JWST – Astronomy Now

Engineers examine unexpected readings from JWST shake test

20 December 2016 Stephen Clark

NASA says engineers are diagnosing the source of “anomalous readings” during a recent vibration test of the sensitive optics and sensors at the heart of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

Hubble finds universe is expanding faster than expected

2 June 2016 Astronomy Now

When Edwin Hubble discovered nearly 100 years ago that the universe was uniformly expanding in all directions, the finding was a big surprise. Then, in the mid-1990s, another shocker occurred: astronomers found that the expansion rate was accelerating, perhaps due to “dark energy.” Now, the latest measurements of our runaway universe suggest that it is expanding faster than astronomers thought.

Hubble team breaks cosmic distance record

4 March 2016 Astronomy Now

By pushing the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to its limits, astronomers have shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the distance to the most remote galaxy ever seen in the universe. The galaxy, named GN-z11, has a redshift of 11.1, which corresponds to 400 million years after the Big Bang when the universe was only three percent of its current age.

Space telescopes find “twins” of Eta Carinae in other galaxies

6 January 2016 Astronomy Now

Located about 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina, Eta Carinae outshines our Sun by 5 million times. The binary system consists of two massive stars in a tight 5.5-year orbit, shrouded in an expanding veil of gas and dust from an enormous eruption seen in the 1840s. Now a study using archival data from NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes has found five similar objects in other galaxies for the first time.

Hubble survey reveals early galaxies were more efficient at making stars

21 November 2015 Astronomy Now

A study just published by University of Texas at Austin assistant professor Steven Finkelstein and colleagues reveals that galaxies were more efficient at making stars when the universe was younger. The announcement explains the team’s discovery that there are a lot more bright, highly star-forming galaxies in the early universe than scientists previously thought.

Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2015 – report 3

8 July 2015 Astronomy Now

In his third report from the Royal Astronomical Society’s NAM2015, Kulvinder Singh Chadha examines the Sun in X-ray and ultraviolet wavelengths from three different spacecraft, dons a virtual reality planetarium headset, and investigates if the proposed James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could discern Earth-sized worlds that are habitable.

Clusters of monster stars lit up the early universe

22 April 2015 Astronomy Now

The first stars were born at the end of the cosmological ‘dark ages’ several hundred million years after the Big Bang. Two Canadian researchers have calculated that clusters of these protostars may have been as luminous as 100 million Suns.