old. [...] The disk of CE Antilae is divided into three distinct rings, one of which is narrow and bounded by two empty "lanes" mostly devoid of matter. When imaging this ring, the JWST spotted an infrared-emitting source, which the team of astronomers determined is most likely a young exoplanet. They then used simulations that confirmed the formation of a thin ring and a "hole" exactly where this planet is positioned, corresponding to JWST observations. The research has been published in the journal Nature.

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Perched in Chile's Andes mountains, "A revolutionary new space telescope has just taken its first pictures of the cosmos," reports National Geographic — "and they're spectacular." Formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, it's expected to bring "unprecedented detail" to space photography: The observatory has a few key components: A giant telescope, called the Simonyi Survey Telescope, is connected to the world's largest and highest resolution digital camera. Rubin's 27-foot primary mirror, paired with a mind-boggling 3,200-megapixel camera, will repeatedly take 30-second exposure images of vast swaths of the sky with unrivaled speed and detail. Each image will cover an area of sky as big as 40 full moons. Every three nights for the next 10 years, Rubin will produce a new, ultra-high-definition map of the entire visible southern sky. With this much coverage, scientists hope to create an updated and detailed "movie" they can use to view how the cosmos changes over time.... For the next decade, Rubin will capture millions of astronomical objects each day — or more than 100 every second. Ultimately, it's expected to discover about 17 billion stars and 20 billion galaxies that we've never seen before... When the observatory begins science operations in earnest later in 2025, its instruments will yield a deluge of astronomical data that will be too overwhelming to process manually. (Each night, the observatory will generate around 20 terabytes of data.) Astronomers expect high-quality observations taken with the telescope will help map out the structure of the universe, find comets and potentially hazardous asteroids in our solar system, and detect exploding stars and black holes in distant galaxies. The observatory will also examine the optical counterparts of gravitational wave events — ripples in the fabric of space caused by some of the most energetic processes in the cosmos. By studying these events, astronomers hope to uncover the secrets of the invisible forces that shape the universe like dark matter and dark energy. "Already, in just over 10 hours of test observations, the observatory has discovered 2,104 never-before-seen-asteroids," reports NPR, "including seven near-Earth asteroids, none of which pose any danger..." The basic idea is that the data "should let astronomers catch transient phenomena that they otherwise wouldn't know to look for, such as exploding stars, asteroids, interstellar objects whizzing in from other solar systems, and maybe even the movement of a giant planet that some believe is lurking out in our own solar system, beyond Pluto." The telescope is a joint project between the U.S. Energy Department and its National Science Foundation — and it will stream a special live broadcast of its first images today at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) on their official YouTube channel (also simulacast at Space.com).

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It's not dark matter, writes Space.com. But astronomers have discovered "a vast tendril of hot gas linking four galaxy clusters and stretching out for 23 million light-years, 230 times the length of our galaxy. "With 10 times the mass of the Milky Way, this filamentary structure accounts for much of the universe's 'missing matter,' the search for which has baffled scientists for decades...." [I]t is "ordinary matter" made up of atoms, composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons (collectively called baryons) which make up stars, planets, moons, and our bodies. For decades, our best models of the universe have suggested that a third of the baryonic matter that should be out there in the cosmos is missing. This discovery of that missing matter suggests our best models of the universe were right all along. It could also reveal more about the "Cosmic Web," the vast structure along which entire galaxies grew and gathered during the earlier epochs of our 13.8 billion-year-old universe.... The newly observed filament isn't just extraordinary in terms of its mass and size; it also has a temperature of a staggering 18 million degrees Fahrenheit (10 million degrees Celsius). That's around 1,800 times hotter than the surface of the sun... The team's research was published on Thursday (June 19) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Models of the cosmos (including the standard model of cosmology) "have long posited the idea that the missing baryonic matter of the universe is locked up in vast filaments of gas stretching between the densest pockets of space..." the article points out. But now thanks to Suzaku, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) satellite, and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton, "a team of astronomers has for the first time been able to determine the properties of one of these filaments, which links four galactic clusters in the local universe." Team leader Konstantinos Migkas (of the Netherlands' Leiden Observatory) explained the significance of their finding. "For the first time, our results closely match what we see in our leading model of the cosmos — something that's not happened before." "It seems that the simulations were right all along."

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French President Emmanuel Macron urged Europe to reassert itself as a global space power, warning that France risks being sidelined in the low Earth orbit satellite market dominated by players like SpaceX and China. Phys.Org reports: Macron spoke at the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget outside the French capital a day after France more than doubled its stake in satellite operator Eutelsat, the EU rival to Elon Musk's Starlink. Macron called for more investment as the European space industry struggles to remain competitive in the face of US and Chinese rivals. "SpaceX has disrupted the market, Amazon is also getting involved. China is not far behind, and I think we all need to be very clear-headed," Macron said. Europe must become "a space power once again, with France at its heart," he said. He warned that Europeans were "on the verge of being completely" squeezed out of the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation market. Macron said France and its partners should not be reliant on non-European constellations in low orbit, calling it "madness." He called non-European players to team up with France. "This must be the solution for our major strategic partners in the Gulf, India, Canada and Brazil," he said. "We really need to succeed in increasing our collective investment effort," Macron added, noting the importance of private investors and public-private collaboration. He also said France planned to organize a space summit in early 2026 to "mobilize our public and private partners across the globe."

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alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: The colossal black hole lurking at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is spinning almost as fast as its maximum rotation rate. That's just one thing astrophysicists have discovered after developing and applying a new method to tease apart the secrets still hidden in supermassive black hole observations collected by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The unprecedented global collaboration spent years working to give us the first direct images of the shadows of black holes, first with M87* in a galaxy 55 million light-years away, then with Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our own galaxy. [...] Their results show, among other things, that Sgr A* is not only spinning at close to its maximum speed, but that its rotational axis is pointed in Earth's direction, and that the glow around it is generated by hot electrons. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the magnetic field in the material around Sgr A* doesn't appear to be behaving in a way that's predicted by theory. M87*, they discovered, is also rotating rapidly, although not as fast as Sgr A*. However, it is rotating in the opposite direction to the material swirling in a disk around it -- possibly because of a past merger with another supermassive black hole. The findings have been detailed in three papers published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. They can be found here, here, and here.

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SpaceX's Starship exploded on its test stand in South Texas ahead of an engine test, marking the fourth loss of a Starship this year. "In three previous test flights, the vehicle came apart or detonated during its flight," notes the Washington Post. No injuries were reported but the incident highlights ongoing technical challenges as SpaceX races to prove Starship's readiness for deep-space travel. From the report: In a post on the social media site X, SpaceX said that the explosion on the test stand, which could be seen for miles, happened at about 11 p.m. Central time. For safety reasons, the company had cleared personnel from around the site, and "all personnel are safe and accounted for," it said. The company is "actively working to safe the test site and the immediate surrounding area in conjunction with local officials," the post continued. "There are no hazards to residents in surrounding communities, and we ask that individuals do not attempt to approach the area while safing operations continue." Starship comprises two stages -- the Super Heavy booster, which has 33 engines, and the Starship spacecraft itself, which has six. Before Wednesday's explosion, the spacecraft was standing alone on the test stand, and not mounted on top of the booster, when it blew up. The engines are test-fired on the Starship before it's mounted on the booster. SpaceX had been hoping to launch within the coming weeks had the engine test been successful. [...] In a post on X, Musk said that preliminary data pointed to a pressure vessel that failed at the top of the rocket. You can watch a recording of the explosion on YouTube. SpaceX called the incident a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," which caught the attention of Slashdot reader hambone142. In a story submitted to the Firehose, they commented: "I worked for a major computer company whose power supplies caught on fire. We were instructed to cease saying that and instead say the power supply underwent a 'thermal event.' Gotta love it."

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Honda has successfully conducted a surprise launch and landing test of its prototype reusable rocket as part of its plan to achieve suborbital spaceflight by 2029. Reuters reports: Honda R&D, the research arm of Japan's second-biggest carmaker, successfully landed its 6.3-meter (20.6-foot) experimental reusable launch vehicle after reaching an altitude of 271 meters (889 feet) at its test facility in northern Japan's space town Taiki, according to the company. While "no decisions have been made regarding commercialization of these rocket technologies, Honda will continue making progress in the fundamental research with a technology development goal of realizing technological capability to enable a suborbital launch by 2029," it said in a statement. Honda in 2021 said it was studying space technologies such as reusable rockets, but it has not previously announced the details of the launch test. A suborbital launch may touch the verge of outer space but does not enter orbit. Studying launch vehicles "has the potential to contribute more to people's daily lives by launching satellites with its own rockets, that could lead to various services that are also compatible with other Honda business," the company added.

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Space may be the perfect place to study cancer — and someday even treat it," writes Space.com: On Earth, gravity slows the development of cancer because cells normally need to be attached to a surface in order to function and grow. But in space, cancer cell clusters can expand in all directions as bubbles, like budding yeast or grapes, said Shay Soker, chief science program officer at Wake Forest's Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Since bubbles grow larger and more quickly in space, researchers can more easily test substances clinging to the edge of the larger bubbles, too. Scientists at the University of Notre Dame are taking advantage of this quirk to develop an in-space cancer test that needs just a single drop of blood. The work builds on a series of bubble-formation experiments that have already been conducted on the ISS. "If cancer screening using our bubble technology in space is democratized and made inexpensive, many more cancers can be screened, and everyone can benefit," said Tengfei Luo, a Notre Dame researcher who pioneered the technology, speaking to the ISS' magazine, Upward. "It's something we may be able to integrate into annual exams. It sounds far-fetched, but it's achievable...." Chemotherapy patients could save precious time, too. In normal gravity, they typically have to spend a half-hour hooked up to a needle before the medicine begins to take effect, because most drugs don't dissolve easily in water. But scientists at Merck have discovered that, in space, their widely used cancer drug pembrolizumab, or Keytruda, can be administered through a simple injection, because large crystalline molecules that would normally clump together are suspended in microgravity... Someday, microgravity could even help patients recovering from surgery heal faster than they would on Earth, Soker added. "Wound healing in high pressure is faster. That's the hyperbaric treatment for wounds...." For the Wake Forest experiment, which is scheduled to launch next spring, scientists will cut out two sections of a cancer tumor from around 20 patients. One sample will stay on Earth while the other heads to the ISS, with scientists observing the difference. The testing will be completed within a week, to avoid any interference from cosmic radiation. If successful, Soker said, it could set the stage for diagnostic cancer tests in space available to the general population — perhaps on a biomedical space station that could launch after the planned demise of the ISS. "Can we actually design a special cancer space station that will be dedicated to cancer and maybe other diseases?" Shoker asked, answering his question in the affirmative. "Pharmaceutical companies that have deep pockets would certainly support that program."

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The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter has captured the first-ever images of the sun's poles by tilting its orbit out of the ecliptic plane. Space.com reports: The captured images of the solar south pole were taken between March 16 and 17, 2025, with the Solar Orbiter's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI), Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), and Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instruments. They constitute humanity's first ever look at the sun's poles. This was the Solar Orbiter mission's first high-angle observation campaign of the sun, conducted at an angle of 15 degrees below the solar equator. Just a few days after snapping these images, the ESA spacecraft reached a maximum viewing angle of 17 degrees, which it sits in currently as it performs its first "pole-to-pole" orbit of our star. [...] One of the first discoveries made by the Solar Orbiter is the fact that the magnetic fields around the sun's southern poles appear to be, for lack of a better phrase, a complete mess. While standard magnetic fields have well-defined north and south poles, these new observations reveal that north and south polarities are both found at the sun's southern pole. This seems to happen at solar maximum when the poles of the sun are about to flip. Following this exchange of poles, the fields at the north and south poles will maintain an orderly single polarity during solar minimum until solar maximum during the next 11-year cycle. The Solar Orbiter observations also revealed that while the equator of the sun, where the most sunspots appear, possesses the strongest magnetic fields, those at the poles of our star have a complex and ever-changing structure. The Solar Orbiter's SPICE instrument provided another first for the ESA spacecraft, allowing scientists to track elements via their unique emissions as they move through the sun. Tracing the specific spectral lines of elements like hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, neon, and magnesium, a process called "Doppler measurement," revealed how materials flow through different layers of the sun. The Solar Orbiter also allowed scientists to measure the speed of carbon atoms as they are ejected from the sun in plumes and jets. "This is just the first step of Solar Orbiter's 'stairway to heaven.' In the coming years, the spacecraft will climb further out of the ecliptic plane for ever better views of the sun's polar regions," ESA's Solar Orbiter project scientist Daniel Muller said. "These data will transform our understanding of the sun's magnetic field, the solar wind, and solar activity."

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The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will begin full operations in the coming months with the world's largest digital camera, capturing 3,200-megapixel images that would require several hundred HD television screens to display at full resolution. The $810 million facility will map the entire southern sky every three to four nights, observing each location approximately 800 times over its planned decade of operations. The telescope's unusual design allows it to photograph an area equivalent to 45 full moons in each shot and swing between different sky locations every 40 seconds. Its digital camera, roughly the size of a small car, will generate eight million alerts per night when it detects astronomical objects that move or change brightness, according to Tony Tyson, the University of California, Davis astronomer who conceived the project in the 1990s. Astrophysicist Federica Bianco, who received a preview of the telescope's first full-color image, described her reaction simply: "There are so many stars!" The team plans to unveil that inaugural image on June 23.

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Blue Origin is falling far short of its goal to launch the New Glenn rocket eight times in 2025, with its second flight now delayed until at least mid-August. Key leadership changes were also announced, including the departure of the New Glenn program head, as the company faces pressure to increase launch cadence and compete with SpaceX for federal contracts and Amazon's Project Kuiper deployments. Ars Technica reports: The mission, with an undesignated payload, will be named "Never Tell Me the Odds," due to the attempt to land the booster. "One of our key mission objectives will be to land and recover the booster," [chief executive of Blue Origin, Dave Limp] wrote. "This will take a little bit of luck and a lot of excellent execution. We're on track to produce eight GS2s this year, and the one we'll fly on this second mission was hot-fired in April." In this comment, GS2 stands for "Glenn stage 2," or the second stage of the large rocket. It is telling that Limp commented on the company tracking toward producing eight second stages, which would match the original launch cadence planned for this year. This likely is a fig leaf offered to Bezos, who, two sources said, was rather upset that Blue Origin would not meet (or even approach) its original target of eight launches this year. One person familiar with the progress on the vehicle told Ars that even a launch date in August is unrealistic -- this too may have been set aggressively to appease Bezos -- and that September is probably the earliest the rocket is likely to be ready for launch. Blue Origin has not publicly stated what the payload will be, but this second flight is expected to carry the ESCAPADE mission for NASA. On May 28, a couple of days after Limp's all-hands meeting, the chief executive emailed his entire team to announce an "organizational update." As part of this, the company's senior vice president of engines, Linda Cova, was retiring. Multiple sources confirmed this retiring was expected and that the company's program to produce BE-4 rocket engines is going well. However, the other name in the email raised some eyebrows, coming so soon after the announcement that New Glenn's cadence would be significantly slower than expected. Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president running the New Glenn program, was said to be "stepping away from his role and taking a well deserved year off" starting on August 15. It is unclear whether this departure was linked to Bezos' displeasure with the rocket program. One company official said Jones' sabbatical had been planned, but the timing is curious. A search for internal and external candidates to fill his role is ongoing.

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The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the most distant galaxy ever observed, named MoM z14. NASA estimates it existed just 280 million years after the Big Bang. Space.com reports: Prior to the discovery of MoM z14, the galaxy holding the title of earliest and distant was JADES-GS-z14-0, which existed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, or around 13.5 billion years ago. This previous record galaxy has a redshift of z =14.32, while MoM z14 has a redshift of z = 14.44. There is a wider context to the observation of MoM z14 than the fact that it has broken the record for earliest known galaxy by 20 million years, though, as [explained team member and Yale University professor of Astronomy and Physics Pieter van Dokkum]. The researchers were able to determine that MoM z14 is around 50 times smaller than the Milky Way. The team also measured emission lines from the galaxy, indicating the presence of elements like nitrogen and carbon. "The emission lines are unusual; it indicates that the galaxy is very young, with a rapidly increasing rate of forming new stars," van Dokkum said. "There are also indications that there is not much neutral hydrogen gas surrounding the galaxy, which would be surprising: the very early universe is expected to be filled with neutral hydrogen. "That needs even better spectra and more galaxies, to investigate more fully." The presence of carbon and nitrogen in MoM z14 indicates that there are earlier galaxies to be discovered than this 13.52 billion-year-old example. That is because the very earliest galaxies in the universe and their stars were filled with the simplest elements in the cosmos, hydrogen and helium. Later galaxies would be populated by these heavier elements, which astronomers somewhat confusingly call "metal," as their stars forged them and then dispersed them in supernova explosions. The research has been published on arXiv.

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New simulations suggest that the long-assumed collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies is not guaranteed, with the odds now estimated at just over 50% within the next 10 billion years. Factoring in other massive galaxies like M33 and the Large Magellanic Cloud revealed that their gravitational influence significantly alters the likelihood of a merger. ScienceAlert reports: The Milky Way and Andromeda are not, however, alone in this little corner of the cosmos. They belong to a small group of galaxies within a radius of about 5 million light-years from the Milky Way known as the Local Group. The Milky Way and Andromeda are the largest members, but there are quite a few other objects hanging out that need to be taken into consideration when modeling the future. [Astrophysicist Till Sawala of the University of Helsinki] and his colleagues took the latest data from the Hubble and Gaia space telescopes, and the most recent mass estimates for the four most massive objects in the Local Group -- the Milky Way, Andromeda, the Triangulum galaxy (M33), and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Then, they set about running simulations of the next 10 billion years, adding and removing galaxies to see how that changed the results. Their results showed that the presence of M33 and LMC dramatically altered the probability of a collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda. When it is just the two large spiral galaxies, the merger occurred in slightly less than half the simulation runs. The addition of M33 increased the merger probability to two in three. Taking M33 back out and adding LMC had the opposite effect, decreasing the probability to one in three. When all four galaxies were present, the probability of a merger between the Milky Way and Andromeda within 10 billion years is slightly more than 50 percent. "We find that there are basically two types of outcomes," Sawala said. "The Milky Way and Andromeda will either come close enough on their first encounter (first 'pericenter') that dynamical friction between the two dark matter haloes will drag the orbit to an eventual merger, which very likely happens before 10 billion years, or they do not come close enough, in which case dynamical friction is not effective, and they can still orbit for a very long time thereafter." "The main result of our work is that there is still significant uncertainty about the future evolution -- and eventual fate -- of our galaxy," Sawala added. "Of course, as a working astrophysicist, the best results are those that motivate future studies, and I think our paper provides motivation both for more comprehensive models and for more precise observations." The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.

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Adam Riess won a Nobel Prize in Physics for helping discover that the universe's acceleration is expanding, remembers The Atlantic. But then theorists "proposed the existence of dark energy: a faint, repulsive force that pervades all of empty space... the final piece to what has since come to be called the 'standard model of cosmology.'" Riess thinks instead we should just replace the standard model: When I visited Riess, back in January, he mentioned he was looking forward to a data release from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, a new observatory on Kitt Peak, in Arizona's portion of the Sonoran Desert. DESI has 5,000 robotically controlled optic fibers. Every 20 minutes, each of them locks onto a different galaxy in the deep sky. This process is scheduled to continue for a total of five years, until millions of galaxies have been observed, enough to map cosmic expansion across time... DESI's first release, last year, gave some preliminary hints that dark energy was stronger in the early universe, and that its power then began to fade ever so slightly. On March 19, the team followed up with the larger set of data that Riess was awaiting. It was based on three years of observations, and the signal that it gave was stronger: Dark energy appeared to lose its kick several billion years ago. This finding is not settled science, not even close. But if it holds up, a "wholesale revision" of the standard model would be required [says Colin Hill, a cosmologist at Columbia University. "The textbooks that I use in my class would need to be rewritten." And not only the textbooks — the idea that our universe will end in heat death has escaped the dull, technical world of academic textbooks. It has become one of our dominant secular eschatologies, and perhaps the best-known end-times story for the cosmos. And yet it could be badly wrong. If dark energy weakens all the way to zero, the universe may, at some point, stop expanding. It could come to rest in some static configuration of galaxies. Life, especially intelligent life, could go on for a much longer time than previously expected. If dark energy continues to fade, as the DESI results suggest is happening, it may indeed go all the way to zero, and then turn negative. Instead of repelling galaxies, a negative dark energy would bring them together into a hot, dense singularity, much like the one that existed during the Big Bang. This could perhaps be part of some larger eternal cycle of creation and re-creation. Or maybe not. The point is that the deep future of the universe is wide open... "Many new observations will come, not just from DESI, but also from the new Vera Rubin Observatory in the Atacama Desert, and other new telescopes in space. On data-release days for years to come, the standard model's champions and detractors will be feverishly refreshing their inboxes..." And Riess tells The Atlantic he's disappointed when complacent theorists just tell him "Yeah, that's a really hard problem." He adds, "Sometimes, I feel like I am providing clues and killing time while we wait for the next Einstein to come along."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Space.com: Three world travelers, two Space Camp alums and an aerospace executive whose last name aptly matched their shared adventure traveled into space and back Saturday, becoming the latest six people to fly with Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos. Mark Rocket joined Jaime Alemán, Jesse Williams, Paul Jeris, Gretchen Green and Amy Medina Jorge on board the RSS First Step — Blue Origin's first of two human-rated New Shepard capsules — for a trip above the Kármán Line, the 62-mile-high (100-kilometer) internationally recognized boundary between Earth and space... Mark Rocket became the first New Zealander to reach space on the mission. His connection to aerospace goes beyond his apt name and today's flight; he's currently the CEO of Kea Aerospace and previously helped lead Rocket Lab, a competing space launch company to Blue Origin that sends most of its rockets up from New Zealand. Alemán, Williams and Jeris each traveled the world extensively before briefly leaving the planet today. An attorney from Panama, Alemán is now the first person to have visited all 193 countries recognized by the United Nations, traveled to the North and South Poles, and now, have been into space. For Williams, an entrepreneur from Canada, Saturday's flight continued his record of achieving high altitudes; he has summitted Mt. Everest and five of the other six other highest mountains across the globe. "For about three minutes, the six NS-32 crewmates experienced weightlessness," the article points out, "and had an astronaut's-eye view of the planet..." On social media Blue Origin notes it's their 12th human spaceflight, "and the 32nd flight of the New Shepard program."

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Astronomers have discovered a mysterious cosmic object, ASKAP J1832-0911, that emits both radio waves and X-rays in precise 44-minute cycles, making it unlike anything observed before. Space.com reports: This is the first time an object like this, a so-called "long-period transient" or "LPT," has been seen in high-energy X-ray light as well as low-energy radio wave light. The team behind this discovery hopes the finding could help reveal what these flashing objects actually are and how they launch their mystery signals. However, not only is there no explanation for how the signals from LPTs are generated yet, but astronomers also don't know why these signals "switch on" and "switch off" at long, regular and unusual intervals. "This object is unlike anything we have seen before," team leader and Curtin University researcher Zieng (Andy) Wang said in a statement. [...] The team believes the true nature of ASKAP J1832-0911 is a dead star, they just don't quite know what form that star takes. A highly magnetic neutron star, or "magnetar," is one option, and a a white dwarf -- the kind of stellar remnant the sun will leave behind when it dies in over 5 billion years -- is another. "ASKAP J1831- 0911 could be a magnetar, the core of a dead star with powerful magnetic fields, or it could be a pair of stars in a binary system where one of the two is a highly magnetized white dwarf, a low-mass star at the end of its evolution," Wang said. "However, even those theories do not fully explain what we are observing. "This discovery could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution." The research has been published in the journal Nature.

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