If you’re into astrophotography, you’ll know that clarity is everything. High-altitude regions with limited rainfall and minimal light pollution are perfect for stargazing because of the clear skies they provide, and Chile’s Atacama Desert — famed for being the world’s driest (and highest) non-polar desert — is among the best places on Earth to set up your telescope.

Alas, I didn’t have room for a telescope in my backpack during a recent visit to South America, but I did have my trusty iPhone 16 Pro Max. And so when I arrived at the small town of San Pedro de Atacama for a spot of stargazing in January, I thought I’d put the astrophotography capabilities of Apple’s 2025 flagship to the test.

I know what you’re thinking: why did I take the iPhone 16 Pro Max, and not the shiny new iPhone 17 Pro Max? Well, mainly because I’m contractually obliged to share all phone samples with my TechRadar colleagues (boo!), and it didn’t seem fair to steal away our only iPhone 17 Pro Max unit for several months. But also, the iPhone 16 Pro Max runs iOS 26 just as comfortably as its successor, and Apple’s latest software update introduced a hidden nightography feature that I was eager to try on any compatible iPhone.

Night Mode has been a feature of all iPhones (excluding iPhone SE) since the iPhone 11 and iOS 13, but iOS 26 saw Apple introduce Night Mode Max, which raises the exposure ceiling from 10 seconds to 30 seconds. This essentially allows the iPhone’s camera sensor to capture three times more light and deliver sharper night photos as a result.

Night Mode’s default three-second exposure time is enough to capture a dimly lit street in detail, but it’s nowhere near enough if you’re hoping to capture the invisible intricacies of a night sky scene (think galaxies, nebulae, star trails, et al.).

The caveat is that, to access Night Mode Max, your iPhone has to remain completely still or be placed on a tripod. And luckily, during my visit to the Atacama Desert, a local Chilean astronomer kindly allowed me to borrow his tripod for a single photo.

I set up my iPhone 16 Pro Max in the mount, selected the Night Mode Auto toggle — which automatically appears at the top of the viewfinder when in a dark environment — and let the device go through the motions for 30 seconds.

The unedited result of Night Mode Max

Et voilà! The photo above is the unedited version of the image captured by my iPhone 16 Pro Max in the Atacama Desert.

The cloudy band on the left is the Milky Way, and that fuzzy patch of light on the right is the Large Magellanic Cloud — a dwarf galaxy only visible from the Southern Hemisphere. The straight line at the bottom of the frame is, I hope, a shooting star, but it could well be a satellite passing through the exposure.

In any case, I was pretty happy with what the iPhone 16 Pro Max was able to capture in Night Mode Max. My colleague, Lance, ran a comparison between the nightography capabilities of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and iPhone 16 Pro Max last year, and I think the additional 20 seconds of exposure time granted to my shot via iOS 26 yielded visibly different results.

Of course, almost all night photos can be improved with a touch of editing, but I recognize that most people aren’t comfortable using complex editing apps like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. So here’s what I managed to come up with using the built-in editing tools in the iPhone’s Photos app…

Now, I’m no professional photographer or particularly adept photo editor, but that’s not a bad result for an iPhone. And not even the latest model!

At this point, I should probably admit that the aforementioned Chilean astronomer told me which edits to implement on my photo, since he regularly uses his own iPhone to capture the night sky in San Pedro de Atacama. I typically play around with Exposure, Brilliance, Highlights, and Contrast, but he went the whole hog and tweaked nearly every option available in the Photos app.

Here are the exact edits, in case you want to replicate them yourself:

• Exposure: -21
• Brilliance: +17
• Highlights: -25
• Shadows: -29
• Contrast: +25
• Brightness: +7
• Black Point: +7
• Saturation: +27
• Vibrancy: -16
• Warmth: -55
• Tint: -61
• Sharpness: +49
• Definition: +68
• Noise reduction: +49

So there you have it — the best way, in my opinion (and in the opinion of a talented Chilean astronomer, whose name I dearly wish I could remember), to capture the night sky on an iOS 26-compatible iPhone: activate Night Mode Max, and edit the bejesus out of the resulting photo.

Of course, dedicated telescopes will yield even better results, and we’ve detailed how to step up your stargazing game on the cheap in a separate article. But it’s amazing to see how far astrophotography has come on devices once considered incapable of capturing the night sky in any meaningful detail.

This week's science news was a little less earthy and a lot more spacey than usual, starting off with a couple of SpaceX news developments.

First, we had news of a trio of new privately-funded SpaceX missions in the works, including the first crewed flight of Starship. Meanwhile, we learned that it isn't a SpaceX booster that's set to hit the Moon, but that doesn't make it better in the least bit.

We also got word of the largest radio galaxy ever found, and its size is genuinely mind-boggling (and also provides some fodder for the debate over how we classify galaxies).

We also heard from NASA astronomers about some new ways they plan to use the new James Webb Space Telescope, including taking a better look at interstellar visitors as they pass through our solar system.

Finally, we ended the week celebrating the NASA Mars Perseverance rover's one-year "landiversary," and dug into some of the celebratory NASA livestreams to look back on its first year on the Mars ground.

So, if you've been looking for space news this week, you've come to the right place.

Perseverance Celebrates First Year on Mars

It's been a whole year since NASA's Mars Perseverance rover landed in the Jezero Crater at 3:55PM EST on February 18, 2021, and NASA is celebrating with a livestream to review its year of trials, tribulations, and accomplishments.

Perseverance is on Mars looking for signs of ancient life in a large crater that is believed to have once been an ancient lakebed back when Mars had liquid water on its surface a little over three billion years ago.

So far, it hasn't turned up any ancient Martian fossils, but it has only really just started its work in the Jezero Crater. The first few weeks and months after landing was spent performing diagnostics, calibrating its equipment, and ensuring all its systems were in good working order.

There was also the matter of deploying the Mars Ingenuity helicopter, as well. Still, Percy, as the rover is affectionately called by space geeks, has managed to carry out a good bit of analysis in its first year on Mars, and we're hoping for a lot more to come as it enters its second year of service.

Billionaire Can't Get Enough Of Space Apparently

Earlier in the week, we learned that billionaire Jared Issacman – who funded and lead last year's Inspiration4 mission, the first-ever orbital mission with an entirely civilian crew – is planning three more missions with SpaceX, including the first-ever crewed SpaceX Starship mission.

Dubbed "Project Polaris", the three missions will start with a record-breaking orbital flight that aims to orbit the Earth at a higher altitude than ever attempted before, and will also include the first-ever civilian spacewalk by at least two of the crew members. 

We don't know much about the second planned mission, but the third is expected to be the crewed Starship flight. Isaacman is providing the funding for the three missions contracted with SpaceX, and he will command at least the first of the three missions. 

The first flight is planned for later this year, with the final mission planned for sometime in 2023.

Rocket Set To Hit Moon Isn't SpaceX's Junk

In a couple of weeks, a large piece of space debris is going to hit the far side of the Moon, and for years, the debris was thought to be a spent second stage segment of a SpaceX Dragon rocket from 2015. 

We've now learned that the debris is actually a spent rocket segment from a Chinese National Space Agency Long March-3 rocket, part of the October 2014 Chang'e 5-T1 lunar mission.

While that might sound like SpaceX is off the hook for littering the Moon with space junk, its space junk is still up there somewhere, and the fact that we're losing track of which junk belongs to whom is a real problem.

The accumulation of space debris is posing a genuine threat to future space operations, so the sooner we stop dumping trash in low Earth orbit and cleaning up what we've already put up there, the better off we'll all be.

Monster Radio Galaxy the largest ever discovered

Galaxies are massive by their very nature, but some galaxies are bigger than others, and newly discovered radio galaxy Alcyoneus is so big it nearly breaks your brain just trying to think about it.

Radio galaxies are special types of elliptical galaxies with especially active galactic nucleii – that is, central supermassive black holes (SMB) that are gobbling up material. 

Not all of that material is devoured, however, and a small fraction of it gets shot out from the SMB's magnetic poles at a significant percentage of the speed of light.

These relativistic jets, as they're called, can travel for hundreds of thousands of light-years and form enormous radio-loud lobes of charged particles around the "host" galaxy. 

The lobes of Alcyoneus though stretch five megaparsecs from the end of one lobe to the end of the other, covering a distance on 16.3 million light-years, forming the largest structure on record that was produced by a single galaxy.

Webb Will Help Spot the Next ‘Oumuamua

As we get ready for the James Webb Space Telescope to release its first images in the next couple of months, NASA's already planning for new ways to use its new $10 billion space telescope.

One critical task is to hone in on interstellar "targets of opportunity" that pass through our solar system. 

After the 2017 discovery of 1I/‘Oumuamua, the first object we've spotted in our solar system of interstellar origin, we spotted an interstellar comet, 2I/Borisov in 2018, but both were so far from us that it was hard to gather data on either of them. Astronomers hope that Webb can change that going forward.

"The supreme sensitivity and power of Webb now present us with an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the chemical composition of these interstellar objects and find out so much more about their nature: where they come from, how they were made, and what they can tell us about the conditions present in their home systems," said Martin Cordiner, the principal investigator for the Webb Target of Opportunity program at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Only time will tell and it's hard to predict when the next target of opportunity will present itself, but there's every reason to hope that we'll be ready when the time comes.

• What’s on the James Webb Space Telescope’s ‘to do’ list?

In 2017, we spotted, for the first time, an interstellar object passing through our solar system. It was the cigar-shaped 'Oumuamua. To this day, we still don't know what it was or even precisely what it actually looked like, but NASA hopes that the new James Webb Space Telescope will give us a better look the next time around.

"So far, astronomers have confirmed only two of these interlopers from other star systems – 1I/'Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2018 – but many, many more are thought to exist," Ann Jenkins and Christine Pulliam, of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland, wrote in a NASA blog post this week. "Scientists have had only limited ability to study these objects once discovered, but all of that is about to change with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope."

The sensitivity of Webb's instruments as well as its prime location a million miles away from the Earth's atmosphere and its interference gives Webb one of the clearest views of the universe possible. This should greatly enhance our ability to home in on transient objects and get a lot more data about them before they pass out of view of astronomers.

"The supreme sensitivity and power of Webb now present us with an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the chemical composition of these interstellar objects and find out so much more about their nature: where they come from, how they were made, and what they can tell us about the conditions present in their home systems," said Martin Cordiner, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and The Catholic University of America, as well as the principal investigator for the Webb Target of Opportunity program.

"The ability to study one of these and find out its composition – to really see material from around another planetary system close up – is truly an amazing thing," Cordiner added.

When such a target of opportunity will appear can't be predicted, but there is a lot of material out there in the interstellar medium and space is a big place, so there's no telling how many interstellar visitors we actually get each year. 

With Webb though, we should at least be ready for the next time one rolls through our backyard.

Analysis: Webb isn't even ready yet and we're already finding new things for it to do

The James Webb Space Telescope is still undergoing its mirror alignment process, so we won't even get the first real images from it for another month or two at least, but already we're finding new ways we can use it once it's ready.

Webb's first year of operations, known as Cycle 1, are already parceled out to various projects, like examining the TRAPPIST-1 system to look for an Earth 2.0 and looking for the first stars and galaxies to have formed in the universe. 

But Webb can do so much more, and astronomers are eager to put its sensitive instruments to use in new and exciting ways, including some we never planned.

"With Webb, we can do really interesting science at much fainter magnitudes or brightnesses," said Cristina Thomas, assistant professor of astronomy at Northern Arizona University. "Also, we've never been able to observe interstellar objects in this region of the infrared [spectrum]. It opens a lot of opportunities for the different compositional signatures that we're interested in. That's going to be a huge boon for us!"

• Beyond Webb: why NASA's new $10 billion space telescope is just the beginning

A geomagnetic storm caused by solar activity took out 40 of SpaceX's Starlink satellites last week, highlighting the risk that solar storms present as we continue to clutter up low Earth orbit.

SpaceX revealed the mishap earlier this week in a blog post on its site, saying that while the solar storm event didn't directly wreck the satellites itself, it essentially slammed the brakes on their orbit, causing them to fall back into Earth's atmosphere.

"These storms cause the atmosphere to warm and atmospheric density at our low deployment altitudes to increase," SpaceX said. "In fact, onboard GPS suggests the escalation speed and severity of the storm caused atmospheric drag to increase up to 50 percent higher than during previous launches."

Fortunately, the loss of the satellites poses no danger to those of us on the ground or threatens other orbiting satellites, since the solar event occurred when the satellites being deployed were much lower than the standard orbiting altitude for most low Earth orbit (LEO) objects.

"The deorbiting satellites pose zero collision risk with other satellites and by design demise upon atmospheric reentry—meaning no orbital debris is created and no satellite parts hit the ground," the company said. "This unique situation demonstrates the great lengths the Starlink team has gone to ensure the system is on the leading edge of on-orbit debris mitigation." 

Analysis: it's a dangerous business, stepping out our front door

For nearly all of human history, humanity has been enveloped in a protective magnetic field that keeps the highly charged particles blowing off the Sun from effectively sand-blasting our planet's life-sustaining atmosphere further out into space.

For us on the ground, our long-standing interaction with solar winds come in the form of auroras in the northern and southern latitudes, but that has been about it. 

It wasn't until the invention of electrical and electronic equipment that we suddenly had to worry about the effects of solar storms, since sufficiently powerful coronal mass ejections from the Sun are powerful enough to overwhelm Earth's magnetic field and cause significant – even crippling – damage to a lot of our modern telecommunications and technological infrastructure.

This has been the kind of concern that was always bubbling in the background for engineers and scientists, but it never really became a pressing issue until recently. Once humanity began traveling into space, we found we had less and less of that magnetic shield protecting us.

And let's be clear, that magnetic field is enormous. You would have to travel tens of thousands of miles away from Earth to fully escape its protective bubble. 

Still, just a couple hundred miles above the surface, the effects of the solar winds are more powerful than they are on the Earth's surface, so even putting satellites into orbit comes with all kinds of unforeseen risks.

As we begin to commercialize and populate LEO with satellites, spacecraft, and commercial space stations in the next two decades, the solar weather report is going to be far more important than it's been previously. 

We're likely going to lose more equipment to space weather in the decades ahead, and we'll probably even end up seeing the loss of human life in orbit for the first time in our history. 

The Sun is currently ramping up towards the most active phase of its 11-year cycle, which is expected to peak sometime in 2025. That is right around the time when many private companies like Axiom Space and SpaceX plan to deploy a lot of LEO infrastructure. 

Going forward, it will be more important than ever to keep an eye on the Sun, or else we could end up with a far worse calamity than losing a few dozen Starlink satellites to the atmosphere.

• The internet could go down for months the next time our sun has a tantrum

There was a lot of science news from across many fields this week, from biology and wildlife management to NASA's plans for the International Space Station and even some extreme exoplanet news (who doesn't love a weird exoplanet?).

In Sweden, researchers found that some brown bears were more aggressive killers than others, and it could have important implications for protecting reindeer herds shepherded by Indigenous people in the future.

We also caught sight of an exoplanet with a layered atmosphere of iron, chromium, and other metals. Yes, you read that right, an iron and chromium atmosphere, made of metallic gases. How is that even possible?

For more terrestrial matters, a new study found that about 1,600 years ago, Earth might have had a near-miss encounter with a comet, and given the damage that just the cometary debris caused, we caught a lucky break.

Another study revealed strong evidence for a pair of ancient supermountains on Earth that might have been instrumental in the development of complex lifeforms about 2 billion years ago.

And not to be upstaged by primordial supermountains and dangerous comets, NASA revealed its plan for decommissioning and safely deorbiting the International Space Station, and it even gives us a target date for the final, spectacular descent of the ISS into the Pacific ocean.

So, fellow science nerds, let's dig into the major science news for this first week of February 2022.

Bears Wake From Hibernation and Slaughter Reindeer Calves with Abandon

Everyone knows that bears are ferocious predators, but a new study that tracked the hunting behavior of brown bears in Sweden reveal that some are more aggressive and deadly than others.

The most deadly of the 15 bears tracked in the study, an especially aggressive female, killed 38 reindeer calves in just a single month before going on to kill 18 moose calves the next month.

While moose herds are wild, reindeer herds in Sweden are partially domesticated and herding is a major cultural and economic activity among the indigenous Sámi people. 

The slaughter of so many calves can have long-term consequences for a herd's viability, so understanding how brown bears hunt vulnerable calves can improve wildlife management practices.  

Newly-Discovered Exoplanet Has Atmosphere Rich In Heavy Metal Gases

When it comes to extreme conditions, our solar system has some notable outliers, like Venus with its crushing 482 degree Celsius atmosphere or Saturn's moon Titan that is cold enough to condense methane into sloshing liquid lakes on its surface.

They've got nothing on the exoplanet WASP-189b, however. This gas giant is a hot Jupiter, meaning that despite its enormous size and mass, it orbits extremely close to its star. 

The dayside temperature is 3,200 degrees Celsius, which isn't just hot enough to melt iron, it actually turns it into a gas, along with chromium, magnesium, and titanium oxide.

These metallic gases are actually layered in WASP-189b's atmosphere in a similar manner to Earth's, where heavy water vapor resides in the lower troposphere while lighter gases extend higher into the stratosphere. 

Earth Might Have Narrowly Avoided Devastating Comet Impact 1,600 Years Ago

While our planet has seen its share of impact events from asteroids and comets in the distant past, we may have come close to seeing a similarly devastating impact as recently as 1,600 years ago.

New evidence from the Ohio River Valley in North America indicates that the Ohio Hopewell culture that mysteriously and suddenly declined about 1,500 years ago might have been the victim of an airburst from fragments and debris from a comet that made an especially close pass. 

Stretching across 11 Hopewell sites in three states, archeological evidence shows telltale signs of an airburst, including specific meteorites known to be the result of an airburst. 

Extensive historical comet records from China also detail an unusually large number of comet approaches right around the time the Hopewell decline began.

The airburst appears to have set 9,200 square miles of the region on fire, which would have been devastating to Hopewell agriculture, likely hastening their demise. 

International Space Station To Deorbit In Fiery Sendoff In Early 2031

NASA revealed its plan for decommissioning and safely deorbiting the International Space Station (ISS), which anticipates the aging space station will decelerate and burn up in the atmosphere in early 2031.

Entering its third decade of continuous occupancy and operation, the ISS is one of humanity's greatest scientific and engineering achievements, but the rigors of operating in low-Earth orbit have gradually taken their toll on the station's primary structure. 

It won't be safe to use the station beyond 2030, NASA says, so it is planning for how to safely bring it out of orbit. NASA will then turn over responsibility for operations in low-Earth orbit to the private sector while NASA pivots its focus to future lunar missions and an eventual manned mission to Mars.

Ancient 'Supermountains' Might Be Responsible for Complex Life on Earth

We also took a deep dive this week into a new study arguing that ancient supermountains might have been responsible for two of the biggest evolutionary developments in the history of life.

The mineral zircon, with a low level of lutetium, is only able to form under immense pressure, and so are typically only created in the heart of tall mountains produced by the collision of tectonic plates. 

Using this mineral as a marker, researchers at the Australian National University were able to track mountain formation through the geological record and found two supermountains as tall as the Himalayas but three to four times as long. These supermountains may have seeded the essential minerals and oxygen on Earth's surface that are necessary for life to evolve.

"This study gives us markers, so we can better understand the evolution of early, complex life," one researcher said. The processes involved look complicated on their face, but they are actually rather straightforward, and the new study gives us an important piece of evidence towards solving the mystery of the origins of life on Earth. 

• Beyond Webb: why NASA's new $10 billion space telescope is just the beginning

Earth may have had a near-miss encounter with a comet nearly 2,000 years ago that would have devastated the planet, if its debris is anything to go by.

Between 252 and 383 CE, 69 near-Earth comets were recorded by Chinese astronomers, and researchers at the University of Cincinnati found evidence that one of these comets came close enough to Earth that debris from the comet exploded in the atmosphere over the Ohio River Valley region of North America.

Such explosions, known as airbursts, are incredibly destructive and can generate orders of magnitude more energy than even our most powerful nuclear weapons. And when such an airburst occurs over a populated region, the results on the ground are nothing short of apocalyptic.

According to the new study, published in the Scientific Reports journal, artifacts and other evidence uncovered at 11 sites belonging to the indigenous Ohio Hopewell culture spread out across the region indicate that up to 9,200 square miles were set ablaze by the explosion. 

This is an area more than 10 times the size of the Tunguska event in 1908 when a similar airburst leveled 830 square miles of forest in Siberia, Russia.

Several Algonquin and Iroquoian tribes, which are descended from the older Ohio Hopewell culture, have consistent oral histories that harken back to a terrible calamity at some point in the past, said Kenneth Tankersley, the study's lead author and a professor of anthropology at the University of Cincinnati's College of Arts and Sciences.

"What's fascinating is that many different tribes have similar stories of the event," Tankersley said.

"The Miami tell of a horned serpent that flew across the sky and dropped rocks onto the land before plummeting into the river. When you see a comet going through the air, it would look like a large snake.

"The Shawnee refer to a 'sky panther' that had the power to tear down forest. The Ottawa talk of a day when the sun fell from the sky. And when a comet hits the thermosphere, it would have exploded like a nuclear bomb."

Tankersley and his co-authors believe that the airburst not only laid waste to the corn crop that the Hopewell people relied on, it also destroyed just about any other source of food in the region.

"It looks like this event was very injurious to agriculture. People didn't have good ways to store corn for a long period of time. Losing a crop or two would have caused widespread suffering," said David Lentz, a professor of biology at the University of Cincinnati and co-author of the study.

"When your corn crop fails, you can usually rely on a tree crop. But if they're all destroyed, it would have been incredibly disruptive," Lentz added.

The study suggests that the airburst might have been the inciting cause for the Hopewell culture's sudden and rapid decline around this period.

"It's hard to know exactly what happened. We only have a few points of light in the darkness," Lentz said. "But we have this area of high heat that would have been catastrophic for people in that area and beyond."

Analysis: Now just imagine if it actually hit us

There's no way to tell how big the comet might have been if and when it nearly hit the Earth 1,600 years ago, but if it was massive enough to leave behind large debris that could trigger the kind of airburst that the new study hypothesizes occurred, then it would have at least been big enough to cause major devastation.

The asteroid that hit off the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago and triggered the mass-extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs is estimated to have been about six to 10 miles wide, which is a fairly normal size for a comet.

However, that asteroid was also much denser, possibly three to four times thicker than your typical comet, so a six-mile-wide comet would not pack as much of a punch as that asteroid did.

It still would have triggered incredible devastation to the hemisphere it impacted and would likely have triggered a nuclear winter, which would have resulted in the mass extinction of countless species, possibly even humans.

• Starlink satellites mar a fifth of asteroid-spotting telescope's critical observations

When you think of air, you don't typically think of metal, but that's probably because you aren't on WASP-189b. To be clear, you'd also be very dead if you were. 

WASP-189b is an exoplanet orbiting a star about 322 light-years away from us and it's what astronomers call a "hot Jupiter." Unlike our own gas giants, which orbit the sun on the outer part of our solar system, hot Jupiters are gas giants that orbit closely to their host stars. WASP-189b, for example, is about 20 times closer to its star as we are to the sun.

This produces very hot atmospheric temperatures on the daytime side of the planet, upward of 3,200 degrees Celsius. This is hot enough to boil metals like iron, chromium, and magnesium, which brings these elements into their gaseous states and allows them to create a layered atmosphere around the planet.

Researchers at the University of Bern, University of Geneva, and Lund University in Sweden discovered the extraordinary chemical composition of WASP-189b's atmosphere using data from the Characterising Exoplanets Satellite (CHEOPS) space telescope and the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph at Chile's La Silla Observatory.

"We measured the light coming from the planet’s host star and passing through the planet’s atmosphere," Bibiana Prinoth, a doctoral student at Lund University and the lead author of a new study in Nature Astronomy detailing the discovery, said in a statement. 

"The gases in its atmosphere absorb some of the starlight, similar to ozone absorbing some of the sunlight in Earth’s atmosphere, and thereby leave their characteristic ‘fingerprint.’ With the help of HARPS, we were able to identify the corresponding substances.”

Among those identified were iron, chromium, vanadium, magnesium, and manganese. Also spotted was titanium oxide, which is particularly interesting to researchers.

"Titanium oxide absorbs short wave radiation, such as ultraviolet radiation," said study co-author Kevin Heng, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Bern. "Its detection could therefore indicate a layer in the atmosphere of WASP-189b that interacts with the stellar irradiation similarly to how the Ozone layer does on Earth."

Analysis: Extreme exoplanets challenge us to think differently about the universe 

After spending centuries looking at the planets of our own solar system, we've developed something of a baseline for what we consider to be extreme environments, like Venus' crushing carbon dioxide atmosphere and runaway greenhouse effect trapping in temperatures of nearly 482 degrees Celsius.

The more we look at exoplanets though, the more apparent it becomes that Venus and Jupiter are only a glimpse of how drastic conditions on other worlds might be.

The idea of a hot Jupiter hadn't been considered until we first started identifying exoplanets out in the galaxy and found that not only do they exist but are pretty common. 

Planets with metallic atmospheres shouldn't be any more of a surprise when you consider the abundance of iron in the universe. After all, it has a boiling point well below the temperature that most stars are capable of producing even at a significant distance, so it's perfectly logical that you're going to find planets with iron atmospheres.

It doesn't make it any less weird to contemplate, though, and part of the fun of learning about exoplanets is finding out just how weird the universe can be.

• Those aren't stars–they're black holes

*Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story stated that Conrad Wells described the Hubble aberration as a major embarrassment for NASA. That characterization is incorrect. Mr. Wells only stressed that NASA took the matter of quality control much more seriously when it came to the James Webb Space Telescope. The story has been updated to clarify Mr. Wells' remarks.*

When the Hubble Space Telescope launched in April 1990, it was an instrument decades in the making. Originally called the Large Space Telescope, Hubble was the most advanced telescope ever deployed at the time and promised to give us a view of the universe unlike anything we'd ever seen before.

Almost as soon as we started taking pictures with Hubble, though, it was painfully clear that something was wrong. A "spherical aberration" was blurring the images, distorting the details, and making faint structures in the universe difficult hard to detect.

It was discovered that a slight flaw in the machining process of Hubble's primary mirror produced an error of just one-fiftieth the size of a human hair, but it was enough to reduce the quality of the photos considerably. 

Corrective optics were installed on Hubble in a 1993 servicing mission that acted like a pair of corrective glasses to counter the effect of the aberration and Hubble went on to return truly awe-inspiring images for nearly three decades thereafter, but it was a hard lesson to learn that almost ended in disaster. 

But NASA was determined to learn it before launching the James Webb Space Telescope, one of the highest-stakes deployments NASA has ever undertaken.

What the heck happened with Hubble anyway?

Hubble's primary mirror was fabricated by a company called Perkin-Elmer Corporation, beginning in 1979. The 7.9-foot/2.4-meter surface was ground with incredible precision, but when dealing with the incredibly faint light of distant stars, nebulae, and galaxies, incredibly precise sometimes isn't enough.

During the grinding process, miscalibrated equipment introduced a defect in the curvature of the mirror of just two microns, which is enough to blur the images Hubble takes.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory director Lew Allen headed up the investigation into the defect and found that a reflective null corrector hadn't been measured properly and it directed a polishing machine to shape the wrong curvature into the otherwise perfectly smooth surface. 

In fact, the resulting defect exactly matched the flaw in the offending null corrector, and a second reflective null corrector had actually identified the mistake. However, technicians rejected the test results showing the error and assumed a test showing the mirror to be properly shaped was correct.

Allen blasted both the contractor for its lack of quality control safeguards as well as NASA for not catching the error before launching Hubble. Both these conclusions left a lasting impression on the agency, and when work began on the James Webb Space Telescope just over a decade later, the conclusions of the Allen report would not be forgotten.

Preventing another Hubble debacle

Conrad Wells, a Senior Optical Systems Engineer at L3Harris and a lead engineer on Webb's optical telescope element, told TechRadar on Monday that NASA made took the matter of quality control very seriously when it came to Hubble's successor.

"When the Hubble Space Telescope went up, it had a little bit of a problem," Wells said. "It turns out they didn't do that full, system-level test on the Hubble Space Telescope. They tested the primary mirror, they tested the secondary mirror, they tested all the systems in it, but they never took light from one side of it all the way to the other."

That kind of full-system testing matters, since it is what most closely replicates the actual operation of the telescope in practice. Fortunately, Hubble was able to be repaired and the defect corrected, and those repairs and what engineers learned from that process lives on in Webb in a couple of ways.

First: test, test, test. In order to carry out the kinds of tests that would instill confidence in the James Webb Space Telescope, L3Harris engineers used the second largest vacuum chamber in the world and brought it down to less than 25 degrees Kelvin using compressed liquid helium to reproduce the operating conditions Webb will be working under at L2.

They then went through every step in the process of aligning the 18 panels that make up the primary mirror of the telescope just as engineers are set to do in the next couple of weeks, down to simulating starlight with fiber optics and ensuring that light accurately reaches all four of Webb's main instruments.

They also made sure that those instruments are all confocal, so that they are all able to focus on the same object properly. All while operating the optics at temperatures approaching -400 degrees Fahrenheit in a vacuum.

"All of us have a high degree of confidence that the optical system is going to work well," Wells said. "This is the second time that we’ve done it, it’s not the first time. It’s going to work. NASA’s insistence, and our execution of that system level test, is going to make this mission a success."

Another important legacy of that initial Hubble aberration is in the alignment and focusing of Webb's primary mirror, which is directly derived from the technology and techniques used to correct the original Hubble defect.

"The technology that they used to test [the corrective optics] in space," Wells explained, "imaging starlight through it, and looking at that blurred image as you go to focus, that's actually how the James Webb Space Telescope is going to align itself on orbit."

That process is now underway and will take several weeks at least, but Wells isn't nervous about how Webb's first light images are going to turn out. After all, he tested the alignment of the mirrors himself.

"It's going to work."

• NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has reached its destination. Now what?

The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope has completed its insertion burn at the second Lagrange (L2) point a million miles, or 1.5 million kilometers, from Earth, successfully completing its 30-day deployment.

Webb will now sustain what is known as a halo orbit around L2 for at least the next 10 years, where it will use its infrared detectors to look deep into the universe's past to the earliest stars and galaxies to form after the Big Bang.

Stars and galaxies from the earliest days of the universe, the first ever to form after the Big Bang, have had their light stretched by the expansion of the universe to such a degree that the light they emitted more than 13 billion years ago has been pushed out of the visible spectrum by a process known as red-shifting. 

This turns visible light into infrared light that it is no longer detectable by normal telescopes. The deep-infrared sensors on Webb therefore aim to do what no other telescope ever made can do and capture that light for the first time.

The first images from Webb are expected in late April at the earliest (though late May is more likely), after Webb's sensors have had sufficient time to cool down to -369.4 degrees Fahrenheit/-223 degrees Celsius–which is the temperature cold enough to capture some of the faintest infrared light possible without having to worry about interference from the heat of the Sun or even Webb's own instruments–and its 18 primary mirror segments have been aligned to within 10s of nanometers.

For now though, NASA and all of the various engineers from around the world, both government and private contractors, are celebrating what is unquestionably one of the greatest engineering achievements of all time.

Analysis: this is an incredible human accomplishment

To say that this is a big deal for astronomers is a gross understatement.

Webb is the most advanced telescope ever deployed, and its sophistication means that it is also incredibly complex as far as space telescopes go. 

From its iconic honeycomb primary mirrors to its secondary mirror at the end of a set of extended mechanical arms to the five sheets of delicate Kapton that make up its tennis court-sized sunshield, there were literally hundreds of points of failure during Webb's deployment. 

Everything needed to go right in order for Webb's deployment to be successful, and at every step of the way, human ingenuity succeeded in accomplishing the extraordinary.

The final test will be when the first images from Webb come in after the telescope has had time to cool down to its operating temperature, which is just 50 degrees Celsius higher than the coldest temperature physically possible. 

If everything works as it was designed, we will see sights in the universe we have literally never seen before, looking back through time to more than 13 billion years ago when the very first stars formed after the birth of the universe itself. 

It wasn't until Hubble took its first images, though, that we learned that its mirror had been incorrectly machined and had to be replaced. Should something like that happen with Webb, there will be nothing we can do about it. 

It might not lead to a complete failure of the telescope (that possibility is genuinely remote at this point), but those first images will show whether we slightly missed the mark, or whether this intense, two-decade-long international scientific effort was executed flawlessly.

Conrad Wells, a Senior Optical Systems Engineer at L3Harris who was a lead engineer on Webb's main optical telescope element, isn't worried. Wells and the L3Harris engineers have done extensive testing so that there won't be any surprises the way there were with Hubble's deployment, including a full system test from end to end to make sure that the optical systems work exactly as they should.

"All of us have a high degree of confidence that the optical system is going to work well," Wells told TechRadar as Webb completed its historic deployment. "This is the second time that we’ve done it, it’s not the first time. NASA’s insistence, and our execution of that system level test, is going to make this mission a success.

"It's going to work."

The effort to deploy Webb was unprecedented and has been executed flawlessly, which is reason enough to celebrate. Now we wait. The next five months can't pass fast enough.

• Beyond Webb: why NASA's new $10 billion space telescope is just the beginning

On January 8, 2022, arguably humankind’s greatest engineering achievement came to fruition about a half a million miles behind our planet. After 20 years in development, $10 billion spent, and 14 nail-biting days of exquisite hi-tech origami in space, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was fully deployed.

After successfully launching from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana on Christmas Day while folded-up in the fairing of the Ariane 5 rocket, engineers remotely controlled 50 moving parts and 178 release pins. Everything had to happen correctly, in sequence, to put Webb in its final configuration. It worked.

This Monday, January 24, after a 30-day journey into space, Webb arrives at its final destination. A dream realized? Not yet. This is what happens next.

 What is Webb? 

Webb is the biggest and the most advanced space observatory ever constructed. About 100 times more powerful than Hubble, Webb is the size of a 70-foot tennis court. Its massive 21.6-foot primary mirror (to Hubble’s 8-foot primary mirror) is made from super-strong beryllium and comprises 18 hexagonal segments. 

Each segment is covered in gold, which is perfect for reflecting infrared light. And that’s the main difference between Webb and Hubble. Unlike Hubble, which looks at the universe in visible and ultraviolet light, Webb captures ancient, stretched infrared light. That, coupled with its larger mirror, means it can look further back in time than astronomers have ever been able to do before.

 Will Webb really look back in time? 

All telescopes are time machines. The light from every single star you see is old and has travelled very far to reach you. Even the Sun’s light is 8 minutes and 20 seconds old. The brightest star in the night sky, Sirius, is 8.6 light-years away. That means its light has travelled for 8.6 years at 186,000 miles per second to reach your eyes. 

Every photon Webb will detect is old light, but since it’s an infrared telescope it will detect the very oldest, most ancient light. Infrared light is electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths longer than visible light, so it is imperceptible to the human eye. 

The very oldest light in the universe – emitted soon after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, when the first stars and galaxies formed – has been stretched by the expansion of the Universe, so it is deeply red. So red in fact that it falls off the visible light spectrum entirely and into the infrared spectrum.

Webb will be able to study those very first stars and galaxies a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, something no other telescope has been able to do. That is why Webb was built.

 Where is Webb? 

The Webb telescope is currently here. Although it’s too small and dim to see with the naked eye, look out at night and Webb will be out there. It’s currently in the constellation of Monoceros, slightly east of Orion’s Belt. Webb is always going to be on the night-side of our planet so it can always get a clear view of deep space.

Webb has journeyed a million miles/1.5 million kilometers from Earth to what’s known as the second Lagrange point (L2). This is a very important position in space relative to Earth. 

Named after an Italian mathematician, L2 is a point of gravitational balance on the far side of Earth away from the Sun – about four times the distance of the Earth to the Moon – where the gravity of the Earth and Sun combine here to create a relatively stable location.

It’s a place where Webb can keep the Sun, Earth and Moon behind it at all times, aiming its solar panels backwards while its mighty mirror is simultaneously shielded from sunlight by its five tennis court-sized sunshield panels. L2 is also a handy place because it’s close enough to Earth for us to maintain easy communications.

Webb is unlike most space telescopes – Hubble included – that look out at space while orbiting Earth. So while Hubble was famously fixed by Space Shuttle astronauts in 1993 after launching a few years prior with an optical abnormality, Webb is too far away to fix if something goes wrong. 

However, it won’t be there alone; the European Space Agency’s Gaia 3D star-mapper is orbiting L2 right now, and the Roman Space Telescope will arrive in 2027. 

 What will Webb do now? 

With the mechanical unfolding of the observatory complete, the engineers got on with aligning the mirrors. Remotely moving each of the 18 primary mirror segments and the secondary mirror out of their launch configuration, they tinkered with the curvature of each mirror segment to set the overall shape of Webb’s primary mirror.

NASA says it could take until April 24 to align the 18 hexagonal gold-covered beryllium segments to create Webb’s primary mirror. 

“This telescope is not ready out of the box and the first images are going to be ugly – it’s going to be blurry,” said Jane Rigby, Webb Operations Project Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, at a press briefing in January. Engineers will effectively have 18 images that need to be stitched together into one telescopic image.

It’s going to be exacting work. “We start with the mirrors off by millimeters and we're driving them to be aligned to within less than a size of a Coronavirus – to 10s of nanometers,” said Rigby. “It’s a very deliberate process that is time consuming.”

Once that process is over – by mid-March or thereabouts – engineers will take about two months to point Webb at some bright stars to properly collimate and focus the telescope. They will then test and commission Webb’s four main science instruments as they cool down to a temperature of -370 degrees Fahrenheit/-223 degrees Celsius. 

NASA says not to expect the first showpiece photos from Webb until about five months after launch, once commissioning ends, which on current timescales is late May. 

“We want to make sure that the first images that the world sees do justice to this $10 billion telescope,” said Rigby. She wouldn’t be drawn on exactly what the "wow" images would be of, but expect to see Webb’s deep infrared overlays on classic Hubble images such as the Horsehead Nebula and the Pillars of Creation.

With Webb safely at its destination we can now look forward to a new era in astronomy.

•  What’s on the Webb telescope’s 'to do' list?

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is about to reach its new home. 

The most advanced space observatory ever constructed, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will reach Earth's second Lagrange point (L2) at 2:00PM EST on Monday, January 24, 2022. It’s a special place in space a million miles behind Earth from where it can keep the Sun, Earth and Moon behind it as it looks deep into the cosmos like never before.

Then what?

Webb is not due to start science operations until later this year, probably around May or June 2022 when the 18 gold-covered beryllium segments of its iconic 21.5-foot/6.5-meter mirror have been aligned and its optical system calibrated.

Specializing in detecting the oldest light in the Universe–the infrared part of the spectrum–we know Webb will photograph the first galaxies, explore the mysteries of the origins of the Universe and directly image exoplanets, but what’s actually on its official to-do list?

From a long-list of over 1,100 projects from 44 countries, here are some of the most intriguing projects already allotted time–8,760 hours in total–on Cycle 1, Webb’s first year of planned observations.

 Look for the ‘cosmic dawn’ 

The first and biggest project in Webb’s first year will be COSMOS-Webb, a program to map the earliest galaxies in the universe – the so-called ‘cosmic dawn. 

This is likely to produce data used by scientists for decades. Its NIRCam instrument will point at the same reference area of the night sky as previously imaged by Hubble, but this time should reveal half-a-million as-yet-unseen galaxies in the near-infrared as well as 32,000 galaxies in the mid-infrared. 

“Because we’re covering such a large area, we can look at large-scale structures at the dawn of galaxy formation,” said Caitlin Casey, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and co-leader of the COSMOS-Webb program. “We will also look for some of the rarest galaxies that existed early on, as well as map the large-scale dark matter distribution of galaxies out to very early times.” 

COSMOS-Webb is part of the Webb Treasury program, which are datasets that are considered to be so important that they will be made publicly available in perpetuity.

 See if the TRAPPIST-1 System contains an Earth 2.0 

Webb will soon make the first detailed near-infrared study of the atmosphere of a habitable-zone planet. 

About 41 light years from Earth, in the constellation of Aquarius, TRAPPIST-1 is a small red dwarf star with seven Earth-sized planets around it – the most we know of so far. Three exoplanets were found around TRAPPIST-1 in 2016 by the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile, then more by NASA’s now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope.

Now it’s Webb’s turn to tell us something we don’t know about these possibly Earth-like planets – in particular TRAPPIST-1c, which is thought to be rocky and Venus-like. 

In Webb’s first year it will produce data for Hot Take on a Cool World: Does Trappist-1c Have an Atmosphere? and Probing the Terrestrial Planet TRAPPIST-1c for the Presence of an Atmosphere. 

Another project, Atmospheric reconnaissance of the TRAPPIST-1 planets, will confirm if the planets have atmospheres.

 Unravel the mysteries of star formation 

How do stars and star clusters form? You might think astronomers should know that by now, but much of the universe is obscured by gas and dust. 

Cue Webb, which will be able to see through all that thanks to its infrared sensitivity. So in another of the Webb Treasury studies, an international research team will survey the stars, star clusters, and dust that lie within 19 nearby galaxies.

It’s called the PHANGS (Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS) Survey and it brings together over 100 international experts to study star formation from beginning to end. 

“Webb will reveal star formation at its very earliest stages, right when gas collapses to form stars and heats up the surrounding dust,” said Janice Lee, Gemini Observatory chief scientist at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona. 

It should create revolutionary data and spur major scientific advances, according to the scientists.

 Reveal the moons of Uranus 

 Save for a brief flyby in 1986 by NASA’s Voyager 2 probe, the seventh planet from the Sun is virtually unexplored, and its 27 moons even less so. 

That's where The Moons of Uranus: A NIRSpec Investigation of Their Origins, Organic Constituents, and Possible Ocean World Activity comes in, a project that will use 21 hours of Webb’s time to study Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon. 

These four largest moons will be examined for traces of ammonia, organic molecules, carbon dioxide ice, and water to see if they do, as theorized by some, host underground oceans.

It’s hoped that the dataset might be used to help plan future spacecraft missions to explore Uranus and its moons, such as this exciting new flagship mission currently being discussed by NASA.

 Weigh a supermassive black hole

Astronomers have found a supermassive hole weighing about 40 million times as much as our Sun in a nearby spiral galaxy called NGC 4151. 

In an effort to work out exactly how a supermassive hole (which are present in all galaxies) ‘feeds’ and affects the surrounding galaxy, a team led by the University of Memphis wants to use Webb to determine its mass. 

In AGN Feeding and Feedback in NGC 4151 Webb will be used to measure the motions of stars in the galaxy’s core, since the faster nearby stars will move the heavier the black hole must be because its gravitational influence is increased.

How Webb will make its discoveries

 To understand why Webb is unique and how it will make its discoveries, it helps to know exactly what scientific instruments are on board:

MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument): a camera and a spectrograph that sees light in the mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Primarily for better-than-Hubble wide-field astrophotography images.

NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera): to detect light from the earliest stars and galaxies. It has a coronagraph so it can block a star’s light, which helps in the search for planets orbiting nearby stars.

NIRISS (Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph): for ‘first light’ detection of the first stars, and for detecting exoplanets as they cross their star.

NIRSpec (Near InfraRed Spectrograph): a spectrometer to disperse light from an object into a spectrum. This instrument can observe 100 objects simultaneously.

It's a new year and we're back with the weekly science round-up with all the latest happenings in science and technology, from space to the life sciences, and there's been a lot to talk about.

Obviously, the James Webb Space Telescope deployments have been front and center as we prepare for next week's final insertion burn, but we got some news on the space commercialization front, though not all of it has been good.

In a weird historic first, we've seen the first flight delay due to inclement weather on another planet, and back here on Earth, we caught sight of a strange circumstance of Orcas actually being nice (we think?) to a humpback whale rather than killing it because they're jerks.

It's been a heck of a week, so let's dig in.

Webb Deploys All 18 Mirror Segments Successfully

The James Webb Space Telescope successfully deployed all 18 of its primary mirror segments, marking the last major deployment of the mission before it attempts an insertion at Earth's second Lagrange point (L2) early next week.

"Just in from the @NASAWebb team: All 18 primary mirror segments and the secondary mirror are now fully deployed!" tweeted NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on January 19. "Congratulations to the teams that have been working tirelessly since launch to get to this point. Soon, Webb will arrive at its new home, L2!"

With all 18 hexagonal segments of the mirror in place, there will be a number of months taken for alignment and focusing on the telescope. The alignment of the individual segments right now is within a few millimeters, but by the time the adjustments are complete, they will be aligned to within 10s of nanometers.

Assuming that next Monday's L2 insertion goes according to plan. Stay tuned!

Starlink Satellites Threaten Astronomical Observations

On the flip side of astronomy news, it turns out that Starlink satellites have been streaking across nearly 20% of the Zwicky Transient Facility's twilight observations, greatly complicating some of our most important astronomical work.

"In 2019, 0.5 percent of twilight images were affected, and now almost 20 percent are affected," said Przemek Mróz, an astronomer who led a recent study of twilight observations and the impact Starlink satellites is having on them.

"We don't expect Starlink satellites to affect non-twilight images," he added, "but if the satellite constellation of other companies goes into higher orbits, this could cause problems for non-twilight observations."

These observations are critically important for monitoring near-Earth objects like asteroids that might one day cross our orbit, as they have in the past with devastating impact. 

Did Orcas Free A Tangled Humpback Whale?

Drone footage published by Whale Watch Western Australia showed a remarkable incident off the Australian coast when an injured and weakened humpback whale that had become caught up in a tangle of rope received critical assistance from an unlikely source: a pod of orcas, also known as "killer whales".

After being discovered by a pair of orca males named Hookfin and Blade (by the researchers, not the orcas themselves...we think?), the rest of the pod followed and circled the helpless humpback.

"Matriarch Queen arrived and moved towards the Humpback Whale which caused a commotion of white water and then something incredible happened…a large chunk of the green rope that was entangling this Humpback Whale floated free behind him," the researchers wrote in a description that accompanied the YouTube video.

What makes this extraordinary is that orcas have something of a reputation for being rather merciless predators. As remarkably intelligent pack hunters, a pod of orcas regularly bring down prey larger than themselves, other whales included.

No one can say for certain whether the orcas were indeed assisting the whale or whether they just lost interest in killing it is an open question, but given the complex social systems that orcas develop amongst themselves, it's not out of the question that it was a genuine act of altruism on their part.

ISS to Get a Film Studio in 2024

The International Space Station (ISS) may also be getting an upgrade in 2024, but not one that you might think.

This week, Space Entertainment Enterprise announced that it was working with Axiom Space to build a new module for the ISS that could be used as a film studio, bringing the commercialization of space into pretty sharp focus.

A Russian film crew has already shot footage aboard the ISS for an upcoming film, and NASA confirmed in 2020 that Tom Cruise was working with the agency to shoot a new movie aboard the orbital station.

Given that the ISS's original mission was slated to end in 2024 before being extended by NASA to 2030. Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, has already said it will be leaving the ISS in 2024, so primary responsibility for the $4 billion annual operation of the ISS will fall even more heavily on NASA. 

NASA has already said it was working with companies like Axiom Space and SpaceX to accelerate commercial operations in low Earth orbit so the agency could pivot towards the Artemis Moon mission and eventual human landing on Mars. 

I honestly didn't think a film studio would be one of the first out the gate, though.

Mars Ingenuity Flight 19 Delayed Over Mars Weather

Weather delays have been grounding flights for more than a century now, but never has it happened on another planet.

NASA's Mars Ingenuity helicopter became the first aircraft to ever experience a weather-related flight delay on another planet when an unexpected dust storm earlier this month forced the delay of Ingenuity Flight 19 on January 5. 

The flight has been rescheduled for January 23.

The delay is more concerning than many might think, as it marks the early start of the Martian Autumn, a period of increased dust storm activity and higher winds, neither of which is great news for a solar-powered helicopter drone.

A major dust storm in 2018 went on to covered the entire planet and prevented the Mars Opportunity rover from recharging its batteries, eventually leading to the end of the rover's mission when NASA could not reestablish communications.

"We will remain diligent in our efforts to safely fly Ingenuity for the foreseeable future," Ingenuity's weather and environment specialists said this week. Hopefully all goes well in the year ahead for the intrepid helicopter.

• Here's what's on the James Webb Space Telescope's to-do list

SpaceX's Starlink satellite constellation has been concerning the world's astronomers for years. Now, a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at Caltech's Palomar Observatory shows just how bad the problem is – and how much worse it is likely to become.

Since 2019, SpaceX has been launching batches of satellites into low-Earth orbit (LEO) to build a constellation network that will provide internet access from any point on the globe. There are close to 1,800 satellites in orbit already, with plans for tens of thousands to eventually be deployed.

The problem is these satellites reflect light from both the Sun and the Earth over the horizon, which makes them visible in the night sky even to the unaided eye. While this can be a spectacular sight, or even a nuisance, for ground-based observers looking up at the stars, for ground-based astronomical observatories it's a serious issue.

When the human eye stares at the night sky and sees a Starlink satellite, it looks like a particularly bright star moving across the sky. It only does that because our brain is constantly updating the visual data it's getting from our eye to create that motion. 

That is not how telescope observatories work, though. For these observatories to capture images of distant objects, they have to collect a lot of light over an extended period and then create a single image out of all that light. This is how they can capture such vivid imagery of objects that our eyes can't detect on their own.

When a Starlink satellite passes through the view of these observatories, however, it doesn't look like it's moving. It appears as a bright line across the image, blocking out whatever is behind it. This is especially true of images taken during twilight hours at dawn and dusk, which are essential for identifying objects that might be between the Earth and the Sun, like near-Earth asteroids.

"In 2019, 0.5 percent of twilight images were affected, and now almost 20 percent are affected," Przemek Mróz, the study lead author and a former Caltech postdoctoral scholar, now at the University of Warsaw in Poland, said in a statement.

"We don't expect Starlink satellites to affect non-twilight images, but if the satellite constellation of other companies goes into higher orbits, this could cause problems for non-twilight observations," Mróz added.

Twilight observations are especially important for planetary defense

The reason twilight observations are so important is that most of the objects in the solar system orbit the Sun on a level plane. Some objects have far more eccentric orbits – comets, most notably – but all asteroids are leftover material from the Sun's original accretion disk during the formation of the solar system.

So, asteroid orbits aren't very eccentric and can sometimes intersect our own and hit the planet. Usually, this isn't catastrophic, as the meteors (any space object that enters our atmosphere is defined as a meteor) burn up in the atmosphere and simply create a light show in the form of shooting stars or more spectacular fireballs. 

It's the bigger meteors we need to worry about and it's vital we track as many asteroids as we can that might threaten life on Earth. That's where twilight observations come in. 

If the Earth is between an asteroid and the Sun, there's no problem tracking it. It'll be visible deep into the night and will even be reflecting the Sun's light making it easier to spot. But that is only half of the sky. The other half is completely overwhelmed by the light of the Sun, making it impossible to observe anything during the day. 

This makes it all-but-impossible to spot an object that orbits between the Earth and the Sun, as many asteroids do. It also means that we lose track of any object that might orbit further away from the Sun than we do if that object's relative position is only visible during the day.

So how do you spot these objects? Fortunately, you can point a telescope towards the Sun's position on the horizon just after sunset or just before sunrise and get a pretty clear view of these objects. 

This allows us to keep track of the position of near-Earth asteroids and project their orbits into the future, thereby identifying possible threats far enough in advance to do something about them.

However, they are also tiny points of light in the sky, so telescopes have to take very long exposure images over multiple days for them to show up and for us to be able to determine their velocity and trajectories. And now, about 20% of these images are compromised by SpaceX's Starlink satellites streaking across them.

Tom Prince, the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Caltech and co-author of the ZTF study, notes that the problem isn't too bad, yet.

"There is a small chance that we would miss an asteroid or another event hidden behind a satellite streak," Prince said, "but compared to the impact of weather, such as a cloudy sky, these are rather small effects for ZTF."

Unfortunately, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, under construction in Chile, is far more sensitive than ZTF and will be far more susceptible to satellite streaks during its observations. With tens of thousands of satellites planned this decade, it will be disastrous for the new observatory's work.

"There’ll be nowhere where you can take [the Vera Rubin] and point it without having one of them in the field of view,” Tony Tyson, a University of California, Davis astronomer and physicist working on observatory told Vox in December 2019.

What's the big deal about streaks?

So what if there's a white line across an image? Isn't the rest of the image still perfectly usable?

Yes, the rest of the image is usable, but anything that was behind that streak is going to get missed. It might show up in a subsequent image, but without knowing its position in the first image, you can't measure its speed or trajectory.

If one out of every five images might be compromised, can't we just take more images to compensate? Yes, and we'll have to do that, but one in five images is being compromised by Starlink satellites when there are only about 1,800 satellites in LEO. SpaceX already has approval to put 12,000 Starlink satellites in orbit and has plans to deploy an additional 18,000 satellites on top of that.

What's more, SpaceX isn't the only company looking to create satellite constellations. Companies like Amazon and OneWeb are planning their own constellations. 

What happens when there are 100,000 satellites in LEO, all streaking across the sky during twilight and marring these vital observations? That's how many are likely to be deployed within the decade between the various satellite companies. With that many satellites in LEO, every single observation taken at twilight is going to be affected. All of them. And it won't be a single streak either, it could be dozens.

Can technology help?

It's possible that machine learning algorithms can help compensate by removing these streaks, but that has the potential to effectively smudge the data and create objects that aren't there or erase objects that are.

It is also possible to coordinate observations with satellite operators so that observations aren't taken when satellites are passing overhead. That's easy enough, for now, but will it still be easy when there are a hundred thousand satellites in orbit?

Could Starlink satellites be made of a non-reflective material? Possibly, and SpaceX has already put a sun visor on the satellites and positioned their solar panels to reduce the amount of light reflected back at Earth. This has cut down their brightness considerably, but not enough to keep from streaking across observatories' images.

Even if SpaceX took every satellite out of orbit and scrapped its Starlink plans, there's nothing to stop a Russian or Chinese company from doing something similar. It's not like a constellation of Chinese internet satellites will be any better.

So what is the solution? That is the big question, and no one has come up with a satisfying answer yet. Astronomers have turned to the UN to ask for help in regulating these satellites to protect ground-based observation. That won't stop these companies from deploying their satellites, though. SpaceX alone puts a hundred or so satellites into orbit every month. There's money to be made, after all.

“The mechanisms in [international] law that might have allowed us to avoid this, those wheels turn so slowly that by the time we would get to any consensus on a policy solution, this is all going to be over,” said John Barentine, an astronomer and the director of public policy at the International Dark-Sky Association. “I just think that it’s a numbers game that astronomy probably cannot win.”

What it means to have the night sky taken from us

For all the purported benefits to humanity – and don't get me wrong, bringing true broadband internet speeds to developing countries and rural areas is an unquestionably good thing – no one should forget that SpaceX, Amazon, and others aren't doing this out of altruism.

They aren't bringing free internet service to the world. They will be charging for it and presumably making profits off its investment in their satellite constellations. Making money is the whole point of the enterprise, twilight observations of near-Earth objects or even just simple star-gazing be damned. 

"Satellite constellations...strike at the core of humanity’s scientific and cultural relation to the night sky, affecting millennia-old sky traditions and cultural practices across all nations around celestial cycles and the night sky," Aparna Venkatesan, James Lowenthal, Parvathy Prem, and Monica Vidaurri wrote in a study published in Nature Astronomy in November 2020.

They too advocate for an international consensus to protect the night sky for future generations: "This approach requires a radical shift in the policies of international regulatory bodies towards the view of space as an ancestral global commons that contains the heritage and future of humanity’s scientific and cultural practices."

With little regulation and no international rules governing satellite constellation deployment, it feels like screaming into a void, one that will soon be charging you money for the privilege of doing so. Whatever happens, we should never forget what is being taken from us and why.

• Those aren't stars—they're black holes

Before there were planets around the Sun, there were rings.

Much like the way material orbiting Saturn is flattened by centrifugal forces into a tight, neat disk, the same happened with the Sun in the earliest days of the solar system – and the way those rings were composed explains how Earth grew from those rings into a manageable size and not into a so-called "Super-Earth."

Super-Earths are rocky terrestrial worlds around other stars that are substantially larger than our own Earth, the largest rocky planet in our solar system, and which make up about 30% of the rocky exoplanets we've discovered so far.

We avoided that fate, it turns out, thanks to '"pressure bumps" in those early solar rings, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. 

An international team of researchers from Rice University, University of Bordeaux, Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, ran hundreds of supercomputer simulations to recreate the formation of the solar system. 

What they found was that three bands of high pressure in the early solar accretion disk can account for everything from the composition of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and the formation of the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, but also the nearly circular orbits of the four inner planets, their composition, and their various sizes.

"Our model shows pressure bumps can concentrate dust, and moving pressure bumps can act as planetesimal factories,” Rice University astrophysicist André Izidoro, who led the study, said in a statement. “We simulate planet formation starting with grains of dust and covering many different stages, from small millimeter-sized grains to planetesimals and then planets.

• This photo of a moon-forming disc around an exoplanet puts Saturn to shame

"We propose that pressure bumps produced disconnected reservoirs of disk material in the inner and outer solar system and regulated how much material was available to grow planets in the inner solar system."

Had the disk been uniform, or "smooth", in its composition, then the solar system would have a much different make up than we see today.

"In a smooth disk, all solid particles — dust grains or boulders — should be drawn inward very quickly and lost in the star,” Andrea Isella, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Rice and coauthor of the study, said. “One needs something to stop them in order to give them time to grow into planets.”

At these pressure bumps, gas is denser and gas particles move faster, which in turn helps slow down the drift of heavier solid material like dust and rock, allowing it to start to accumulate into planets.

The key, the researchers believe, is the quick formation of the second, middle ring in the solar disk. When they ran simulations with a late-forming second ring of material, this allowed much more solid material through into the inner solar system. This led to the formation of Super-Earths, but a fast-forming second ring led to a solar system much like our own.

“By the time the pressure bump formed in those cases, a lot of mass had already invaded the inner system and was available to make super-Earths,” Izidoro said. “So the time when this middle pressure bump formed might be a key aspect of the solar system.”

Analysis: finding out how we got here will help us find alien life out there, if it exists

Super-Earths aren't necessarily like Earth, just bigger, since the math and physics of the universe tends toward larger rocky bodies having substantially greater gravity as their radii grow larger.

If the Earth were ten times larger – assuming the same density as our own Earth, which it would be if its composition was proportionally the same as it is now – Earth's gravity would also be ten times greater.

So, if you weighed 100kg on Earth, you would weight 1,000kg on the Super-Earth, and our muscles and skeletons would need to be much, much stronger to support that additional weight. It would be like squeezing all of the mass of a fully grown bull into the human frame.

Needless to say, it would radically change the way life on Earth developed, if it were able to develop at all. The increase in gravity also has important implications for whether a protective magnetic field could develop. Without one, UV radiation would have killed most life on the planet and the solar winds would have stripped away a lot of our atmosphere (which is what we suspect happened to Mars).

Knowing the conditions that will allow life to form as we know it, then, will help us narrow down which exoplanets are more likely to have life on them. And given the limited amount of resources we have for the search, the more we can shorten the list of candidate planets, the better our odds of success.

• Earth sits in the center of a 'superbubble' ringed by baby stars – now we know why

Astronomers have known for decades that our solar system sits in the middle of a bubble in space about 1,000 light-years wide with incredibly young stars on its "surface," but now researchers think they've figured out how it got there.

In a new study published in Nature, astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) used computer modeling to travel back in time to reproduce the evolution of the Local Bubble, as it is called.

Apparently, it took a whole lot of supernovae. Starting about 14 million years ago, a relatively rapid sequence of stellar explosions – about 15 in total – pushed interstellar gas and dust outward, carving out a low-density cavity with a dense gas and dust rich "edge", providing ideal conditions for the formation of new stars.

“We’ve calculated that about 15 supernovae have gone off over millions of years to form the Local Bubble that we see today,” said Catherine Zucker, an astronomer and data visualization expert who worked on the project for CfA and is now a NASA Hubble Fellow at STScI. "This is really an origin story; for the first time we can explain how all nearby star formation began."

Stars typically don't just form on their own. They usually need a push of some kind to get clouds of gas and dust to clump together enough to begin fusing hydrogen and ignite into full-fledged stellar furnaces. 

The expansion of the Local Bubble is providing exactly that kind of disturbance in the molecular cloud to kickstart the star-formation process, and it is still expanding even as you read this.

"It's coasting along at about 4 miles per second," Zucker said. "It has lost most of its oomph though and has pretty much plateaued in terms of speed."

Analysis: wait, why didn't we get blown up by all those supernovae?

If you're wondering how our solar system survived with 15 or so supernovae blowing up all around it 14 million years ago, you're right to ask that question.

Fortunately for us, we weren't actually in the Local Bubble when all of this started popping off. We're only just passing through it at the moment, entering into the bubble about five million years ago. 

In about 5 million years, we'll pass out of it as well, but for now, we get to enjoy the sight of being surrounded by what is essentially a stellar nursery.

"When the first supernovae that created the Local Bubble went off, our Sun was far away from the action," said João Alves, a professor at the University of Vienna and co-author on the study. "But about five million years ago, the Sun's path through the galaxy took it right into the bubble, and now the Sun sits — just by luck — almost right in the bubble's center."

• Those aren't stars – they're black holes

After the successful deployment and "tensioning" earlier this week of the five-layered sun shield on the James Webb Space Telescope -- the long awaited successor to the Hubble and a huge leap forward for astronomy -- NASA announced on Wednesday that the telescope's secondary mirror has also been successfully extended.

Extending the boom arm to deploy the secondary mirror on the telescope was one of the major anxiety points for the mission; if something mechanically failed during this process, it would have been non-recoverable and the telescope couldn't work.

Fortunately, the unfolding went off without a hitch, and now we just need to wait for the extension of its now-iconic honeycombed primary mirror later this week, which will be the next critical milestone for the telescope's deployment. 

Analysis: this was arguably the most important deployment of the entire mission

What makes the secondary mirror so important? It's one of the few parts of the telescope that simply could not fail to deploy if the mission was to even barely succeed.

Were the sunshield's deployment to fail, Webb wouldn't be able to pick up the deep-infrared light that it was designed to detect, but it could still pick up near-infrared. This would \be an improvement over the Hubble Space Telescope, just not as much of an improvement as we're hoping for.

If the primary mirror fails to deploy successfully later this week, the telescope will lose sensitivity, but it will still be able to function and provide new deep-infrared imagery -- just not as well as we wanted it to.

Without the secondary mirror, however, no light would make it to the telescope's infrared sensors at all, so the mission would immediately fail. No light, no telescope.

So it was absolutely critical that the secondary mirror deployed properly, which it now has. 

"We are 600,000 miles from Earth and we have a telescope," announced Bill Ochs, Webb's program manager, to his team after the mirror successfully extended and securely latched into place.

If nothing else, the James Webb Space Telescope should now work in some capacity. After the primary mirror deploys, we'll know how close to working perfectly we'll get. Fingers crossed!

• Those aren't stars – they're black holes

Alien civilizations might be using lasers to communicate across vast distances, and now we might be able to finally hear what they have to say.

LaserSETI, as it is known, scans the night sky for pulses of visible light that can be used to communicate vast amounts of information, typically half a million times as many bits as radio transmissions. 

Operated by the SETI Institute, the new system will hopefully bring us closer than ever to making contact with alien civilizations – assuming they're out there, of course.

New optical detection equipment has just been installed on the roofs of existing building on Hawai'i's Mount Haleakalā, according to the University of Hawai'i. This will allow SETI researchers to monitor a larger area of sky than ever before, looking for nanosecond-long pulses of light that could be encoding messages from extraterrestrial life.

“The possibility that life exists elsewhere is exciting for the public, especially with the reports of biologically interesting molecules in the atmosphere of Venus, the selection of two Venus missions by NASA, the Mars Perseverance rover mission, and the upcoming Europa Clipper mission to explore Jupiter’s moon,” said University of Hawai'i Institute for Astronomy professor Karen Meech. 

“[University of Hawai'i] has had a long involvement in astrobiology to explore the possibility of life elsewhere—both through research related to formation of habitable worlds, discovery of exoplanets, and the development of new innovative mirror and telescope technology to detect planets. It is exciting to add a new direction to this investigation by searching for technological signatures.”

Analysis: how LaserSETI works

The optical sensors just installed in Hawai'i will work with two existing sensors in Sonoma, California, at the Robert Ferguson Observatory to monitor the skies over the Pacific Ocean.

The way each device works is by using two cameras rotated at 90 degrees relative to each other along a viewing axis. The cameras use a transmission grating to split light sources into spectra, then read the camera out at a rate of more than 1,000 times a second.

The two cameras in the optical sensor is able to scan approximately 75 degrees of the night sky, and while the light of stars will produce a characteristic spectra of light, so too will laser pulses, which would be easily identifiable.

By using camera systems in California and Hawai'i, researchers can cover the same patch of sky from different angles, which will be able to filter out light signals that might originate from satellites or passing aircraft, both of which use laser pulses for navigation and communication. This ensures that any laser pulse signals they detect will be attributable to a source outside our solar system.

“LaserSETI is attempting a big step forward in searching for technosignatures, that is, evidence of life originating beyond Earth,” said the principal investigator for LaserSETI, Eliot Gillum. “It’s the first project in either optical or radio astronomy designed to cover the entire sky.”

This system also helps keep costs low, so that covering the entire night sky in every hemisphere is expected to cost just $5 million, a relatively small sum as far as projects of this scope go. 

Currently, there are 10 additional systems being installed at sites in Puerto Rico, the Canary Islands, and Chile, which will be enough to cover the night sky for the entire western hemisphere.

• Could aliens be using Dyson Spheres around black holes to collect immense power?

If you're planning to watch the launch of NASA's James Web Space Telescope, you're not alone. The Christmas Eve event is unquestionably the most exciting event of the year for NASA — and it's also unquestionably the most fraught with anxiety. You can join us in all of our live coverage with our James Webb Space Telescope live blog right now!

It will take 29 days to fully deploy the James Webb Space Telescope, sometimes called JWST, a period that NASA has described as "29 days on the edge." Others, ourselves included, have called it "the month from hell," as the delicate operation to deploy the next generation space telescope unfolds. 

Any number of things could go wrong during the 29-day deployment, and given the nature of the operation, should something physically happen to the James Webb Space Telescope, there will be no way to fix it and salvage the $10 billion telescope. The stakes for the James Webb Space Telescope launch deployment couldn't be higher.

This week's launch is the kick off to the operation, and we'll be covering the event live as it happens. If you're wondering how to follow along, we've pulled it all together in one place so you can watch the launch along with us.

How to watch NASA's James Webb Space Telescope launch

The launch window opens at 7:20AM EST on Friday, December 25, and the rocket carrying the precious cargo will launch from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana. If the weather cooperates and there aren't any preflight issues, the James Webb Space Telescope should take off shortly after 7:20AM.

Launch windows are only time frames when a launch is safe to take place, so the actual launch itself can be any time during that window, though if conditions are good, launches typically happen as soon as the window opens. Why wait, after all?

NASA will stream the James Webb Space Telescope launch on NASA Live, and the space agency will also stream on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch. We've embedded the livestream feed below to make it super easy to follow along.

Coverage of the launch is scheduled to start at 3AM EST on December 25 with fueling updates, while the main launch coverage should kick off at 6AM EST.

What is the James Webb Space Telescope?

What is the James Webb Space Telescope?

The James Webb Space Telescope is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990. As fine a space telescope as it is, the Hubble is 30-year old tech at this point, and there are some important wavelengths of light that it is incapable of imaging, namely the middle and lower end of the infrared spectrum.

This is critically important for seeing the oldest galaxies and stars, as their incredible age has put them so far from us that the light from is pushed deep into the infrared spectrum. Infrared light is also able to penetrate dust clouds and nebula in ways that visible and ultraviolet light cannot.

The James Webb Space Telescope is specifically designed to see this wavelength of light, which means it will be capable of seeing deep into the universe's history to the earliest galaxy formation, as well as seeing new features of our galaxy that we didn't even know were there.

To get an understanding of the difference, this is the famous Pillars of Creation in the Eagle nebula, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The left side of the image is taken using visible light, while the right side of the image is using Hubble's near-infrared capabilities.

Yep, that is a lot of stars.

And that's just a tiny part of the infrared spectrum that we can see using Hubble. One of the first things the James Webb Space Telescope will image, we're certain, will be the Pillars of Creation if for no other reason than to show off its capabilities. How it's view of the Pillars of Creation will differ from what we already have will be telling.

The telescope, which originally had a $1 billion budget and was scheduled for a 2007 deployment has since grown to a $10 billion project nearly two decades in the making.

The telescope itself, when fully deployed, is the size of a tennis court and will be about 100 times as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope, thanks to its enormous, 21.5-foot tall primary mirror, which has 6.25 times as much light-collecting surface as Hubble's 7.9-foot tall mirror.

In addition, because the James Webb Space Telescope will be positioned much further away from Earth than the Hubble Space Telescope is, it will have a clearer view of the universe than Hubble would ever be capable of achieving from low Earth orbit.

Needless to say, it's a big friggin' deal.

• SpaceX: everything you need to know about the pioneering space company

Azure Space, Microsoft’s project for bringing the power of cloud computing to the space and satellite-related connectivity/compute industry, is getting a significant upgrade, the company have revealed.

In a new blog post, Microsoft detailed new partnerships and new features that it hopes will result in better satellite imagery, better connectivity, and more data/insights.

Azure Orbital is a fully managed cloud-based ground station-as-a-service that lets users communicate with their spacecraft or satellite constellations, downlink and uplink data, process the data in the cloud, chain services with Azure services in unique scenarios, and create new products.

AI-powered eye in the sky

The platform has now reached preview phase, meaning customers can now communicate and control satellites directly from their ground stations positioned around the world - with no backhaul costs into Azure.

Microsoft also announced SpaceEye, as well as an image-enhancing feature built on Project Turing. Powered by artificial intelligence, the SpaceEye tool allows satellites to peek through the clouds and see what goes on on the surface of the planet, providing image enhancement that increases the resolution of satellite imagery to make it comparable to aerial. 

“Sixty-seven percent of the world is covered in clouds—a major challenge for Earth observation from space is that much of the Earth is covered by opaque clouds,” Microsoft explains in the announcement. “Built on Azure by Microsoft Research, SpaceEye is an AI-based system that generates daily cloud-free optical and multispectral imagery for the planet.”

This technology is also enhancing Bing Maps worldwide, covering over 50% of all user requests, Microsoft added.

The company also announced partnerships with Airbus, iDirect, Esri, Blackshark.ai and Orbital Insight, bringing better satellite imagery, more flexible solutions, more data, and new insights. 

“The power of extracting and leveraging data collected from space can transform entire industries and create new paradigms,” Microsoft concludes. “Azure Space, through partnerships, space data, our collaboration tools, and Microsoft services and capabilities, unlock powerful possibilities for customers.”

• These are the best dedicated server hosting providers right now

White dwarfs are among the most studied and understood celestial objects in the universe, but they are still capable of surprising us when we least expect it.

Astronomers using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) were studying a white dwarf in a binary star system when they suddenly caught it turning itself "on and off" over the course of as few as 30 minutes.

The researchers, lead by Dr. Simone Scaringi at the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, at Durham University, UK, were studying how the white dwarf accreted material – a fancy way of saying gobbling up – from its stellar partner when they observed the brightness of the white dwarf suddenly plummet. The observations were published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"To see the brightness of TW Pictoris plummet in 30 minutes is in itself extraordinary as it has never been seen in other accreting white dwarfs and is totally unexpected from our understanding of how these systems are supposed to feed through the accretion disc," Scaringi said. "It appears to be switching on and off."

This kind of shift isn't unusual in other objects like neutron stars, but it is the first time it has been observed in a white dwarf, which makes it especially interesting to astronomers studying the physics of 'accretion'.

Accretion is the process by which vast amounts of material accumulates from a source into a rotating disc around a center of gravity that slowly absorbs the material. Most famously, Saturn's rings are a form of accretion disk, as is the disk surrounding the supermassive black hole in the heart of the galaxy M87, which was the first black hole ever directly imaged back in 2019.

• Supernova shoots a dying star made of metal out of Milky Way at 2 million mph
• Astronomers finally solve the mystery of a famous 900-year-old Chinese supernova
• Mysterious 'cosmic burpers' are shooting out bizarre radio waves from galaxy's core

Much like the accretion disk around M87's supermassive black hole, the accretion disk around a white dwarf star also causes it to shine brightly as the rapidly accelerating material on the inner edge of the disk generates radio waves that astronomers are able to detect. It is these radio waves that Scaringi has been studying in order to understand the physics behind this process as it plays out throughout the universe.

"In general the accretion process does not have any short-term 'gaps'," Dr. Scaringi told TechRadar in an email. "What generally happens in these types of systems is that the donor star in orbit around the white dwarf keeps feeding the accretion disk. As the accretion disk material slowly sinks closer towards the white dwarf it generally becomes brighter, and eventually makes it onto the white dwarf surface."

"It is known that in some systems the donor stars stops feeding the disk (for yet unclear reasons)," Dr. Scaringi told us. "When this happens the disk is still bright as it 'drains' material that was previously still there. It then takes the disk about one to two months to drain most of the material, something we saw happen in different accreting white dwarfs.

"Once the amount of material has nearly drained out entirely, this is when so-called 'magnetic-gating' acts: the spinning magnetospheric barrier of the white dwarf prevents left-over disk material from simply accreting smoothly, but instead regulates the amount that lands onto the white dwarf in 'fits and starts'. 

"As it takes months to drain a disk out, seeing TW Pictoris drop in brightness in 30 minutes was totally unexpected," Scaringi told us. "What we think may be happening in TW Pictoris is that instead of the disk being drained out so fast, we are seeing some sort of reconfiguration of the white dwarf magnetic field, which promptly pushes the inner-disk edge outwards, and thus makes it fainter."

These observations may turn out to be a critical step in our understanding of accretion behavior, since white dwarfs are far more common in the universe than neutron stars or black holes, which are also well know but little understood accretors. 

This phenomenon should thus be easier to study around white dwarfs, and since the physics behind accretion are essentially the same as it is with neutron stars and black holes, we should be able to extrapolate what happens around a white dwarf to these more exotic accretors.

"This really is a previously unrecognized phenomenon" Scaringi said, "and because we can draw comparisons with similar behavior in the much smaller neutron stars it could be an important step in helping us to better understand the process of how other accreting objects feed on the material that surrounds them and the important role of magnetic fields in this process."

Analysis: White dwarfs still have secrets to share 

White dwarfs are some of the most common objects in the night sky, even if they are among the tiniest. Usually found at the center of so-called planetary nebulae – a type of smaller nebula that doesn't result from a supernova but rather a gradual shedding of outer material from a dying star – these kinds of stellar corpses are easier to spot and thus study than more elusive neutron stars or black holes.

As such, we know a lot about white dwarfs, but clearly there is even more to learn about them. The processes at work in these remnant cores of dead stars are the product of forces beyond anything we've ever encountered in our own solar system – thankfully – so objects like TW Pictoris are especially interesting for us. 

Studying their environment and how they interact with the space around them can give us real insight into their inner workings, with implications for our own sun, which is one day destined to become a white dwarf some five to eight billion years from now.

How this magnetic gating mechanism works is still a matter of study, but clearly we aren't even close to fully understanding these remarkable objects.

• Titanic collision of two neutron stars solves a cluster of cosmic mysteries

Astronomers studying the central region of the Milky Way have discovered a new source of cosmic radio waves so bizarre that they are struggling to imagine what kind of object could be sending them out.

The radio waves vary in intensity, oscillate in only one direction, rotate over time, and randomly switch on and off with no discernable pattern, according to University of Sydney researchers, who published their data in a new study in the Astrophysical Journal.

"We've never seen anything like it," Ziteng Wang, a Ph.D. student at the University of Sydney and lead author of the paper, said in a statement.

"At first we thought it could be a pulsar—a very dense type of spinning dead star—or else a type of star that emits huge solar flares. But the signals from this new source don't match what we expect from these types of celestial objects," Wang added.

Since the radio waves do not match any known pattern or source, they could represent signals from a completely unknown class of object, but what that object might be is hard to imagine given the bizarre nature of the signals themselves.

“Looking towards the center of the Galaxy, we found ASKAP J173608.2-321635, named after its coordinates," said Wang's Ph.D. supervisor, University of Sydney professor Tara Murphy. "This object was unique in that it started out invisible, became bright, faded away and then reappeared. This behavior was extraordinary.”

The bizarre nature of this new find doesn't mean it is entirely unique, however. In recent years, astronomers have been finding that the universe is filled with radio waves that we are also just now being able to detect.

"The information we do have [about the object] has some parallels with another emerging class of mysterious objects known as Galactic Centre Radio Transients, including one dubbed the ‘cosmic burper’,” said Wang's co-supervisor David Kaplan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

"While our new object, ASKAP J173608.2-321635, does share some properties with GCRTs there are also differences," he added. "And we don’t really understand those sources, anyway, so this adds to the mystery."

• Astronomers finally solve the mystery of a famous 900-year-old Chinese supernova
• Elusive black hole just revealed itself when it got caught snacking on a star
• James Webb Space Telescope finally gets a launch date

Analysis: radio astronomy opens up new frontiers we didn't even know were there  

Radio astronomy is a quickly growing specialization thanks to new radio telescopes that can detect a broader range of radio signals, making stars and other objects in the universe that might be effectively invisible to us in the visible light discernable when viewed in the infrared or ultraviolet spectrums.

In recent years, all kinds of astronomical phenomena like supernovae and exotic objects like black holes have been imaged using radio astronomy, including the 2019 image of the supermassive black hole M87 at the center of the galaxy, the first ever image of its kind.

With new telescopes coming online in the coming years, like the James Webb Telescope we expect to replace the Hubble Telescope when it launches toward the end of 2021, even more of the universe will be accessible in ways we are only just beginning to realize.

“Within the next decade, the transcontinental Square Kilometre Array radio telescope will come online," Professor Murphy said. "It will be able to make sensitive maps of the sky every day. We expect the power of this telescope will help us solve mysteries such as this latest discovery, but it will also open vast new swathes of the cosmos to exploration in the radio spectrum.”

• Supernova shoots a dying star made of metal out of Milky Way at 2 million mph

A 900-year-old mystery has finally been solved as an international team of astronomers say they have identified the source of a famous supernova recorded by astronomers in 1181 CE. 

The supernova, which is known as the "Chinese Guest Star", was observed by Chinese and Japanese astronomers and was described as being as bright as Saturn and remaining visible in the night sky for as long as six months.

While these astronomers also recorded the approximate location of the supernova in the sky, no one has been able to identify any remnant of it to date, even as astronomers have been able to track down the sources of the other four bright supernova in the Milky Way that have been observed and documented by astronomers in the past millennium.

Now, a team of astronomers from Hong Kong, Spain, Hungary, France, and the UK say in a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that a nebula known as Pa 30 is the remnant of the star that violently erupted in a supernova in 1181.

According to the team's observations, the nebula is expanding at an "extreme velocity" exceeding 1,100 km a second, or nearly 2,500,000 mph. At this speed, it would only take you five minutes to get from the Earth to the Moon. 

Using this velocity, the astronomers were able to trace it back to its origin to a star known as Parker's Star, and determine it was created by a supernova around 1,000 years ago, which puts it in the right place in the sky and the right time to have been the Chinese Guest Star observed here on Earth.

"The historical reports place the guest star between two Chinese constellations, Chuanshe and Huagai," said University of Manchester Professor Albert Zijlstra, one of the paper's co-authors, in a statement. "Parker’s Star fits the position well. That means both the age and location fit with the events of 1181."

Parker's Star and Pa30 are believed to have been the result of a merger of two white dwarf stars, which in turn produces a relatively faint and rare form of supernova known as a Type Iax supernova.

"Only around 10% of supernovae are of this type and they are not well understood," Zijlstra said. "The fact that SN1181 was faint but faded very slowly fits this type. It is the only such event where we can study both the remnant nebula and the merged star, and also have a description of the explosion itself."

For Zijlstra and team, being able to stich up this cosmic cold case has been a satisfying effort for all involved.

"Combining all this information such as the age, location, event brightness and historically recorded 185-day duration, indicates that Parker’s star and Pa30 are the counterparts of SN 1181. This is the only Type Iax supernova where detailed studies of the remnant star and nebula are possible. It is nice to be able to solve both a historical and an astronomical mystery," he said.

Analysis: science never truly stops, even when the scientist is long dead

The great thing about something like the Chinese Guest Star is that it's a good reminder that science is a process more than it is anything else.

Astronomers nearly a millennium ago recorded their observations of a phenomenon that they could not explain and left that record for scientists 1,000 years later to pick up and study. 

Today, scientists are making all kinds of observations and deductions that they can't explain yet, especially in more cutting edge fields like quantum mechanics and theoretical physics, that scientists decades or even centuries from now will be able to finally explain.

Recording that data, then, is an important part of the scientific process and is worth supporting, even if we can't explain it or do anything with it in our lifetimes.

• Supernova shoots a dying star made of metal out of Milky Way at 2 million mph

Astronomers just discovered the fastest-known asteroid in the solar system, which tore through its latest long, elliptical lap around the sun in just 113 days, getting so close to the star on its nearest approach that its surface was hot enough to melt lead.

The space rock, designated 2021 PH27, has the shortest orbital period of any known object in the solar system other than Mercury – which has an orbital period of a mere 88 days – but 2021 PH27 does have a longer elliptical orbit that crosses both Mercury's and that of Venus.

On its closest approach, 2021 PH27 gets to within about 12.4 million miles, or 20 million km, from the sun, which is more than twice as close as Mercury gets on its closest approach, about 29 million miles, or 47 million km. When it does, the surface of 2021 PH27 rises to about 900 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 500 degrees Celsius.

Discovered on August 13 by the Carnegie Institution of Science's Scott S. Sheppard, using the Dark Energy Camera atop the Víctor M. Blanco 4m Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, an international team of astronomers across two continents and Hawaii worked together to observe the asteroid over the next few days to confirm the speed and orbit of 2021 PH27 – even though it meant delaying their own projects for which they had reserved valuable telescope time.

"Though telescope time for astronomers is very precious," Sheppard said in a statement, "the international nature and love of the unknown make astronomers very willing to override their own science and observations to follow up new, interesting discoveries like this."

The asteroid is entering what's called solar conjunction, which is a fancy way of saying that it appears to us on Earth like it is moving 'behind' it, and is expected to reemerge on the otherwise sometime next year. At that point, scientists hope to more precisely determine its orbit, after which the asteroid will get its official name.

Analysis: 'interior' asteroids like 2021 PH27 helps us understand threats to Earth from 'exterior' ones

Most asteroids in the solar system reside in the major asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and so they are of particular interest to us Earth folk, since that's where the danger to our planet is going to come from.

Asteroids in this part of the solar system can get dislodged from their trajectories for any number of reasons, but gravitational perturbations from Jupiter are the most common way that these space rocks get flicked in towards the inner planets. Those asteroids orbiting the sun inside of Earth's orbit, then, are most likely those that got sent into the inner solar system but missed hitting us or one of the other three terrestrial planets.

"The fraction of asteroids interior to Earth and Venus compared to exterior will give us insights into the strength and make-up of these objects," Sheppard explained.

"Understanding the population of asteroids interior to Earth’s orbit is important to complete the census of asteroids near Earth, including some of the most likely Earth impactors that may approach Earth during daylight and that cannot easily be discovered in most surveys that are observing at night, away from the Sun," he added.

• Supernova shoots a dying star made of metal out of Milky Way at 2 million mph

High-performance computing and machine learning are accelerating astronomical research at an unprecedented pace which is why the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will use Google Cloud to store 20TB of nightly sky observations.

The search giant's cloud computing unit has announced that the Rubin Observatory has finalized a three-year agreement to host its Interim Data Facility (IDF) on its platform. Through this collaboration, Rubin will process astronomical data collected by its observatory and make the data available to hundreds of users in the scientific community ahead of its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) project.

The LSST will use the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope and the gigapixel LSST Camera to create an astronomical catalog thousands of times larger than any previously compiled survey. The survey will capture around 1,000 images of the sky every night for 10 years.

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These high-resolution images will contain data for roughly 20bn galaxies and a similar number of stars to lay the foundation for a massive dataset made up of 500 petabytes of files that will eventually be shared with the scientific community at scale. The Rubin Observatory will use Google Cloud Storage and the Google Kubernetes Engine to accomplish this feat along with Google Workspace for productivity and collaboration.

Unlocking the secrets of the universe

In addition to its partnership with the Rubin Observatory, Google Cloud's VP of global public sector Mike Daniels also revealed in a blog post that a Caltech researcher was able to discover a new comet by using AI earlier this year.

Back in August of this year, research scientist in the Astronomy department at Caletch Dr. Dmitry Duev began a pilot program using Google Cloud's tools to identify the space objects observed by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California.

The ZTF scans the Northern skies every clear night to measure billions of astronomical objects and register millions of transient events. Using these images, Duev trained a machine learning model on Google Cloud to pinpoint comets with over 99 percent accuracy. On October 7, the model identified Comet C/2020 T2 which was the first ever such discovery attributed to AI.

Scientists or astronomers that want to start or ramp up their own projects can also turn to Google Cloud for help as the company offers research credits to academics for qualifying projects in eligible countries. You'll just need to fill out this application form or contact Google Cloud's sales team to get started.

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Update: Below, we have the SpaceX return video replay in case you missed this weekend's events. Check out the videos further down the page.

Two NASA astronauts have returned to Earth, concluding SpaceX's live coverage of their journey from the International Space Station (ISS) to the Gulf of Mexico. 

Good news: everything went according to plan: SpaceX Crew Dragon astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down off the coast of Florida at 2:44pm EDT on Sunday, August 2 and, eventually, a NASA team opened the hatch of their capsule after recovering the space vehicle. 

You can watch the historic SpaceX live video below, from undocking from the ISS to the NASA press conference after the astronauts and capsule were recovered. 

In total, the astronauts spent two months and three days in the SpaceX capsule and onboard ISS, returning today by landing in the waters off the coast of Florida (on the West coast of the state, not the East side where Hurricane Isaias is tracking).

Why this SpaceX return matters

It's a dramatic ending to America's first space mission from US soil in nearly a decade, when the NASA Space Shuttle was retired (on this month back in August 2011, actually). It also marks the conclusion of the first commercially-backed human space travel mission, which is a big deal for the future of affordable space travel.

Want one more fascinating SpaceX fact? It's the first splashdown return to Earth for US astronauts in about 45 years. Remember: the shuttle program was very different from launch to landing. The difference between today and 45 years ago is that the recovery crew is noticeably slimmed down – no US Navy fleet present – another sign of sustainability for affordable modern space travel.

Just as we covered the SpaceX launch, and then followed NASA's 'Bob and Doug', as they made their way from Earth's orbit to their landing site. Here's how to watch the final moments of the SpaceX mission below.

SpaceX return video: rewatch it right here

The SpaceX return was live streaming on various video platforms (the future is great, isn't it?), and since it's all over, you can rewatch the splashdown. SpaceX's YouTube videos captured the two astronauts from their prep on ISS in space to their landing in the Gulf of Mexico on Earth.

First up: Here's the SpaceX undocking video on Saturday, August 1.

Here's the SpaceX video replay of their splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico:

Here's the Dragon capsule being loaded up onto a ship for recovery:

Here's the hatch opening after the capsule was recovered:

SpaceX return schedule: here's when it happened

The SpaceX return time was scheduled for 2:42pm EDT. Of course, tuning in early was a wise idea simply because you didn't want to start the SpaceX live stream video right when they're splashing down into the water. That would be like watching the ending to a movie and skipping the big buildup.

Worldwide, this meant the SpaceX return time was 11:42am PDT (in California where SpaceX is located), 7:42pm BST, and the next morning 4:42am AEST.

What happens after this SpaceX return

The SpaceX landing live stream today ended the Demo-2 mission for the two NASA astronauts, but there will be an intense review of all data for certification, according to NASA. That's the benefit of reusable rockets: it makes space travel cheaper, but that you can better evaluate stress on everything involved in the launch. 

In late September, barring any delays, the LC-39A launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, will host the next set of NASA astronauts to go to space: Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker, and JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi. They will fly Dragon’s first six-month operational mission (Crew-1).

You can watch the SpaceX crew here in these two NASA videos:

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Astrophotography has become an increasingly popular lockdown hobby during the global pandemic, but NASA has given us a reminder that it's being doing it a bit longer than most – it has published an incredible decade-long timelapse of the sun on YouTube.

Called 'A Decade of the Sun', the hour-long video starts back on June 2, 2010, and was captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) that orbits around the earth.

As you'd expect, the stats behind the video, which is mesmerizing if somewhat lacking in plot arc, are pretty incredible. For example, the timelapse is constructed from 425 million high-resolution photos gathered in the ten years to June 2, 2020. 

This amounts to 20 million gigabytes of data, which is pretty huge even with the petabyte era on the horizon. We can only assume NASA has a few external hard drives lying around. 

NASA's naturally needed a bit more than the world's darkest ND filter to shoot the timelapse video, with three main instruments used to capture the images. The main one, called the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), captures images every 12 seconds at ten different wavelengths of light.

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Astrophotography on steroids

Despite this incredible technical achievement, you'll be pleased to know that so far 232 people on YouTube have deemed it worthy of a thumbs down.

While we admit this NASA video is lacking in character development, we found it to be a timely meditation on our perception of time (every second in the video is one earth day), not to mention a relaxing work companion thanks to the ambient music supplied by musician Lars Leonhard.

The video starts on June 2 2010, just a few days before Apple announced the iPhone 4, and some observers have used it to mark big life events – for example, YouTuber Balázs Stumpf remarks "my daughter was born at 2:39 and my son at 47:33. Amazing, thanks!".

Naturally, NASA wasn't able to avoid technical issues for the entire decade. A week-long blackout in 2016 was caused by a problem with the AIA instrument, while the moments when the sun is off-center have been caused by NASA's calibration process.

Otherwise, it's a remarkably consistent look at our sun and huge events like solar bursts over a decade-long period. If it's inspired you to start taking your own night sky shots, check out our 'how to take photos of stars, star-trails and the ISS' guide, which only requires a DSLR to get started.

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When astronauts return to Earth, they often speak about the profound and awe-inspiring experience they had when they looked back down onto our small, blue planet. “All I know is I was stunned in a way that was completely unexpected,” NASA astronaut Nicole Stott told Inverse. “I felt connected,” Mae Jemison recalled. “For me, it was a connection back down to Earth. It was a connection with the rest of the universe.”

Known as the Overview Effect, this mental shift in awareness can have a big impact on astronauts when they go into space for the first time. But although spaceflight may be wonderous, exciting and a dream come true for many astronauts, it isn’t without risk of adverse behavioral and psychological effects.

Whether an astronaut is heading up to the ISS (International Space Station) or on their way to Mars in a decade’s time, space travel puts crews in an extreme environment with plenty of unique stressors on-board. This can lead to homesickness, isolation, depression, boredom and conflict with other members of the crew. Space flight isn’t just about adventures in sleek rockets – astronauts are humans after all.

Although the mental health of astronauts was less of a concern in the early days of the space race, luckily NASA, ESA and space agencies all over the world have been switched onto the toll space flight can take on mental wellbeing since the 1990s.

And they need to be. Now NASA plans to send astronauts to Mars by 2030 (or not long after) there’s even more reason to consider the health and wellbeing of the astronauts – a mission to Mars will be longer and more stressful than any other.

But how can space agencies ensure the wellbeing of astronauts is prioritised on such high-pressure missions that go where no one has gone before?

Starting as you mean to go on

One way to ensure astronauts are calm under pressure and deal with conflict well is to select the most capable candidates.

Many of the people who make it as astronauts have come from roles that are extremely high stress – pilots, physicians, engineers. They’re often chosen because they can handle stressful circumstances and solve problems while under tremendous amounts of pressure.

“Knowledge of human psychology has advanced to the point that picking the right people for a Mars mission is no longer a challenge,” wrote Stephen Petranek in How We’ll Live on Mars. “We are very good at identifying the right people to become commercial pilots, Navy SEALs, and others who occupy critical positions where stress, judgment and intelligence meet.”

According to a report from the Human Research Program (HRP) at NASA, since 1959 the space agency has carried out intensive psychiatric screening in order to identify signs of mental illness, which could jeopardize a mission’s success.

Anyone identified as likely to have a behavioral or psychiatric problem during flight is eliminated from the selection process. This is called the ‘select-out’ process. Conversely, those best-suited to become astronauts are identified, this is called ‘select-in’.

Even those who make it as astronauts are routinely tested and assessed. The report details annual assessments, which are performed by a crew flight surgeon and a psychiatrist at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) Flight Medicine Clinic. They consist of “space flight experiences, workload, fatigue, sleep, peer relationships, family, challenges, goals, and future plans.”

In the future, this process could be further streamlined. NASA is currently funding research to find out whether certain biomarkers in a potential astronaut’s body could flag up an increased stress response or whether certain genes could signal disturbed sleep patterns. This means the astronaut selection process may one day involve a DNA test.

There’s no ‘I’ in TEAM

It’s not just about ensuring individuals are psychologically-sound and well looked after, but how the whole crew works and lives together – especially during long periods of time.

Gary Beven, a space psychiatrist at NASA, told io9: “One misconception is a concern or theory that the spaceflight environment may be inherently harmful or hazardous, from a psychological standpoint.”

He continued, “Any previously reported behavioral health problems have appeared to occur because of common Earth-bound issues. For instance, placing crews that have potential personality conflicts in a smaller space station environment, with few recreational outlets.”

This means it’s possible to simulate space missions here on Earth to figure out what causes conflict – and what can be done to prevent it.

NASA runs an analogue mission called HERA here on Earth. It involves four astronauts living in a confined space for 45-days to figure out how people are affected by isolation and confinement.

Although the missions at HERA have been taking place over four years, researchers from Northwestern University have recently begun to develop a predictive model, which aims to help NASA anticipate problems among crew members. The focus will be on addressing crew compatibility, the events that lead to communication breakdowns, how to work best in teams and designing workflow to keep astronauts engaged.

Similarly, the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS, runs longer mission simulations for a whole year in a 1,200-square-foot habitat on Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano.

The fake astronauts live like they’re on Mars. They’re isolated, there’s a delay in communications and they have showers that last seconds – they’re even required to put on spacesuits when they go outside of the airlock.

The HI-SEAS researchers have found that most crews end up fighting at some point during the experiment. However, there are also lots of opportunities to analyze why  conflict happens and create a better recipe for success in the future.

In How We’ll Live on Mars, Angelo Vermeulen, a space systems researcher on the team said: “It all boils down to crew selection. You need to match skills as well as psychological compatibility. You can quickly see if problems will develop by simply putting people together for a week and giving them something challenging to do.”

“If there are going to be problems, you’ll usually see them,” Vermeulen said. “There’s never a guarantee issues won’t arise over a long period of time. But you should start with a crew that explicitly likes to work together and is resilient.”

However, these simulated missions have been criticized. It’s hard to say whether the full psychological impact of space travel could ever be replicated here on Earth – all the participants know they’re still on the planet. There could be more reason to worry in space, but conversely, stress levels might level off once an astronaut becomes adapted to their new environment and realize they’re in it for the long-haul.

When space feels lonely

Research from NASA suggests that social support is most effective when it matches whatever the astronaut feels stressed about. If there’s a conflict on-board, a conversation with the rest of the crew will help. But if someone is missing their children or spouse, the most comforting thing is to be able to talk directly to them.

Luckily, on-board the ISS and other recent missions, the internet protocol (IP) telephone is used regularly to connect astronauts with their friends and family.

Many astronauts also find sharing videos, conducting experiments, and making a music video in outer space for social media can also combat feelings of isolation. A tweet may not be the same as an intimate chat with close friends and family, but it fulfils a need to feel connected to Earth and can also provide a greater sense of purpose – they are educating, inspiring and entertaining fans all over the globe.

As flights become longer, loneliness and homesickness will likely become more of an issue – especially as there’s a longer delay between communications from Earth, which could be 45 minutes or more than an hour.

One option may be to use virtual reality to help astronauts feel calm and more connected to life back home. NASA’s Human Research Program (HRP) suggests adding “virtual windows to actual windows to replace the lost view of Earth” or using VR technology to create environments, along with actual plants, to ground astronauts with familiar, natural scenes.

Keep calm and fly on

As well as addressing loneliness and providing better connections with life back home, it’s also important that astronauts know how to deal with stress and other conditions that might impair the way they perform and the way they interact with other members of the crew.

A current solution on the ISS is private psychological sessions with a psychiatrist, which take place every two weeks for at least 15 minutes. This helps the experts to track any changes to mood or stress levels and recommend steps that can be taken, such as changes to sleep patterns, different kinds of work or more downtime.

There’s also research being conducted into tracking the physical symptoms of stress before a problem arises. Researchers at the Florida Polytechnic University are working on what’s been called a ‘happy suit’, which could help astronauts feel better as they travel long distances in space. According to Space.com, the suit is a network of wireless sensors that can respond to an astronaut’s vitals in real-time making adjustments to temperature, light, oxygen levels and more.

Arman Sargolzaei, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the school, said in a statement: "It's vital for astronauts to be mentally healthy during missions and right now there's no active, real-time solution to help them when they feel stressed or anxious [...] This technology would provide them with immediate relief to their state of mind."

Other examples of wearable and AI technology could also be adopted in the future, such as biometric sensors that can detect a rise in cortisol or facial recognition technology that can tell when someone’s expression might suggest a stress response.

The realities of life on Mars

As spaceflight times increase from months to years, researchers expect instances of behavioral and psychiatric problems to increase. After all, a journey to Mars will require crews to live in confined and extreme environments for years – this is a big leap from the six-month duration of lower Earth orbit missions that most astronauts were selected for.

A mission to the red planet is also likely to be filled with conflicting emotions. The outbound journey will last months and could be lonely – especially as the communication delay to Earth grows. There might be a lot of excitement about landing on Martian soil, coupled with anxiety about how far from home the crew are. Then there’ll be anticipation about returning home and learning to adjust to normal life again – that’s a lot for even the most level-headed astronaut to deal with.

The best solution right now is continued research, more analog studies and an ongoing commitment to consistent care and rigorous processes. That way NASA, and other space agencies can make solid predictions about how crews will fare during longer missions and put all the necessary support structures in place to ensure they’re a success.

Welcome to TechRadar's Space Week – a celebration of space exploration, throughout our solar system and beyond. Visit our Space Week hub to stay up to date with all the latest news and features.

Main image: SNC's Dream Chaser is being called an SUV – 'space utility vehicle'. Credit: SNC

Want to get your astronaut wings? For now, multi-millionaires only have one option: get to Moscow and convince the Russian Space Agency Rososmos to take you up to the International Space Station (ISS) in a Soyuz TMA-M capsule blasted skyward on a Soyuz rocket.

However, there is an effort on the part of NASA and its commercial partners – SpaceX and Boeing – to get astronauts into orbit and to the ISS from US soil. There are also three companies – Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SNC – that have designs on getting private astronauts or 'space tourists' to the fabled Kármán Line that separates Earth and space.

That means five stunning new spacecraft are in the works, from tried-and-tested capsule designs to supersonic planes, and even a 'baby Space Shuttle'.

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New Shepard 

Manufacturer: Blue Origin

Passengers: 6

Purpose: Suborbital space tourism

Take-off: Vertical take-off on New Shepard rocket 

Landing: Parachute

Location: West Texas

It's becoming clear that Jeff Bezos' private spaceflight company Blue Origin will probably become the first company to offer trips to space, albeit only lasting 11 minutes. That's partly because it's using a tried and tested technique common to spaceflight missions since the beginning: launch a capsule on a rocket, and have the capsule parachute back to Earth. 

The New Shepard pressurized capsule is 530 cubic feet, and houses six reclining seats covered in soft leather, each next to a huge 42.7 x 28.6-inch window. There's a tablet on the wall beside each one.

It's a vertical take-off, with the capsule on top of a 60-foot-tall New Shepard booster rocket. After a 150-second ascent, the engines cut, and the capsule – by then traveling at Mach 3 – separates from the rocket and continues on to space. The six people then undo their harnesses, enjoying weightlessness for three minutes, then return to their seats for a brief Mach 5 descent before three parachutes are deployed.

The capsule returns gradually to Earth just a few miles from the launch pad, and a soft landing is ensured by a thrust system. Meanwhile the New Shepard booster makes a rocket-powered vertical landing back where it started, so Blue Origin's New Shepard system is completely reusable. 

If anything goes wrong during take-off or during the ascent, a rocket motor on the undercarriage of the capsule itself will burn for two seconds to fling it clear.

Crew Dragon

Manufacturer: SpaceX

Purpose: Orbital spaceflight

Passengers: 7

Take-off: Vertical take-off on Falcon 9 rocket 

Landing: Parachutes

Location: Florida

Although the Dragon capsule has been around for years, and has been taking payloads up to the ISS since 2012, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon incarnation is 'human-rated'.

Capable of carrying seven astronauts, Crew Dragon could (and probably will) be used for space tourism at some point, but it's designed to initially take up to four professional astronauts to the ISS as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program .

The seven carbon fiber seats are covered in Alcantara cloth, a high-grade microfiber, with a three-screened Crew Command Panel accessible from two of the seats. A touch-panel includes manual control options, but the Crew Dragon is also fully autonomous; it can be flown either by the astronauts themselves, or by SpaceX mission control in Hawthorn, California.

There are four windows, but they're porthole-shaped, and rather small – after all this is primarily about science, not selfies. However, there is air-con.

The Crew Dragon capsule launches on a reusable Falcon 9 rocket, and is due to be used for the first time during Demonstration Mission 1 (SpX-DM1), an uncrewed test flight that's currently scheduled to launch on September 16 from Launch Complex 39A at Florida's Kennedy Space Center (crew Dragon's rival in the Commercial Crew Program is Boeing's Starliner capsule, of which more shortly). That will be followed by Demonstration Mission 2 (SpX-DM2), the first crewed flight test, tentatively scheduled for January 17 2019. 

VSS Unity

Manufacturer: Scaled Composites for Virgin Galactic

Purpose: Suborbital space tourism

Passengers: 6

Take-off: Runway

Landing: Runway

Location: New Mexico

Tickets have been on sale for rides on a Virgin Galactic spaceplane for a decade, with the price recently jumping to US$250,000. Over 700 tickets have so far been sold, but it’s taking a long time to make Richard Branson’s dream a reality. The original SpaceShipTwo, VSS Enterprise, was lost in a fatal accident in October 2014, with the new version – named by Stephen Hawking, no less – called VSS Unity.

The total 2.5-hour Virgin Galactic experience goes something like this: six passengers sit in VSS Unity, a small supersonic plane, which launches from a runway at Spaceport America in New Mexico strapped to a carrier craft called VMS Eve. Unity then separates at 46,500ft and triggers the ignition of its rocket motor for 40 seconds or so, propelling it into space at Mach 2.5.

Then follows five minutes of weightlessness prior to re-entering Earth's atmosphere – hopefully gradually, thanks to a unique feathering system – and landing back on the runway. The cabin itself holds two pilots and six passengers, each with their own window, albeit a small porthole.

In July of this  year VSS Unity reached an altitude of 52 miles, just 16 miles short of the fabled Karman Line that separates Earth from space.

CST-100 Starliner

Manufacturer: Boeing

Purpose: Orbital spaceflight

Passengers: 7

Take-off: Vertical on United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket

Landing: Parachutes

Location: Florida

How about a 'space taxi' with Wi-Fi and iPads? Despite the provision of wireless internet and the possibility of in-flight entertainment, Boeing's Starliner will use its connectivity for the serious tasks of communication, and autonomous docking with the ISS.

A rival to the SpaceX Crew Dragon in NASA's Commercial Crew Program, it's highly possible that the CST-100 Starliner (CST stands for Crew Space Transportation) crew capsule could become the primary capsule used by NASA to get its astronauts into space. However, it's also probably got a future as a shuttle for space tourists, taking them either into orbit or for trips around the moon; Bigelow Aerospace is a partner, and is planning inflatable space habitats, first at the ISS and then free-floating in orbit.

Although it's designed to take seven astronauts, the Starliner can carry a mix of cargo and people; for NASA it's likely to take four astronauts plus cargo. Seven seats housed within a capsule interior that glows blue; the company's trademark color will be emitted from its Boeing LED Sky Lighting tech. 

Like Crew Dragon, Starliner has backup manual controls, and lands by parachute. Boeing says the Starliner is reusable up to 10 times, with a six-month gap in between flights.

Although Boeing plans to perform an unmanned test flight of Starliner towards the end of this year, it recently experienced a problem with the craft's launch abort engines, so there's a decent chance there will be no test until 2019. Either way, Starliner will eventually launch atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Kennedy Space Center. 

Dream Chaser

Manufacturer: Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC)

Purpose: Orbital spaceflight

Passengers: 7

Take-off: Vertical take-off on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket

Landing: Any runway that can take a Boeing 737

Location: Florida/anywhere

It looks like a Space Shuttle, it lands like a Space Shuttle… but at just nine meters long, SNC's Dream Chaser is six times smaller than its illustrious lookalike. Slated to service the ISS for NASA starting in late 2020, Dream Chaser spacecraft will provide cargo delivery and the return of science experiments under the Commercial Resupply Service 2 (CRS2) contract.

SNC lost out to SpaceX and Boeing for crewed missions, but under CRS2, Dream Chaser will provide a minimum of six cargo missions to and from the space station between 2020 and 2024. Although NASA doesn't initially want to use the Dream Chaser crewed – and will instead fly it remotely – it's capable of carrying up to seven astronauts.

Based on NASA’s HL-20 – the HL stands for horizontal landing – the basic design of the reusable Dream Chaser has existed since the 1980s. Taking off on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, Dream Chaser returns to Earth with a gentle runway landing, just as the Space Shuttle did – and for those CRS2 missions it'll land at the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

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A hundred and thirty million years ago, two neutron stars in a galaxy far, far away crashed into each other and merged into a black hole. The impact was so large that here on Earth, 40 million parsecs away, we felt spacetime rumble.

How do we know? Well, two months ago we watched it live. The stars were so far away that it took 130 million years for the tremors to reach us - which they did on 17 August 2017. 

The collision generated the strongest, longest gravitational wave signal seen in the two years since we set up detectors, and astronomers have been able to use the data gathered to solve a host of cosmic mysteries.

Hot and dense

But let's back up a minute. What are neutron stars? Well, you'll probably remember from school that our Sun has a limited lifespan. In about four or five billion years, it'll balloon into a red giant, consuming most of the solar system in the process. Don't worry, odds are that humans will be long extinct by that point. 

Afterwards it'll collapse down into a white dwarf and then slowly cool down to the background temperature of the Universe. After an unfathomably long time (so long that it hasn't actually happened anywhere in the Universe yet), it'll be so dim that it'll turn into a black dwarf.

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Stars that are much bigger than the Sun, however, go down a different path. They don't slowly balloon into red giants, instead exploding in an impressive supernova. What's left afterwards is incredibly dense and hot - so dense that a matchbox full of it would weigh about three billion tonnes. It's also spinning super fast - as much as several hundred rotations per second. This is a neutron star.

Particularly dense neutron stars collapse fairly quickly into black holes, but smaller ones whizz around the Universe for a while - some emitting beams of radiation like a lighthouse that we see from time to time from Earth (these are called "pulsars"). And it's two of these smaller neutron stars that collided 130 million years ago and that are getting scientists so excited right now.

Cosmic mysteries

The collision of the two neutron stars forced the density of their innards up to a level where they were no longer stable and they collapsed into a black hole. In the process, it generated a flash of light that was so bright we could see it on Earth. 

That light was particularly interesting, because it contained proof of something that astrophysicists have long only guessed at - that the elements of the periodic table that are heavier than iron are formed in such stellar collisions. These collisions are rare, which is why those elements (which include gold, platinum and uranium) are rare compared to lighter ones like hydrogen, carbon and oxygen. 

Another mystery that the data from the event solved was that neutron star mergers trigger short bursts of gamma rays. For years, astronomers have only been able to guess at where mysterious gamma ray bursts come from, but now the hypothesis that they come from neutron stars colliding seems to be confirmed.

More to come?

In total, astronomers have published more than 30 papers across five journals as a result of the event. But observatories around the world were forced to cease their work after a few weeks of study, because our Sun passed in front of the part of space where the event occurred - like a gigantic celestial photobomber. Radio telescopes are still tracking it, so more discoveries could still be made.

“All our hopes and dreams have basically come true,” Jocelyn Read, an astrophysicist at California State University, told Nature. 

“All this time we have been saying, look at this amazing thing we are going to be able to see. And it is still hard to believe when it actually happens.”

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Venus is not a place you'd want to hang out for any length of time. Its atmosphere is dominated by sulphuric acid rain which falls out of clouds but evaporates before it hits the ground due to the intense heat.

But it's the winds that get astronomers back on Earth excited. Venus' winds blow around the planet 60 times faster than it rotates. To try to figure out why, astronomers have studied the Venusian atmosphere for decades, but it's tricky because we can only see the half of the planet that the Sun is illuminating. 

And the computer models that we've built from those day-side observations don't deliver the crazy wind speeds we see in reality. It's clear we're missing something, and it's probably hiding on the planet's mysterious night side.

Glimpse at the night side

Now, thanks to the European Space Agency's Venus Express probe, we're finally getting a glimpse at that night side. A team of exometeorologists has used an instrument on the probe called the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer to scan the night side's cloud systems.

"We focused on the night side because it had been poorly explored," said Javier Peralta of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the lead author of a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"We can see the upper clouds on the planet's night side via their thermal emission, but it's been difficult to observe them properly because the contrast in our infrared images was too low to pick up enough detail."

Irregular and chaotic

The pictures they were able to obtain with Venus Express, however, reveal phenomena that have never been seen on the day side. The rotation there is more irregular and chaotic. "It was an exciting moment when we realised that some of the cloud features in the VIRTIS images didn't move along with the atmosphere," said Peralta.

The next step is to integrate those features into the models to see if they help explain our observations. "This study challenges our current understanding of climate modelling and, specifically, the super-rotation, which is a key phenomenon seen at Venus," said Håkan Svedhem, ESA Project Scientist for Venus Express.

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We are living in a great age of exploration. Over the last decade or so, we've discovered thousands of planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy. 

These "exoplanets" are too far away to actually see, even with our most impressive telescopes. Instead, we detect them when they pass between their parent star and Earth, dimming the star's light at regular intervals. These passes are called "transits".

Now, however, astronomers have turned this concept on its head in a new study, asking which of these alien worlds might be able to spot Earth and the rest of our solar system in the same way. 

Easier to see

The first counterintuitive thing that they found is that it might actually be easier to see the smaller planets of the solar system than its enormous gas giants. ”Larger planets would naturally block out more light as they pass in front of their star”, said lead author Robert Wells, a PhD student at Queen’s University Belfast. 

”However the more important factor is actually how close the planet is to its parent star – since the terrestrial planets are much closer to the Sun than the gas giants, they’ll be more likely to be seen in transit.”

The second is that only a maximum of three planets could be ever detected at once, and even then not from everywhere outside the solar system. ”We estimate that a randomly positioned observer would have roughly a 1 in 40 chance of observing at least one planet," said Katja Poppenhaeger, a co-author on the study. 

"The probability of detecting at least two planets would be about ten times lower, and to detect three would be a further ten times smaller than this.”

Narrowing down the list

By narrowing down the list in this way, the team ascertained that only 68 of the thousands of exoplanets we've identified would be able to see one or more of the planets in our solar system. Only nine of those would be ideally placed to observe transits of Earth.

And here's the kicker - none of those are thought to be inhabitable. But! The team estimates that there should be approximately ten currently undiscovered worlds which are both favorably located to detect Earth and capable of sustaining life.

Which means ten chances that an alien civilisation at the same technology level that we're at would know that our planet even exists. 

The team's next plan? Target those transit zones to search for exoplanets. And maybe identify the home of our first interstellar buddies along the way.

The full study was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 

• Touchscreen technology can limit the spread of bacteria

The last time a sandwich was in space was 1965. The two astronauts on Nasa's Gemini 3 mission snuck a corned beef sarnie into the pocket of a spacesuit and snaffled it in orbit. 

When they returned to Earth, they were severely reprimanded. The crumbs had gone everywhere in the microgravity, and Nasa warned that they could have got into the astronauts' eyes or started fires under the electrical panels. Since then the menu has been 100% tortillas.

Now, however, a German-based company called Bake In Space has created a "crumbless" bread that could change everything. The firm has developed a bread mixture and several oven designs which will be tested next year on the International Space Station.

“As space tourism takes off and people spend more time in space we need to allow bread to be made from scratch,” Sebastian Marcu, the company's founder, told New Scientist.

How it works

The first problem to solve is the design of the oven. Most traditional ovens rely on convection to spread heat, but that doesn't work so well in microgravity. They also require large amounts of energy that are tough to get on the International Space Station.

But engineers are also thinking about vacuum baking - where the pressure inside an oven is lowered. Low pressure means water boils at a lower temperature - so that baking can happen more easily.

Various different approaches will be tested on the European Space Agency's Horizon mission in April 2018, complete with video feeds from inside the oven. “Bread could have a completely different structure,” says Marcu.

Plus, it's hoped that bringing bread into orbit could yield more than just nutritional benefits - the smell of fresh bread could be an important morale boost. Just what you need when you're floating in a tin can, far above the Earth.

• Self-doubting robots could integrate more easily into society

If you've ever taken a trip to Iceland, northern Norway or Canada in the hope of catching a glimpse of the aurora borealis and left disappointed, then I've got some good news for you. It's possible to create artificial aurorae. Unfortunately, you'll need to detonate a nuclear bomb in the atmosphere to do it. 

That's the finding of a study of newly-declassified Cold War tests that took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Both the US and USSR conducted military exercises that involved exploding nuclear devices at heights from 16 to 250 miles above the surface, with codenames like "Argus" and "Hardtack".

“The tests were a human-generated and extreme example of some of the space weather effects frequently caused by the sun,” said Phil Erickson, assistant director at MIT’s Haystack Observatory, Westford, Massachusetts, and co-author of the study.

“If we understand what happened in the somewhat controlled and extreme event that was caused by one of these man-made events, we can more easily understand the natural variation in the near-space environment.”

Perturbations

The aurora borealis, and its southern-hemisphere equivalent - the aurora australis, occur when the Sun belches out high-energy particles that collide with the Earth's magnetic field. The impact of that collision makes changes to the magnetic field that create auroras, and can also damage power grids.

In the Cold War tests, the nuclear explosions released enough energy to cause similar perturbations in the Earth's magnetic field, resulting in aurorae being seen above places close to the equator that would never normally see it - like the Apia Observatory in Western Samoa.

Some even created artificial radiation belts around our planet - layers of charged particles held in place by magnetic fields. These belts remained in place for weeks, and in one case years, causing satellites that passed through them to fail.

"Such atmospheric nuclear testing has long since stopped, and the present space environment remains dominated by natural phenomena," wrote Nasa's Mara Johnson-Groh. 

"However, considering such historical events allows scientists and engineers to understand the effects of space weather on our infrastructure and technical systems." 

The full details of the study were published in the journal Space Science Reviews.

• First came self-lacing trainers – now it's auto-fitting surgical gowns

A few years ago, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was in the doldrums. Short of cash, astronomers were forced to beg for scarce time on tiny telescopes, relying on volunteers to donate their spare computing power for analysis.

Then, in 2015, Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner came along, donating a vast sum of money to the cause. The result was the Breakthrough Initiatives, a 10-year program to search more than a million stars for artificial radio and laser signals.

The first results in that search are already in. For 692 stars, the Breakthrough Initiative team looked for signals that appeared unnatural or unusual in some way, and last night published the details of the 11 events ranked highest for significance.

In a press release, the team wrote: "The pipeline produced millions of hits for the sample as a whole, of which the vast majority are almost certainly radio frequency interference from human technology." 

Probably not aliens

Don't get too excited though, because the team doesn't reckon that any of them are aliens yet. 

"Eleven events rose above the pipeline threshold for significance, but further detailed analysis indicates that it is unlikely that any of these signals originate from artificial extraterrestrial sources," they said. 

But the hunt continues. Every six months, they've promised to release a new tranche of data, complete with the software used for analysis, so that enthusiasts around the world can help develop increasingly sophisticated algorithms to comb through it. 

“With the submission of this paper, the first scientific results from Breakthrough Listen are now available for the world to review,” said Andrew Siemion, director of  the University of California, Berkeley’s SETI Research Center. 

“Although the search has not yet detected a convincing signal from extraterrestrial intelligence, these are early days. The work that has been completed so far provides a launch pad for deeper and more comprehensive analysis to come.” 

Most exciting exoplanet

Meanwhile, the European Southern Observatory has published details of a newly-discovered exoplanet which it claims is the best candidate yet in the search for life. 

The planet, which bears the catchy name LHS 1140b, is a little larger but much more massive than Earth and orbits in the habitable zone of the faint star LHS 1140. Most excitingly, though, the observatory believes that it has retained most of its atmosphere.

“This is the most exciting exoplanet I’ve seen in the past decade,” said Jason Dittmann of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of a paper describing the discovery. 

“We could hardly hope for a better target to perform one of the biggest quests in science — searching for evidence of life beyond Earth.”

Xavier Delfosse and Xavier Bonfils, who both contributed to the discovery, added: “The LHS 1140 system might prove to be an even more important target for the future characterisation of planets in the habitable zone than Proxima b or TRAPPIST-1. This has been a remarkable year for exoplanet discoveries!” 

• This electronic cheetah-bot can help us develop more efficient robots

About a decade ago, astronomers first began to detect strange millisecond-long bursts of radio waves. Fewer than two dozen have been observed, and they're believed to originate in distant galaxies, billions of light years from Earth.

"Fast radio bursts are exceedingly bright given their short duration and origin at great distances, and we haven't identified a possible natural source with any confidence," said theorist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Artificial origin

Loeb, and his colleague Manasvi Lingam from Harvard University, have suggested instead that there might not be a natural source at all. 

"An artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking," he says.

In a paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, Loeb and Lingam looked at whether it'd be possible to create a radio transmitter strong enough to be detected in other galaxies. They found that a solar-powered transmitter, with sunlight falling on an area of a planet twice the size of Earth, would be enough to generate the required energy.

Melt the whole thing

The next question was whether a structure of that size would be viable from an engineering perspective, or whether the enormous energies involved would melt the whole thing. With water-cooling techniques, they say, the heat could be withstood.

The biggest unknown, though, is what an alien civilisation would do with such an instrument. The most plausible answer, Loeb and Lingam say, is driving interstellar light sails. The power could push a payload of about a million tons.

Intergalactic Distances

"That's big enough to carry living passengers across interstellar or even intergalactic distances," said Lingam.

Loeb acknowledges that the work is speculative, saying: "Science isn't a matter of belief, it's a matter of evidence. Deciding what's likely ahead of time limits the possibilities. It's worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge."

The full paper is available online at the arXiv pre-print server.

• Good news for Matt Damon! Potatoes can grow on Mars

We are living in a great age of discovery. We first confirmed the existence of an exoplanet, one orbiting another star, in 1992. Today, we know of more than 3,500. And Nasa just added seven more to that list.

The exciting thing about these ones is that they're all Earth-sized, all orbiting the same star, and all could have liquid water on their surface. "This discovery could be a significant piece in the puzzle of finding habitable environments, places that are conducive to life," said Nasa's Thomas Zurbuchen.

Dim and cool

The planets were confirmed by the Spitzer Space Telescope, orbiting a star that lies only about 40 light years from Earth in the constellation of Aquarius. The star system has been named TRAPPIST-1 after the Chilean telescope that first glimpsed it. 

The star itself is relatively dim and cool – so much so that it's not possible to be seen with the naked eye – and it's barely larger than Jupiter. 

Due to the low temperature of the star, all seven of the planets orbit closer to it than Mercury does to our Sun. As a result, if you stood on the surface of one of them, you'd see the others appearing larger than the Moon in our sky. 

Weather patterns could also be completely unlike those on Earth – the planets may be tidally locked to their star, meaning both sides will be permanently locked in either day or night. This would create strong winds blowing from one side to the other, and extreme temperature differences.

Exciting Result

"This is the most exciting result I have seen in the 14 years of Spitzer operations," said Sean Carey, manager of Nasa's Spitzer Science Center. 

"Spitzer will follow up in the fall to further refine our understanding of these planets so that the James Webb Space Telescope can follow up. More observations of the system are sure to reveal more secrets."

Nikole Lewis, co-leader of the Hubble study and astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, added: "The TRAPPIST-1 system provides one of the best opportunities in the next decade to study the atmospheres around Earth-size planets."

• Astronomers are preparing to create the first image of an actual black hole

An international team of researchers is coming to the conclusion of a 20-year project to design a telescope capable of imaging a black hole. 

That's no easy task. Black holes are black because light can't escape from them. So what the team is doing instead is capturing the light that surrounds a black hole, marking the 'event horizon', just before it disappears forever.

Supermassive

Twelve teams have installed special equipment on radio telescopes scattered around the world. The equipment will allow them to capture data at a specific frequency – 230GHz – between 5 and 14 April 2017 and record it onto hard drives.

The telescopes will be pointed at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, where it's believed that a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A* is located. 

Sagittarius A* is thought to have a mass four million times greater than the Sun, and an event horizon about 12.4 million miles across. However, its distance from Earth (26,000 light years) means it would still appear smaller than a pin-prick in the night sky.

Black blob

Once data collection is complete, the hard drives will be sent to a team at the MIT Haystack Observatory, who'll stitch it together in a way that simulates a single radio telescope as large as the Earth. 

"The Event Horizon Telescope is the first to resolve spatial scales comparable to the size of the event horizon of a black hole," said University of California, Berkeley astronomer Jason Dexter.

The resulting image is expected appear as a ring around a black blob, though the Doppler effect will make it appear to us as a crescent. The processing will take some time, so expect the final image to appear some time in 2018.

• Robot insects are now faster than the real thing

Black holes are one of the great terrors of the Universe. They're parts of space so dense that not even light can escape their gravity. Once you pass their outer boundary – the 'event horizon' – you're never getting out. 

Astronomers who study black holes have sometimes observed them gobbling up stars that unwittingly pass their way. But they're messy eaters – a black hole's intense gravity sometimes flings bits of star outward as the rest is consumed. Plus, as the stellar material is ingested, it heats up to millions of degrees and generates X-ray flares.

Those flares are a handy indication for astronomers using orbital telescopes, but they're usually short-lived – typically fading to almost nothing within a year. Now, however, astronomers have published details of a flare that has lasted almost a decade – more than 10 times longer than any other.

Spectacular and prolonged

The diner in this case is a black hole named XJ1500+0154, which sits about 1.8 billion light years from Earth. To us, the whole thing just looks like a blob, but the artist's impression above shows what it might look like to a closer observer – with the ripped-apart star falling towards the black hole, emitting X-rays.

“We have witnessed a star’s spectacular and prolonged demise,” said Dacheng Lin, an astronomer at the Space Science Centre of the University of New Hampshire. “Dozens of these so-called tidal disruption events have been detected since the 1990s, but none that remained bright for nearly as long as this one.”

Completely ripped apart

The unusual length of the flare suggests that either this was the most massive star ever to be consumed in one of these events, or the first where a smaller star was completely ripped apart.

The researchers say that, based on their modelling, the black hole's food stash should begin to run out over the next decade, with the flare fading over the course of the next several years.

The full details of the event were published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

• Terahertz networks could make wireless as fast as fibreoptic cables

You know how the Universe began, right? The Big Bang, about 14 billion years ago, when everything we know exploded out of nothing. 

Well, that explosion is still going on. In 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble (who the telescope is named after), observed that distant galaxies in the sky are moving away from us, indicating that the universe is still expanding at a rate called the "Hubble constant".

Over the years we've made more and more accurate calculations of that rate of expansion as our technology has improved. Now, by using galaxies as enormous lenses, astronomers have made a new calculation, but there's one problem – it doesn't quite line up with other estimates.

Points of reference

The figures, arrived at by an international team of physicists named (brilliantly) H0LICOW, were obtained by looking at five different galaxies using space telescopes. They agree quite well with other measurements using stars and supernovae as points of reference.

But they don't agree with results obtained by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, which monitors the cosmic background radiation of the Universe. And that's exciting, because it suggests that we might have something wrong in the way we understand physics.

High precision

“The expansion rate of the Universe is now starting to be measured in different ways with such high precision that actual discrepancies may possibly point towards new physics beyond our current knowledge of the Universe,” said Sherry Suyu, who led the H0LICOW team. 

She added: "The Hubble constant is crucial for modern astronomy as it can help to confirm or refute whether our picture of the Universe – composed of dark energy, dark matter and normal matter – is actually correct, or if we are missing something fundamental."

• 'Knitted muscles' could let us build soft exoskeletons

Astronomers got a new toy in 2013. It's a satellite called Gaia, and since launching in December of that year, it's been circling the Sun, quietly taking photos of the rest of the galaxy with its billion-pixel camera - the largest ever in space.

It's so powerful, in fact, that it could resolve the width of a human hair at a distance of 1,000 kilometres. There isn't much hair in space, but there are a lot of stars - and those stars are what Gaia is interested in.

A Billion Stars

Now, scientists from the European Space Agency have used those photographs to build a three-dimensional map of our galaxy - the Milky Way. It covers an area about 100,000 light years across, and contains about a billion stars. That makes it 1,000 times more complete than any existing map of the galaxy.

Within the new map, both the position and the movement of every star is charted, allowing astronomers to figure out its distance from Earth. Data about the temperature, brightness and chemical composition of about two million of the brightest stars has also been logged.

But despite this unparalleled level of detail, the map only covers about one percent of the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way. Which is why Gaia isn't stopping any time soon - it has another two years or so left on its mission, which will be mostly spent filling out temperature and brightness data on the dimmer stars.

Thousands of New Worlds

The information that it gathers will be used to understand the origin and evolution of the Milky Way, reveal thousands of new worlds, spot asteroids that could threaten Earth, learn more about the distribution of dark matter and even test Einstein's general theory of relativity. It's thought that this first release of data alone will generate hundreds of new scientific papers.

"Over the centuries we have sought to catalogue the content of the skies," astronomer Francois Mignard, a member of the Gaia Science Team, told AFP. "But never have we achieved anything so complete or precise—it is a massive undertaking."

• Jeff Bezos' new rocket is massive - and it's called Glenn

• Duncan Geere is TechRadar's science writer. Every day he finds the most interesting science news and explains why you should care. You can read more of his stories here, and you can find him on Twitter under the handle @duncangeere.

Update: Sorry folks, it looks like we're going to have to wait a little longer before E.T phones home.

The Russian lab that first heard the mysterious signal is now stating that "subsequent processing and analysis" has "revealed its most probable terrestrial origin." Yep, we'd been listening in on one of our own. Despite earlier hopes, the alien spotters can now state "with confidence that no sought-for signal has been detected yet."

The original post continues below.

It has emerged that last year, at the RATAN-600 radio telescope in the far south of Russia, astronomers received a strange signal.

It came from the direction of HD164595 - a star about 95 light years away from Earth in the constellation of Hercules. The star is almost exactly the same size as our Sun and we know it has at least one planet, possibly more.

The signal itself was strong - strong enough that if it has been broadcast in all directions then it must have come from a Kardashev Type II civilisation.

That number refers to the Kardashev scale - a method for measuring a civilisation's level of technological advancement. A type-II civilisation is far more advanced than ours.

Alternatively, if the signal had been carefully aimed at Earth, then it isn't unrealistic it could have come from a type I civilisation - roughly equivalent to our own.

Provocative Enough

News of the signal came through the Centauri Dreams website, which covers peer-reviewed research related to deep space exploration.

"No one is claiming that this is the work of an extraterrestrial civilization, but it is certainly worth further study," wrote Paul Gilster, who runs the site. "But the signal is provocative enough that the RATAN-600 researchers are calling for permanent monitoring of this target."

Alternative explanations include light from a bright stellar object being squeezed by a quirk of gravity as it passes another object in space, or testing by the Russian military. The noise was heard in a part of the spectrum known to be used by the military.

The SETI foundation, meanwhile, has turned its own telescope to the same source - though hasn't yet been able to find it.

The search will, no doubt, continue.

• Scientists exit volcano dome after year-long Mars simulation

• Duncan Geere is TechRadar's science writer. Every day he finds the most interesting science news and explains why you should care. You can read more of his stories here, and you can find him on Twitter under the handle @duncangeere.

The first image from South Africa's newest radio telescope shows 1,300 galaxies in a small corner of the Universe where we previously only knew of 70.

But it's just the first step in a massive project that'll let us see things in space that we've never seen before.

Radio telescopes don't look like the image of a telescope that you probably have in your head, of a glass-rimmed cylinder poking out of a dome on top of a mountain.

Instead, they consist of a bunch of satellite dishes, usually positioned in the desert where clear, dry air is common.

This new installation, named MeerKAT, consists of 16 of those dishes close to the town of Carnarvon in South Africa, about 600km north of Cape Town. It'll be expanded to 64 dishes next year, resulting in the ability to see even finer detail in the night sky.

Better than we could have expected

Already, though, it's the best radio telescope in the southern hemisphere. According to Fernando Camilo, its chief scientist, it's producing images " far better than we could have expected".

But this is just the beginning. In the next decade or so, the finished MeerKAT will become part of the Square Kilometre Array - a huge multi-continental radio telescope, featuring 3,000 dishes covering a collective area of a square kilometre. It'll be headquartered in Britain.

When that comes online, everything will change - it will have a discovery potential 10,000 times greater than the most advanced instruments today, letting us see parts of the Universe that we've never even dreamed of.

A first for Africa

South African Minister of Science and Technology Naledi Pandor told AFP that "this the first time that an African group of countries will host global science infrastructure of this character."

He added: "It's a first for us as Africa and also it's a first for the world because the world hasn't done this in Africa," said the Minister. "We are building a global infrastructure for the world."

• How to control a bunch of drones with the power of thought alone

• Duncan Geere is TechRadar's science writer. Every day he finds the most interesting science news and explains why you should care. You can read more of his stories here, and you can find him on Twitter under the handle @duncangeere.

In December 1995, astronomers operating the Hubble Space Telescope pointed its powerful lens at nothing whatsoever. They found the darkest area of the sky that they could and imaged it for ten consecutive days to see whether anything was there.

The result was incredible. Rather than nothing, the researchers got an image back of more than 3,000 galaxies - some dating back nearly to the Big Bang.

They called their results the Hubble Deep Field, and it has since become a landmark image in the study of the early Universe.

Since then, there have been several attempts to do a similar thing in other parts of the cosmos. The latest, which has just been released, is called the Ultra-Deep Survey and maps a huge area of the night sky - about four times the size of the full Moon.

By comparison, the original Hubble Deep Field image covered an area the size of a tennis ball held at a distance of 100 metres.

It's the result of more than 11 years of observations from the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope on Hawaii. Over 1000 hours of exposures were knitted together into a single infrared image that shows more than 250,000 galaxies.

Because these galaxies are so far away, the amount of time it takes their light to reach us means that we're seeing them as they appeared in the very earliest days of the Universe.

The results will be used to study how galaxies change over time. "With the Ultra Deep Survey we can study distant galaxies in large numbers, and observe how they evolved at different stages in the history of the Universe," said Omar Almaini, who led the team that published the new image.

"We see most of the galaxies in our image as they were billions of years before the Earth was formed."

Dramatic Transformation

William Hartley, a researcher at University College London, added: "We are particularly keen to understand the dramatic transformation that many massive galaxies underwent around 10 billion years ago.

"At that time many galaxies appear to have abruptly stopped forming stars, and they also changed shape to form spheroidal-looking galaxies. We still don't fully understand why this happens. With our new images we expect to find large numbers of these galaxies, caught in the act of transformation, so we can study them in detail to solve this important puzzle."

If you want to comb through the final images yourself, you can grab them from the team's website - though be warned, they're more than 25,000 pixels on each side. Alternatively, you can zoom through them here.

• This camera is small enough to be injected into your brain

• Duncan Geere is TechRadar's science writer. Every day he finds the most interesting science news and explains why you should care. You can read more of his stories here, and you can find him on Twitter under the handle @duncangeere.

Astronomers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the United States are preparing a fleet of tiny robots to boldly see where no one has seen before.

Collectively known as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI for short), 5,000 of the ten-inch-long bots will be installed in the Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona in 2018.

Each cylindrical robot will wield a fiber-optic cable with a core just 107 millions of a metre wide, which it'll point precisely at specific objects in the night sky to capture their light. Those objects will mostly be distant galaxies, but also a few stars and quasars.

The hard bit is getting all the robots to move in unison. They'll be so tightly packed together that there's a risk that they'll bump into each other as they spin into new positions, several times each hour.

Working Together

To avoid this, a scaled-down system of ten robots will be installed this August and September on the telescope. The test, which will be called ProtoDESI, will let scientists tune the accuracy of the robots and the software that controls them.

"ProtoDESI will show us how the software and positioners are working together," said Parker Fagrelius, who is managing the project at Berkeley Lab. "All of the things we learn along the way from ProtoDESI will be built back into the plans for DESI's commissioning."

Once the full system of ten "petals" each containing 500 robots, is complete and installed, it should be possible to work out how fast different galaxies and quasars are moving away from the Earth.

With that data, we'll be able to trace back the history of the Universe in more detail than ever before. It'll also allow us to build a three-dimensional map of the cosmos and probe the secrets of dark energy, which is thought be accelerating the Universe's expansion.

Along the way, we'll improve our understanding of dark matter, the early days of the Universe, and the structure of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

• Twitter and Facebook help doctors understand migraine symptoms

• Duncan Geere is TechRadar's science writer. Every day he finds the most interesting science news and explains why you should care. You can read more of his stories here, and you can find him on Twitter under the handle @duncangeere.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and Z. Levay (STScI)

On May 9 2016, almost the entire planet will get to experience a rare treat - a transit of Mercury across the Sun.

That's the astronomical name for what happens when Mercury's orbit brings it between the Earth and our star, casting a tiny black shadow across the solar disc. It's been a decade since the last time it happened, making it a somewhat unusual event. But with a little preparation, and some care, it's very possible to watch the celestial ballet taking place.

The easiest way is to find a local astronomical viewing event. If there's an observatory or astronomy club near you, then check to see if they're holding a viewing party of some sort - that'll be the best, and safest, way to easily see it. Plus you'll get to enjoy expert commentary and analysis. If that's not possible, though, it's pretty easy to sort out your own viewing party with only some basic astronomical equipment.

Safety first

You won't be able to see it with the naked eye. In fact, don't even try - looking directly at the Sun is very dangerous and can result in severe damage to your eyesight. Even with sunglasses or eclipse glasses, you won't see anything - the Sun is too big and bright, and Mercury is too small.

Instead, you can project the image of the Sun onto a piece of paper and view it that way. Get hold of a telescope or pair of binoculars with a magnification of 50x to 100x, along with a tripod, some duct tape and a few large pieces of stiff white card.

First, cut a hole in one of the pieces of card about the same size as the front of the telescope or binoculars - you're going to use this as a light shield. If you're using binoculars, you only need one of the lenses. Tape the shield to the front so that the lens pokes through but the light around it is blocked, and seal any leaks as best you can using duct tape or something similar.

Then position the binoculars or telescope so they're pointing towards the Sun and position another piece of card at least a foot behind the eyepiece. Don't look through the eyepiece under any circumstances - it'll literally burn a hole in your eye. Don't believe us? Here's Mark Thompson demonstrating with a pig's eye:

Getting the positioning right will take a little time and effort, so be patient if you're having difficulty and keep trying - the entire transit takes seven and a half hours, so there's no rush.

You'll know you've got it right when a bright circle appears on the card, at which point you can focus the binoculars or telescope to get it properly in focus. Then all you need to do is look for a small black spot on the surface. That's Mercury - which should be visible from 12:12pm in the UK (7:12am EDT), ending at 7:41pm (near 2:41pm EDT).

If you're watching for a while then you'll need to adjust the tripod over time to account for the rotation of the Earth, and it's also probably a good idea to give the lenses a break every so often to cool down to prevent damage.

If it's cloudy? Well, you're out of luck. But Nasa and other national space agencies will no doubt be streaming the transit online where you can benefit from the same expert commentary that you'd get from your local astronomy club.

As well as enjoying the beauty of the event, astronomers will also be using the opportunity to watch light pass through Mercury's thin atmosphere and in the process learn about how the Sun interacts with different bodies in the solar system.

Oh, and if you're reading this after 9 May 2016, don't fret. The next opportunity to see Mercury crossing the Sun will be on 11 November 2019. Mark it in your calendar, because after that you'll need to wait until 13 November 2032.

Happy sky-watching!

• The space events you have to see in 2016

Earlier this year, astronomers presented evidence of a huge planet, ten times the mass of Earth, lurking on the distant edge of the solar system. They called it Planet Nine.

The evidence comes in the form of the weird gravitational behavior of a collection of space rocks that whizz in and out of the inner solar system. Their orbits have been aligned by something enormous out there - an object so far away that it's extremely difficult to observe directly.

But there's a problem - no one can work out how such a huge planet got there. Did it form in place, or was it originally a member of the club of inner planets but got booted out of the inner solar system during some cosmic turmoil?

Gravitational Influence

"The evidence points to Planet Nine existing, but we can't explain for certain how it was produced," says astronomer Gongjie Li, lead author on a paper which explores some theories, due to be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Li and her colleague Fred Adams performed millions of computer simulations to try and narrow down some of the theories. One - the most likely - is that the gravitational influence of another star passing close by the solar system pulled the planet's orbit outward. The solar system formed in a star cluster among several thousand others, so such encounters were more common in the early days of the solar system than they are today.

Unfortunately, a rogue star would have been much more likely to pull a planet out of the solar system entirely, and it would have had to have been sitting pretty far away from the Sun in the first place. As such, there's only a 10% probability at best that a hypothetical Planet Nine could have landed in its current orbit that way.

Li and Adams also examined the possibility that Planet Nine is an exoplanet that was stolen from another star system, or even a free-floating planet that was captured by the Sun as it drifted past. Both scenarios, they conclude, have a likelihood of less than 2%.

Shunted Out

Another suggestion, proposed by Scott Kenyon and Benjamin Bromley in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal, is that Planet Nine formed in the inner solar system but was gradually shunted outward by the other gas giants - mostly Jupiter and Saturn.

"Think of it like pushing a kid on a swing. If you give them a shove at the right time, over and over, they'll go higher and higher," explains Kenyon. "Then the challenge becomes not shoving the planet so much that you eject it from the solar system."

They also explored the possibility in another paper that Planet Nine simply formed in place. They found that the right configuration of debris in the early solar system could have created Planet Nine. "The nice thing about these scenarios is that they're observationally testable," Kenyon said. "A scattered gas giant will look like a cold Neptune, while a planet that formed in place will resemble a giant Pluto with no gas."

Right now, there's no clear answer - and more observations will be required to confirm whether the planet even exists, let alone how it got to where it is today.

"Until Planet Nine is caught on camera it does not count as being real," astronomer Constantin Batygin told The Atlantic shortly after the prediction of a new planet was announced back in January. "All we have now is an echo."

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Last July, Nasa's New Horizons probe cruised past the surface of Pluto at a speed of more than 30,000 mph. It was the first spacecraft to visit the icy planetoid, which - as everyone knows - is the furthest object in the solar system.

Except that it isn't. Beyond Pluto lies the Kuiper Belt - a dim, distant, disc of dust, rock and ice that was only discovered in 1992.

It's a bit like the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter, except 20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive, depending on which estimate you look at. When Pluto lost its planetary status in 2006, it was reclassified as merely a large example of the many objects in the Kuiper belt.

20 More Years

During its brief rendezvous with Pluto, New Horizons gathered a wealth of data - about half of which is still awaiting transmission over the craft's weak connection to Earth and subsequent analysis by Nasa's scientists. But don't think that New Horizons' mission is over - in actual fact, it's barely begun.

Nasa's Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, told the audience at the Aerospace Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Earth & Space conference that the craft is healthy and still has enough power for another 20 years of operation.

He added that the next target for New Horizons is a Kuiper belt object bearing the not-very-catchy name "KBO 2014 MU69". It's about a billion miles further out than Pluto, and is much more representative of an average Kuiper belt object. It's about 20-30 miles across, and takes 293 years to orbit the Sun.

Great Frontiers

New Horizons should arrive at 2014 MU69 on 1 January 2019, and will gather data as it both approaches and departs. After that, no decision has been made about where it'll go, but there are many possible candidates in the Kuiper belt.

The hope is that these visits may able to show us what the solar system looked like about 4.6 billion years ago.

Stern said that not exploring the Kuiper belt would be like leaving out the Pacific Ocean on a map of the Earth. Dan Britt, a member of New Horizons' science team, added: "It's really, in planetary science, one of the great frontiers."

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In 1859, an enormous solar flare struck the Earth's magnetic field. As well as causing magnificent auroras as far south as the Sahara desert, it wreaked havoc on the nascent electrical systems operating between Europe and North America.

In some cases, telegraph operators were given electric shocks from their equipment, and some found it would operate even when unplugged. That geomagnetic storm, known as the Carrington Event, is thought to have been one of the largest on record.

On July 23, 2012, a similar-sized flare tore out of the Sun's corona and whipped out into space. Luckily, it missed the Earth by about nine days. If it had hit, the damage would have been immense - it would have shut down communications satellites and GPS, grounded aircraft, and cut off power supplies.

Even when the storm passed and the systems came back online, data in magnetic storage (including all hard drives and SSDs) would have been irrecoverably damaged. The cost of such an event? In a 2013 estimate, focusing solely on the United States, Lloyds put the price of the resulting damage as high as $2.6 trillion. Today, it's undoubtedly higher still.

The spectre of a major solar flare hitting the Earth is why solar storm researchers are desperately pushing governments to make contingency plans.

"Once systems start to fail, (the outages) could cascade in ways we can't even conceive," said Daniel Baker, director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, at a recent space weather conference in Washington, DC.

Contingency Plans

The US government has already drawn up a strategy to deal with the risk of what it describes as a "low probability but high-impact event", involving research, forecasting and mitigation.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recently added space weather to its daily operations briefings. But many other countries - particularly in the developing world - have no such plans.

For the US, the next step is to assess the range of damage possibilities depending on the size of the storm. "The technological and biological impacts of severe space weather events are now firmly in the federal government's sights," said Andrew Gerrard, director of the New Jersey Institute of Technology's Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research.

"All things being equal, increased research funding from the represented federal agencies will further bolster the incorporation of 'space weather' into our daily lives. Such development will enable the solar-terrestrial community to, for the first time, see a solar storm, track its approach, and prepare accordingly."

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While Pluto has been bumped down to dwarf status, astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (CIT) have found evidence that there is in fact another planet in our solar system.

Unfortunately, they haven't actually found the planet itself, which is being referred to as Planet Nine, but the astronomers believe it could be almost 10 times the size of Earth and sits far beyond Pluto, past the Kuiper Belt, between 20 billion and 100 billion miles away.

If there, this would mean the new mystery planet would only orbit the Sun once every 10,000 to 20,000 years, which could be the reason astronomers haven't been able to find it yet.

Gravity in orbit

According to the two astronomers from CIT, professors Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin, whose findings have been published in the Astronomical Journal, the evidence of Planet Nine's existence can be found in six objects beyond the Kuiper Belt that have elliptical orbits.

All six objects orbit in the same area of the solar system, tilting at the same angle and loop, and the chances of that happening are only about one in 14,000.

The astronomers argue that it could be the gravitational pull of the giant Planet Nine basically herding these six into an orbit.

Still, the planet has yet to be found, and Dr. Brown, who began searching for the planet a year ago, believes it could take up to 5 years to actually locate it.

• The most mind-blowing space photos of 2015

Via The New York Times

It's revolutionised astrophysics and human understanding of the scale of the Universe, but the Hubble Space telescope's illustrious career since its launch in 1990 is almost at an end. Although NASA has no official de-commissioning date – Hubble is still returning 10TB of new data every year – it's never going to be able to peer into the edges of the Universe and photograph the dawn of time. First, it orbits Earth, so its view is blocked by the Sun for half the time. Second, what astronomers need is a space telescope that's built to detect the infra-red light that the first-born galaxies now emit.

That means a bigger, colder and more sensitive space telescope that orbits from much, much further away.

Despite nearly 13,000 science papers having been written using its data, Hubble's twenty-fifth anniversary is also doubling as its retirement party. With all upgrades in its past, its only visitor now will be a robot to push it towards Earth, where it will burn-up in the atmosphere.

During the three billion miles it's travelled around Earth, the images it's taken have totally changed science and astronomy. So much so, in fact, that its own success has led to its imminent replacement. Although it's well capable of taking photographs in visible ultraviolet light, Hubble was the first space telescope to detect infrared light, and it's been in this infrared spectrum where its biggest discoveries have been made.

The red end

The further a galaxy is away from us, the longer the wavelength of the light that reaches us, which is the red end of the spectrum. This is called red-shift, which Hubble can handle, but isn't built exclusively for. The last Hubble Ultra Deep Field image of 2014 – taken in ultraviolet – showed galaxies between five and 10 billion light years away, though Hubble has also spotted galaxy EGS-zs8-1 a stunning 13.1 billion light years from Earth. To get any closer to the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago/away, a new 'scope is needed that's built solely to detect infrared light.

Webb of intrigue

Cue the James Webb Space Telescope, which has cost US$8.7 billion to construct and will be 100 times more powerful than Hubble. The name may not sound as iconic (after all, Edwin Hubble was "the man who discovered the cosmos"), but Webb is named after James Webb, who ran NASA in the 1960s and is credited with making the Apollo Moon landings a reality.

Webb is no Johnny-come-lately. Just as Hubble was originally planned in the 1970s and launched seven years late, Webb's development began almost 20 years ago, when it was known as the Next Generation Space Telescope. It's a joint effort between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency.

How is Webb better than Hubble?

In terms of magnification, it's all in the mirror. At 2.7 times the diameter and with six times the area of Hubble's, mirror, Webb's mirror will gather a whole lot more light. Meanwhile, its infrared instruments will detect far longer wavelengths, so it will see those red-shifted galaxies more clearly.

Key to its infrared abilities is its distance from Earth at what's known as the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point. Out here, 1.5 million km from Earth, Webb will effectively orbit the Sun at the same speed as the Earth does, and reflect (and use, as solar power) the Sun's light and heat using a huge five-layered sunshield. That way, Webb can be cold enough in the shade to detect infrared light. Being at L2 also means it can observe the cosmos permanently.

But there's a potential problem. Unlike Hubble, which was famously fixed in 1993 after the "spherical aberration" problem, Webb is too far away to ever be fixed or upgraded. Webb must work perfectly first time.

What will Webb do?

Webb only has a ten-year mission, though the chances of it working beyond 2020 are pretty high. In that decade it has four missions; The End of the Dark Ages: First Light & Reionization, The Assembly of Galaxies, The Birth of Stars & Protoplanetary Systems, and Planetary Systems & the Origins of Life.

Although it's built to study the "dark ages" after the Big Bang – and the first stars and galaxies – Webb will also help in the discovery of exoplanets around distant stars, something that astronomers will hugely benefit from. "I am very excited about the capability to characterise exoplanets and planet forming environments, both through direct imaging and spectroscopic studies," says Dr. Nick Moskovitz, at astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.

"There is also interesting work to be done looking at the compositions of small bodies throughout the Solar System, from near-Earth asteroids out to the Kuiper Belt." The Webb will also be well suited to studying the physical properties of asteroid and comets.

When will Webb launch?

Webb is scheduled to launch on the back of an Ariane V rocket from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana in October 2018. However, it won't get to its orbital point for three months, during which time scientists back in Maryland, USA will begin to position its mirrors and focus its optics by taking test shots. Even when it reaches L2, it will take another three months to optimise the optics before science can truly begin.

Able to probe even farther beyond the spectrum of light than its predecessor can detect, Webb will uncover more about the nature of reality and see to the very edge of the Universe. If you thought Hubble was good, you've seen nothing yet.

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