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September 28, 2021

Aerial view of University of Washington campus in Seattle.Alex Alspaugh/University of Washington

Science is in the midst of a data deluge: Experiments are churning out more information than researchers can process. But a new endeavor, centered on artificial intelligence, will help scientists navigate this data-rich reality.

On Sept. 28, the National Science Foundation announceda $15 million, five-year grant to integrate AI tools into the scientific research and discovery process. The award will fund the Accelerated AI Algorithms for Data-Driven Discovery Institute or A3D3 Institute a partnership of nine universities, led by the University of Washington.

The A3D3 Institute aims to accelerate the discovery pipeline by providing scientists with new, paradigm-shifting AI tools for analyzing the types of large and complex datasets that are an increasingly common feature of research from medical laboratories to particle colliders.

Shih-Chieh HsuUniversity of Washington

I have been fortunate to work with an exceptional group of talented researchers, and am thrilled to continue to be a part of solving some of the most fundamental issues in science and engineering. The ultimate goal of A3D3 is to construct the institutional knowledge essential for real-time applications of AI in any scientific field, said Shih-Chieh Hsu, a UW associate professor of physics and director of the A3D3 Institute. A3D3 will empower scientists with new tools to deal with the coming data deluge through dedicated outreach efforts.

The A3D3 Institute part of the NSFs Harnessing the Data Revolution program is a collaboration among researchers at the University of Washington; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Duke University; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; the California Institute of Technology; Purdue University; the University of California, San Diego; and the University of WisconsinMadison.

In addition to Hsu, other UW faculty involved with the A3D3 Institute are Scott Hauck, professor of electrical and computer engineering; Amy Orsborn, assistant professor of bioengineering and of electrical and computer engineering; and Eli Shlizerman, associate professor of applied mathematics and of electrical and computer engineering.

A3D3 will combine innovations in AI algorithms and computing platforms with research applications in physics, astronomy and neuroscience.Philip Harris/Massachusetts Institute of Technology

From detectors searching for gravitational waves to electrical sensors monitoring the activity of the brain, research is handing scientists ever-larger datasets to analyze. Experiments are generating more data in part because researchers are developing better tools, from sharper medical imaging techniques to more precise sensors for particle physics experiments. A single experiment at CERNs Large Hadron Collider, for example, can generate 1 petabyte of data thats 1 million gigabytes per second from tens of millions of collisions. But as datasets increase in size and complexity, the algorithms needed to analyze data and put the most relevant bits or bytes before the eyes of scientists run the risk of outstripping current computing capacity.

A3D3 research will focus on developing AI-based algorithms that can perform real-time analyses of large datasets in three data-rich fields: multi-messenger astrophysics, high-energy particle physics and neuroscience.

Scott HauckUniversity of Washington

The advancement of computing power from machine learning techniques on high-performance computing platforms is providing exciting new avenues for scientific discovery, while the unique challenges in high-speed and high-throughput data collection for science applications drive new demands for researchers, said Hauck.

Multi-messenger astrophysics integrates observations of the cosmos from diverse sources including gravitational wave detectors, neutrino detectors and telescopes to identify and study sudden and often violent events in the cosmos like supernovae, stellar collisions and black hole mergers. A3D3 researchers will work to develop AI algorithms that can quickly identify these events and help astronomers to cross-correlate observations of the same event from different sources, building a more complete picture of the types of transient events in our sky.

High-energy physics experiments, such as those studied by Hsu at the Large Hadron Collider, have the potential to upend our understanding of the universe by discovering new types of particles like candidate dark matter particles as well as new fundamental forces. A3D3 efforts will focus on AI-fueled approaches to detect unexpected anomalies in collision data and reconstruct the particles underlying 40 million collisions per second that occur in high-energy experiments. These tools will streamline the downstream analysis processes, accelerating and simplifying the pipeline of discovery.

Amy OrsbornUniversity of Washington

In neuroscience, A3D3 efforts will center on understanding the complex neural networks within the human brain that govern motor functions and process sensory information.

We can now measure more of the brain for longer periods of time. We need new tools to analyze these massive datasets, said Orsborn, who is also a core staff scientist at the Washington National Primate Research Center. Analyzing data quickly will also enable new experiments and therapies where we can intervene based on ongoing brain activity.

Researchers need AI-based algorithms to analyze neural datasets in real time such as electrical recordings from implanted electrodes and for a wide range of basic science studies. A3D3 researchers will focus on developing these types of tools, which can help decipher the neural underpinnings of behaviors like basic motor functions and responses to stimuli.

Eli ShlizermanUniversity of Washington

Critically, A3D3 researchers will focus on developing scalable analysis tools, which can adapt not just to the datasets of today, but also to the massive and intricate datasets expected in the coming decades, said Shlizerman.

With the rapid growth in the amount of data generated by scientific research, the A3D3 Institute also has its eyes on the future. The institute will pursue training and research opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students, including students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in STEM communities. These endeavors will ensure that A3D3s impact spreads and endures beyond its immediate goals, said Hsu.

For more information, contact Hsu at schsu@uw.edu.

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New NSF-funded institute to harness AI for accelerated discoveries in physics, astronomy and neuroscience - UW News

Press Trust of IndiaSep 29, 2021 11:59:28 IST

The Indian Space Research Organisation is exploring the possibility of developing a next-generation astronomy satellite, an official indicated on Tuesday.

ISRO's first mission dedicated for astronomy, AstroSat, launched on 28 September 2015 with its design life of five years, on Tuesday completed six years of its operation.

"It (AstroSat) is expected to last some more years", A S Kiran Kumar who as the then Chairman of ISRO led the mission team, and is presently serving as the chair of the apex science committee at the space agency, told PTI. "We can expect some more results to come which will be path-breaking", he said.

Asked about the possibility of ISRO launching AstroSat-2, he said: "Not AstroSat-2. Next generationthinking is going ondepending on how planning happensfollow-on to this (AstroSat) in a different manner are being looked at".

According to ISRO officials, data from AstroSat is widely utilised for the study of various fields of astronomy, from galactic to extra-galactic and from users from all over the world. The multi-wavelength space observatory, which has five unique X-ray and ultraviolet telescopes working in tandem, had detected extreme-UV light from a galaxy, called AUDFs01, 9.3 billion light-years away from Earth.

The discovery was made by an international team of astronomers led by Dr Kanak Saha, at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune and reported in 'Nature Astronomy'.

This team included scientists from India, Switzerland, France, the USA, Japan and the Netherlands. AstroSat has also observed for the very first time rapid variability of high energy (particularly >20keV) X-ray emission from a black hole system, officials noted.

"AstroSat has been a very successful mission and it has produced results which are globally acclaimed", Kiran Kumar said. "Large number of papers have also got published".

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ISRO is thinking of developing next-gen astronomy satellite to follow up on its AstroSat mission - Firstpost

The search for planets beyond our Solar System has grown immensely during the past few decades. To date, 4,521 extrasolar planets have been confirmed in 3,353 systems, with an additional 7,761 candidates awaiting confirmation. With so many distant worlds available for study (and improved instruments and methods), the process of exoplanet studies has been slowly transitioning away from discovery towards characterization.

For example, a team of international scientists recently showed how combining data from multiple observatories allowed them to reveal the structure and composition of an exoplanets upper atmosphere. The exoplanet in question is WASP-127b, a hot Saturn that orbits a Sun-like star located about 525 light-years away. These findings preview how astronomers will characterize exoplanet atmospheres and determine if they are conducive to life as we know it.

The research paper that describes their findings appeared in the December 2020 issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics. It was also the subject of a presentation made during the recent Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2021, a virtual conference from September 13th to 24th, 2021. During the presentation, lead author Dr. Romain Allart showed how combining data from space-based, and ground-based telescopes detected clouds in WASP-127bs upper atmosphere and measured their altitudes with unprecedented precision.

Like many exoplanets discovered to date, WASP-127b is a gas giant that orbits very close to its parent star and has a very short orbital period taking less than four days to complete a single orbit. The planet is also 10 billion years old, which is over twice as long as Earth (or our Saturn) has been around. Because of its close orbit, WASP-127b receives 600 times more irradiation than Earth and experiences atmospheric temperatures of up to 1,100C (2012F).

As a result, the planets atmosphere has expanded (or puffed up) to the point that it is 1.3 times as large as Jupiter but far less dense. In fact, WASP-127b is one of the least dense (or fluffiest) exoplanets discovered to date. This makes WASP-127b an ideal candidate for researchers working on atmospheric characterization, as the extended nature of fluffy exoplanets makes them easier to observe.

Using data obtained by the ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and visible light measurements from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the ESOs Paranal Observatory in Chile, the team observed WASP-127b as it made two passes in front of its star. Consistent with the Transit Method (aka. Transit Photometry), the team monitored WASP-127 for periodic dips in luminosity that indicated an exoplanet passing in front of the star (transiting) relative to the observation team.

Whereas Hubble obtained optical data that confirmed the transits, the VLTs Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observation (ESPRESSO) instrument obtained spectra from the light passing through WASP-127bs upper atmosphere. Dr. Allart, a Trottier Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREX) at the Universit de Montral, led the study.

The combined data allowed the researchers to trace the altitude of the clouds to an atmospheric layer moving at speeds of about 13.5 to 17 km/s (48,600 km/h; 61,200 mph). They further estimated that the cloud deck altitude conformed to an atmospheric pressure range of between 0.3 and 0.5 millibars. Lastly, they detected signs of tenuous atomic sodium in the atmosphere, though there were no indications of other atomic species or water. As he explained in a recent Europlanet Society statement:

First, as found before in this type of planet, we detected the presence of sodium, but at a much lower altitude than we were expecting. Second, there were strong water vapor signals in the infrared but none at all at visible wavelengths. This implies that water vapor at lower levels is being screened by clouds that are opaque at visible wavelengths but transparent in the infrared.

We dont yet know the composition of the clouds, except that they are not composed of water droplets like on Earth. We are also puzzled about why the sodium is found in an unexpected place on this planet. Future studies will help us understand not only more about the atmospheric structure but about WASP-127b, which is proving to be a fascinating place.

The teams ESPRESSO observations also showed that WASP-127b has a retrograde orbit, meaning that it orbits in the opposite direction of its stars rotation and that it orbits on a different plane than the stars equatorial. Such alignment is unexpected for a hot Saturn in an old stellar system and might be caused by an unknown companion, said Allart. All these unique characteristics make WASP-127b a planet that will be very intensely studied in the future.

These include space-based observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Nancy Grace Roman State Telescope (RST). Then there are ground-based observatories like the ESOs Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). With their combination of advanced imaging, coronagraphs, and/or adaptive optics, these facilities will allow astronomers to conduct detailed studies of exoplanet atmospheres.

Just as important is the fact that these studies will include rocky planets that orbit with the habitable zones (HZs) of their stars, not just gas giants with very distant or very close orbits (as was the case here). Since these Earth-like candidates are expected to be the most likely candidates for habitability, astrobiologists anticipate that it wont be long before they find evidence of extraterrestrial life!

While the results of these studies are somewhat limited, the implications of the teams research are anything but. In addition to demonstrating the effectiveness of combining data from multiple observatories, it also illustrates how astronomers are getting closer to the point where they can fully characterize an exoplanets atmosphere. With the introduction of next-generation observatories in the near future, these capabilities will become far greater.

Further Reading: Europlanet, Astronomy & Astrophysics

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Astronomers Detect Clouds on an Exoplanet, and Even Measure Their Altitude - Universe Today

Scientists consider early galaxies to be those formed within 3 billion years after the Big Bang. They believe the galaxies would contain large amounts of cold hydrogen gas, which is the fuel used for creating stars. However, scientists studying early massive galleries using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered six mysterious galaxies that are very different from what they expected to find in the early universe.

The six galaxies, known as quenched galaxies, are no longer forming stars. The galaxies were selected for observation as part of the REsolving QUIEscent Magnified galaxies at high redshift or REQUIEM survey. Kate Whitaker is the lead author on the study and assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She says the most massive galaxies in the universe created stars in a very short timeframe. Initially, scientists believed that gas shouldve been plentiful in the early universe, and the galaxies stopped star production only a few billion years after the Big Bang.

However, in the new study, the team determined the galaxies have run out of fuel to make stars rather than simply stopping star formation. Using observations from Hubble and ALMA, the researchers observed continuum emission, which is a tracer of dust, at millimeter wavelengths. Those observations allow the inference of the amount of gas left in the galaxies. REQUIEM leverages the two telescopes and gravitational lensing to observe dormant galaxies with higher spatial resolution.

The survey allowed a clear view of whats going on inside these distant galaxies, which is frequently impossible for quenched galaxies. When galaxies stop making stars, they get very faint very quickly, making them difficult or impossible to observe using individual telescopes. The observations found that the end of star formation in the six target galaxies wasnt caused by inefficiency in converting cold gas to stars. Rather, the end of star formation in the galaxies was caused by the depletion or removal of gas reservoirs within the galaxies. Scientists dont yet understand why that happened, but it could be related to the activity of a supermassive black hole.

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Astronomers discover six early galaxies that have run out of fuel - SlashGear

The heavens look gorgeous through the lenses of expert astrophotographers. Nebulas, galaxies, the moon and sun, and even the stars take on an artistic glow when captured with the right eye, equipment and light. Here's a look at stunning astronomy images from the Royal Observatory Greenwich's Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition.(Read more about the competition and its winners.)

The overall winner of the 13th annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year award is photographer Shuchang Dong of China, who took this unearthly shot of an annular solar eclipse from the Ali region of Tibet on June 21, 2020. The image also won in the "Our Sun" category of the competition.

The photograph is "moody, serene, perfectly captured and expertly processed. You feel as if you could reach into the sky and place this onto your finger," said contest judge Steve Marsh.

(Equipment used:Fujifilm XT-4 camera; Sun: 386 mm f/10 lens, ISO 160, 1/2000-second exposure; Moving cloud: ND1000 filter, 386 mm f/16 lens, ISO 160, 1-second exposure)

Runner-up in the "Our Sun" category goes to a stunning image of an eclipse, which shows the tendrils of the sun's upper atmosphere (corona) as well as bright spots seen during eclipses called Bailey's Beads. Most surprising is comet C/2020 X3 (SOHO), swooping in from the far right side of the image. French photographer Vincent Bouchama caught this shot from Argentina.

(Equipment used:William OpticsZenithStar61II APO telescope, Williams Optics Flat 61lensat f/5.9, Vixen GPDSkySensor2000PC mount, Canon EOS 760D camera; Sky, sun and comet: ISO 200800, 1/8000.6-second exposures; Moon:ISO 200800,0.6-second exposures; Prominences and Baily's beads: ISO 200, 1/4000-second exposures)

A prominence of hydrogen dances off the sun in this image captured by American Alan Friedman from Buffalo, New York. This image took home a "highly commended" in the "Our Sun" category.

"This beautiful large prominence graced the limb of the Sun over several days and was recorded in good seeing conditions," Alan said in a statement. "Good seeing conditions here refer to the steadiness of the Earth's atmosphere rather than to cloudless skies. Only when the atmospheric turbulence is low can fine details and structures be seen with clarity."

(Equipment used:Astro-Physics92mm f/4.8 Stowaway refractor telescope working at 1.7 m focal length withBaaderFFC, 90 mm CoronadoSolarmaxHa filter,Astro-Physics1200 mount, Grasshopper 2MP monochrome streaming camera, 1/1000-second exposure)

The Northern Lights dance over the approach to the Kara Strait in Russia in this image taken in a 25-second exposure by Russian photographer Dmitrii Rybalka that won the Astronomy Photographer of the Year "Aurorae" category.

"I was keeping watch at night as Third Officer on the bridge of the ship, when I noticed in the sky a tiny white band approaching like a snake," Rybalka said in a statement. "I knew already, this is it, this is that I was waiting for. I took my camera, went to the bridge wing, took my position and started waiting, like a hunter waiting for its prey. A few minutes later, the sky was full of bright green lights dancing in darkness and shining over everything on their way."

(Equipment used:Sony ILCE-7M3 camera, 28 mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 100, 25-second exposure)

Finnish photographer Thomas Kast caught the aurora in conjunction with the moonrise in Lapland. This image was the runner-up in the "Aurorae" category of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition.

"It was a quiet, calm night at this lake watching the moonrise when suddenly the aurora became very strong and started to dance quickly," Kast said. "Further out on the lake there was fog which gave the Moon a nice circle as well. The reflections were magical!"

Equipment used:Nikon D850 camera, 15 mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 400, 1.6-second exposure

The semifrozen Goafoss waterfall in northern Iceland provides an icy counterpoint to the Northern Lights in this image, which took home a "highly commended" in the "Aurorae" category of this year's photography competition. Photographer Larryn Rae captured this image on a 14-degree Fahrenheit (minus 10 degrees Celsius) night when the full moon and the aurora flooded the landscape with light.

Equipment used:Canon EOS 5D Mark IV camera, 24 mm f/2.5 lens, ISO 2500,16 x 2.5-second exposures

Taking the prize in the competition's "Galaxies" category is Chinese photographer Zhong Wu's "The Milky Ring." This image is a 360-degree image of the Milky Way stitched together with photos taken in China and New Zealand.

Equipment used:Nikon D810a camera, 40 mm f/1.4lens, ISO 8000, 1000 x 6-second exposures

American Russell Croman took runner-up in the "Galaxies" competition with this sparkly spot of the heart of the Triangulum Galaxy, which he took from New Mexico.

"In ideal circumstances, it is just possible to see this galaxy with the naked eye despite being more than two and a half million light years away." Russell said in a statement. "Most magnified images concentrate on the vibrancy and clarity of the billions of stars within. Here, we have something rather different, highlighting the delicate nebulosity of the galaxy. The planets forming around the new stars within those stellar nurseries may one day teem with life of their own."

Equipment used:Takahashi FSQ106 EDX4 530 mm telescope at f/5 andPlaneWave14" CDK 2543 mm telescope at f/7.2, Chroma filters, Software Bisque Paramount MX+ and Paramount ME-II mounts, RB-SII-Ha-OIII composite, 49.5hours total exposure

Recognized as "highly commended" by the Astronomy Photographer of the Year judges, this image seems to smile back at the viewer. An edge-on view of the galaxy NGC 1055 forms a wry smile, while stars in the Milky Way in the foreground seem to twinkle like eyes. The photographers are from France and Australia and captured this image from Chile.

Equipment used:Planewave CDK 17" telescope at f/6.8,Astrodonfilters,Software Bisque Paramount ME mount, SBIG STXL-11002 camera, L-RGB-Ha composite, 27.5 hours total exposure

This shot that seems to come from an alien galaxy is the winner of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 13 "Our Moon" category. As the competition name suggests, it is in fact the surface of Earth's moon, with the crescent of Venus rising above its horizon. French photographer Nicolas Lefaudeux captured this image in daylight.

Equipment used:CelestronC11 2800 mm telescope at f/10,iOptroniEQ30 mount, Basler ACA2500-14GC camera.Occultation: 1 x 2.5-millisecond exposures.Venus: 50 x 2.5-millisecond exposures.Moon: 200 x 15-millisecond exposures

Taking the runner-up spot in the "Our Moon" category is Swedish photographer Goran Strand. Strand's image shows the light of the moon reflecting in suspended ice crystals above a snowy landscape in stersund, Sweden. The tracks belong to a local rabbit.

Equipment used:Nikon Z6 II camera, 14 mm f/5.6 lens, ISO 200, 6 x 15-second exposures

The lunar landscape gets its due in this "highly commended" image in the "Our Moon" category. Australian photographer Stefan Buda increased the color saturation on this image to highlight the desolation of the moon's surface.

Equipment used:Self-built Dall-Kirkham 405 mm telescope at f/16,self-built Alt-Azimuthfork mount,AstrodonRGB filters, ZWO ASI120MM camera, 9,000x 0.0625-secondexposures

The pandemic lockdown of early 2020 led to this image captured in Windsor in the United Kingdom. This image took home the winning prize in the "People and Space" category of this year's Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition.

Equipment used:Sony ILCE-6600 camera, 8 mm f/4 lens; Foreground: ISO 1600, 8-second exposure; Sky: ISO 1000, 844 x 30-second exposures

The comet NEOWISE streaks across the sky above a ship passing through the Nieuwe Waterweg canal near Rotterdam. Photographer Andr van der Hoeven captured the blurred lights of the moving ship and the comet's long tail superimposed against a purple-blue sunset. The image won runner-up in the "People and Space" category.

Equipment used:Tamron 2470 mm telescope at f/2.8, Nikon D810a camera, ISO 800, 5-second exposure

German photographer Nicholas Roemmelt captured this shot in the snowy mountains of Tyrol, Austria, as astronomical dawn broke over his camping spot. The judges awarded this photograph a "highly commended" recognition in the "People and Space" category.

"The beginning of the astronomical dawn usually marks the end of the shooting for the astro landscape photographer as the Milky Way and its wonderful colours are quickly fading. But this short period in between the night and the very beginning of the new day has always been a very special moment for me," Nicholas said. "It is probably the most calm time of the day and somehow 'soothes my soul.'"

Equipment used:Canon R(a) camera; Sky: 20 mm f/4 lens, MSM rotator, ISO 6400, 5 x 60-second exposures; Foreground: f/2.8lens, ISO 2500, multiple 1/108-second exposures

American photographer Frank Kuszaj wasn't planning to capture a meteor the night he took this photograph, which took him the top prize in the competition's "Planets, Comets and Asteroids" category. He and his friends were planning to photograph nebulae and distant galaxies. But a Quandrantid meteor zoomed by in a green flash, and Kuszaj just happened to be in the right place to capture it in blazing color.

Equipment used:Sony a7R III camera, SkyWatcher Star Adventurer star tracker, 70 mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 3200, 1-minute exposure

The planet Mars gets all the focus in this runner-up image in the "Planets, Comets and Asteroids" category of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 13 competition. U.K. photographer Damian Peach named the photograph "Perseverance" both in honor of the Mars Rover of the same name and because it took more than 100 nights of observation to catch the perfect conditions for this photograph.

The atmosphere of Venus glows with residual light from the sun in this "highly commended" image in the "Planets, Comets and Asteroids" category.

"This picture of Venus took my breath away. I was drawn to the contrast between darkness and light. The extended crescent resembles our Moon and yet is different, evoking a sense of familiarity and otherworldliness at the same time," said competition judge Imad Ahmed.

The dunes of Death Valley National Park echo the desolation of the moon in this winning shot in the "Skyscapes" category of the 2021 competition. U.S. photographer Jeffrey Lovelace hiked deep into the park's dunes to capture this shot just after sunset.

Equipment used:Sony ILCE-7RM4 camera; Sand and sky: 70 mm f/8 lens, ISO 400, Sand: 30-second exposure, Sky: 1-second exposure; Moon: 200 mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 100, Moon face: 2.5-second exposure, Moon edge: 1/100-second exposure

Mount Etna erupts in Sicily while the moon floats above it all in this runner-up shot in the "Skyscapes" category.

"In February 2021, Etna showed intense volcanic activity spewing ash columns and lava fountains more than 500 metres high. These were mostly located near the new south-east crater which poured numerous lava flows into the Bove Valley," photographer Dario Giannobile said. "They were short in duration but accompanied by intense activity that fractured the structure of the crater from which the flows poured. On 25 February, Mount Etna again showed intense activity and I placed myself at the Piano Bello refuge, calculating the exact position so that the Moon would set near the crater, aligning itself just above."

Equipment used:Canon EOS 6D camera, Sigma 150600 mm lens at 347 mm f/5.6; Foreground: ISO 800, 5-second exposure; Moon: ISO 100, 1/125-second exposure

An unreal skyscape appeared over Lugu Lake in Yunnan, China in early 2021, and photographer Jin Yang was there to capture the brilliant colors of the clouds, earning a "highly commended" in the "Skyscapes" category.

"This incredible phenomenon lasted for ten days in total and promised good luck for the New Year in Chinese folklore," the photographer said. "If Van Gogh saw this beautiful scenery, he would certainly marvel at the extraordinary craftsmanship of nature saying how fantastic it is."

Equipment used:Canon 6D2 camera, Sigma 546 mm f/8 lens, ISO 100, 1/640-second exposure

U.S. photographer Terry Hancock captured this shot of the California Nebula from Whitewater, Colorado, spending seven nights photographing this nebula 1,000 light-years from Earth with narrowband and broadband filters. It took home the top prize in the "Stars and Nebulae" 2021 category.

Equipment used:Takahashi FSQ130 telescope at f/5, Chroma Narrowband filters, Paramount ME mount, QHY600M camera, L-RGB-Ha-SII-OIII composite; 16.1-hours total exposure

IC 2944, also known as the Running Chicken Nebula, shines in red and blue in this runner-up image of the "Stars and Nebulae" category of the 2021 astronomy photography competition. Romanian photographer Bogdan Borz captured this image of the nebula 6,000 light-years away from Chile.

Equipment used:AstroSystemeAustria 500mm Newtonian telescope at f/3.8,Astrodonfilters, ASA DDM85 Equatorial Mount, FLI Proline PL16803 camera, Ha-SII-OIII composite, 2 hours 42minutes total exposure

"The layers and structures of the Cygnus Loop are so sophisticated," U.S. photographer Min Xie said of the supernova remnant visible in this "highly commended" image in the 2021 "Stars and Nebula" category.

"This is an image that every astronomer and astrophotographer wants to see at least once in their lifetime: the entire, pure Cygnus supernova remnant, cleared from every disturbing element," said Lszl Francsics, competition judge. "As a result, this calm, emblematic bubble structure emerges from the dark, with uncountable details. This astro-image is a unique photograph."

Equipment used:Takahashi FSQ-106EDX III telescope with f/3 0.6x reducer, Chroma filters,Astro-PhysicsMach1GTO CP3 mount, ZWO ASI1600MM-Cool camera, Ha-SII-OIII composite, 168 hours total exposure

The Young photographers category of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition honors photographers under the age of 16. The winning image was taken by a 15-year-old Chinese student who captured shots of every planet in the Solar System besides Earth during the lunar Year of the Rat (2020-2021).

Equipment used:CelestronC8 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, UV/IR cut filter,CelestronAVX mount, ZWOASI-224-MC camera; Sun: 200 mm f/10 lens,Baaderfilter, 750 x 18-millisecond exposures; Moon: Omni 2x Barlow 200 mm f/10 lens, 2,250 x 10-millisecond exposures; Planets: Omni 2x Barlow 4000 mm f/20 lens;multiple746-millisecond exposures

Indian teenagers Hassaana Begam and Aathilah Maryam H. took the runners-up place in the youth category for this striking shot of the nebula complex NGC 6914, located about 6,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.

Equipment used:SkyWatcherEquinox ED120 double refractor telescope at f/19,Astrodonfilters, NEQ-6 Pro mount, QSI 660 WSG-8 camera, 5.75hours total exposure

Three young competitors were awarded "highly commended" in the Youth category of the 2021 astronomy competition. The first, Dutch 13-year-old Davy van der Hoeven, was recognized for this moody view of the California Nebula.

"This image makes me think of a beach where the waves are hitting the coast during a stormy evening," van der Hoeven said. "I made this image with my father's telescope and camera on a winter evening in November."

Equipment used:WO Spacecat51 telescope at f/4.9,SkyWatcherNEQ6 mount, QSI 583WS camera, 26 x 1200-second exposures

Julian Shapiro, 13, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was highly commended for this image in the Young photographer category. Shapiro used his telescope to locate and photograph Neptune and its largest moon, Triton.

Equipment used:CelestronNexStar8SE telescope at f/10,CelestronAVX mount, ZWO ASI-224MC camera, 120 x 1-second exposures

The youngest recognized photographer in the 2021 competition is Alice Fock Hang, who captured this image of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae from Les Makes on the Island of Reunion.

"47 Tucan is one of the jewels of the southern sky and is located just above the Small Magellanic Cloud in the balmy summer nights of the southern hemisphere," Hang said. "It is a colourful cluster with a shining heart a pearl in the Universe."

Equipment used:Takahashi Epsilon 210 telescope at f/2.9, Astro-Physics mount, Nikon D610 camera, ISO 800, 90 x 2-minute exposures

Photographer Paul Eckhardt took the 2021 Manju Mehrotra Family Trust Prize for Best Newcomer for this strikingly composed image of the Falcon 9 rocket zipping in front of the moon. This prize is awarded to astrophotographers with less than two years experience who are entering the astrophotography competition for the first time.

Equipment used:Sony ILCE-6500 camera, 210 mm f/8 lens, ISO 400, 1/350-second exposure

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Astrophotographers capture stunning views of the night sky (Photos) - Livescience.com

Antony Hewish, a British astronomer and astrophysicist who designed and built the innovative radio telescope used to discover pulsars dense, fast-spinning stars that emit sweeping beams of radiation and was honoured with a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his role in their detection, has died aged 97.

His death was announced by Churchill College at the University of Cambridge, where he was an emeritus fellow. Dr Hewish was associated with Cambridge for his entire scientific career, and was working at the universitys Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO) when he and his research team detected the first pulsars in 1967.

Like celestial lighthouses, the stars send streams of radio waves or other radiation into the universe, rotating rapidly so that their beams appear to pulse like clockwork. Most pulsars are now understood to be neutron stars, the extraordinarily dense husks of collapsed supergiants. Their discovery ushered in a new era for 20th-century astronomy, helping scientists locate distant planets, search for gravitational waves and investigate the interstellar medium that fills the cosmos.

Along with his Cambridge colleague Martin Ryle, Hewish was one of the first two astronomers to ever win a Nobel prize. They were honored in 1974 for what the committee described as their pioneering research in radio astrophysics, with Hewish cited for playing a decisive role in the discovery of pulsars.

Yet the award sparked decades of arguments among scientists who said at least part of the prize should have gone to one of Hewish's graduate students, Jocelyn Bell. She helped build the radio telescope, operated the instruments, analysed the data and identified the first pulsars, for which she was later honoured with the 2018 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Hewish never denied that Jocelyn Bell Burnell, as she became known as, made the initial pulsar observations. But he noted that he closely investigated the pulses himself, conducting detailed measurements to learn more about the signals, and created the telescope that made their discovery possible.

When you plan a ship of discovery and somebody up the masthead says land ho, thats great, he said in a video interview that was featured in a recent New York Times documentary about Bell Burnell. But I mean, who actually inspired it and conceived it and decided what to do when and so on? I mean, there is a difference between skipper and crew.

Hewish had been studying rapid variations in radio signals when he built the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, a four-acre network of cables and copper wires that stretched across a field near Cambridge. As part of a search for mysterious radio sources known as quasars, the telescope recorded the signals of distant radio waves, which were registered on chart paper as crests and troughs.

Soon after the telescope was completed in 1967, Bell Burnell noticed an unusual squiggle, what she called a piece of scruff, that she traced to the constellation Vulpecula. I wanted to understand what it was, and I ended up taking this problem to Tony. And he said that it was interference, she recalled in the NYT documentary. Referring to herself in the third person, she added that Hewish had one idea that Jocelyn had wired up the radio telescope wrongly, and it was something to do with that.

Hewish (second left) with eight of his fellow British Nobel prize winners at a preview of the British Genius Exhibition in Battersea, London, in May 1977

(Getty)

As Bell Burnell told it, she kept studying the scruff, doing a more detailed analysis that revealed a string of pulses about 1.3 seconds apart. Once again, she called Hewish. This time he agreed it was a genuine signal, although its source remained unclear; unable to rule out an alien origin, they jokingly named their discovery LGM-1, for Little Green Man, according to a 2018 report in The Washington Post.

Bell Burnell soon discovered a second, third and fourth pulsing signal, suggesting they had discovered a new kind of star. The findings were announced in a February 1968 article in Nature, in which Hewish was credited first, followed by Bell Burnell and three other members of the research team.

Interviewed for the NYT documentary, Bell Burnell said Hewish could have cited me more and didnt while presenting their findings at Cambridge. She added that while he became the scientific face of the pulsar discovery, she was interviewed merely for human interest, asked about the colour of her hair and the dimensions of her hips, waist and chest. Tony just let it happen, she said. It was dreadful.

When it came to the Nobel prize, however, she said Ryle and Hewish were fully worthy of the honour. When English astronomer Fred Hoyle asserted in 1975 that Hewish had won by claiming credit for Bell Burnells work, she responded by saying Hoyle had drastically exaggerated the situation and was factually incorrect.

It doesnt much bother me that my name wasnt included, she told The Guardian in 2009. In those days, students werent recognised by the committee.

By 1993, when a Nobel prize was awarded to pulsar researchers for a second time, that practice had apparently changed. The committee honoured both the professor overseeing the research, Joseph Taylor Jr, and his graduate student at the time, Russell Hulse.

The youngest of three sons, Antony known as Tony Hewish was born in Fowey, Cornwall, on 11 May 1924, and grew up in the coastal town of Newquay. His father was a banker, but Hewish showed an aptitude for physics while studying at Kings College boarding school in Taunton and enrolled at Cambridge in 1942 to study science.

Hewish was also a competitive rower, and in a 2008 video interview for Cambridge he recalled spending afternoons practicing on the river when I should have been in the physics lab. His grades suffered, and after his first year, he was dispatched to aid the war effort at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, a military research centre in Farnborough.

For most of the next three years, he helped develop a device to jam the radar of enemy aircraft, working with electronics and antennas that piqued his interest in radio astronomy. He also met Ryle, the head of the militarys radar countermeasures group, whose lab he joined after returning to Cambridge and graduating in 1948.

Hewish married Marjorie Richards in 1950. She later told the NYT that she was surprised when her husband won a share of the Nobel: The entire prize, my husband would agree, should have gone to Professor Ryle. We expected him to get it, and sharing it has been totally unexpected as far as my husband is concerned.

They had a son, a physicist, and daughter, a language teacher. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

After receiving his PhD in 1952, Hewish joined the faculty at Cambridge. He was professor of radio astronomy from 1971 until his retirement in 1989, and led the MRAO for six years at the close of his career. He also delighted in lecturing about physics to wide audiences, including at the Royal Institution in London.

There is, I think, some special benefit for mankind in the realm of astrophysics, he said at the conclusion of his Nobel banquet speech in 1974. It is impossible to witness the interplay of galaxies without a sense of wonder, and looking back at Earth we see it in its true perspective, a planet of great beauty, an undivided sphere. Let us try and keep this image always in our view.

Antony Hewish, astronomer, born 11 May 1924, died 13 September 2021

The Washington Post

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Antony Hewish: British astronomer and Nobel prize winner - The Independent

Top astronomy events for September 2021

Some mysterious celestial objects will become more visible in September as the night sky changes with the seasons.

Accuweather, Accuweather

Rememberthe constellation Orion?

You know:Thehunter, withthree stars inhisbelt.

Problematic. Not least from a menswear perspectiveit would give Orion a size 60-light-year waist. Somecultures in Africa had a better explanation for this star group.

To them, the three stars representedthree zebras. And the star on Orion's left shoulder, Betelgeuse, was a lion, eyeing them hungrily.

From the earliest times, African cultures showed a keeninterest in the cosmos, saysastronomy educator Gary Swangin, manager of the Panther Academy Planetarium in Paterson.

And by earliest times, read: many centuries before the Greeks.

"Generally, it appears that Africa may be the cradle not only of mankind, but also of astronomical investigation," Swangin said.

In recent months,Swangin has launched a new project to investigate the investigators.

"The African Universe" a projected three-part, $1.8 million documentary he's working on (and still raising money for; he hopes to complete it by the end of 2022) will visit sites in Southern Egypt, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mali and The Gambia, where remains of ancient calendars, observatories, and sites of astronomical significance can still be found.

"This is a very timely thing," saidMichael Schwartz, a former NASAastronomer and archaeologist who will be assisting on the project. "This is a piece of science that still needs to be done."

"The African Universe" ispart of a larger initiative Swanginlaunched in 2020. Belinda Educational Group for Science and Technology (BEGST), named after his late wife, is meant to encourage interest in the sciences particularly astronomy and astrophysics by students of color.

Another BEGST project is to create an observatory in Arizona, equipped with a 24-inch reflecting telescope, in honor of Ronald Erwin McNair, the AfricanAmerican astronaut who died in the 1986Challenger disaster.

"It's like the slogan Black Lives Matter," Swanginsaid. "Science and technology matter to children of color. And we need to get that message across."

One way to get the word out is to document how astronomy shaped life in Africa, going back many thousands of years.

The three stars in Orion's belt that is to say, the three zebras were important, because they pointed the way to the "digging stars." Seeing this star clusterin the horizon, in the early morning, gave Africans the heads-up that it was time to plant. We in the West know this groupas thePleiades the "seven sisters."

Explanations for the Milky Way varied, culture to culture. Some saw it as a road leading through the forest. Others saw it as sparks from a campfire, lit by some other tribe on the other end of the continent.

"A few of the constellation names seem to be so commonly referenced that we can take them to be authentic terms," saidMike Shanahan,Directorof TheJennifer Chalsty Planetarium, Liberty Science Center, Jersey City.

"The Southern Cross is referred to as a giraffe by theBasotho people (of Southern Africa)," he said. "The Zulu referred to it as the Tree of Life. The Tuareg people in Algeria referred to the Big Dipper as a camel."

But it's not just in mythological terms that Africans understood the stars. They were also early scientists.

In several African nations (there are currently 55), arrangements of stones not unlike Stonehenge, but smaller and older seem to align with prominentstars.

One such arrangement in Zimbabwe, called the Great Enclosure, contains three stones that align with the three "belt" stars in Orion. Not as they are now but as they would have been75,000 to 150,000 years ago, when the wobble or "precession" in the Earth's axis would have changed the entire orientation of the sky.

There may be a similararrangement of stones (its significance is disputed), in South Africa, dubbed "Adam's Calendar."Anotherstone circle atNabta Playa, in Southern Egypt, marks the solstice.

"Other cultures used the stars in meaningful ways," Shanahan said. "It wasn't just the Greco-Roman culture, like we got in school."

It all comes under the heading of "archeoastronomy" a hybrid discipline that looks at the role the starsplayed in past cultures. Schwartz, a former student of Swangin's, originally from Livingston, is a specialist. He has a key behind-the-scenes role in the documentary.

"It will be my job to look at satellite photos of these sties, and measure the length of the shadows on particular days, and say, yes this needs to be investigated, this is definitely a calendar," Schwartz said. "There's every indication that several are."

One unusual piece ofastronomical lore comes from the Dogon people of Mali. There is an oldlegend that fishlike creatures, from the star Sirius, came to Africa some 5,000 years ago.

The aliens explained many useful things.Among them, that a second smaller star, invisible to the naked eye, orbited Sirius.

Preposterous, of course except that Sirius B wasn't discovered by European astronomers until1862.

"How did they know?" Swangin said. "That's the mystery."

Not sucha mystery, say skeptics. The story of the fish-beings was first told to French anthropologists in the 1930s. The Dogoncould have incorporated modern science into their story by then. But those skeptics also have skeptics. They say they've seenthe double-star groupingdepicted in 400-year-old Dogon artifacts.

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Such confusions are natural to a field that isunder-studied, and under-funded. The very notion that ancient Africa could have science was, until fairly recently, dismissed out of hand.

"Europeans are Eurocentric," Schwartz said. "The whole idea, from the European point of view, is that Africans were not capable of such things. It's bias."

Now, that racist attitude is changing. Swangin's documentary project has a two-fold purpose: to educate the general public, and also to promote further study of these ancient artifacts. Part of the aim of the "African Universe" documentary is to put African American researchers to work.

Astronomy and history students from some 50 Historically Black colleges will be engaged, as filmingprogresses, to investigate the old sites, and to work out the mathematics behind those enigmatic stones andlegends. "We'll have astronomy students, Black studies students, behind the scenes doing calculations," Swanginsaid. "It's not just an entertainment film. It'san investigation of these sites."

The popular interest isthere, Swangin says.

He got a sense of it when he gave a planetarium show, three years ago, called "Gospel Music Under the Stars." Eight gospel singers, and a keyboardist, gave a live performanceunder Paterson's planetarium dome, while Swangin recounted African legends, and recalled the importance of the stars to enslaved people who followed the "drinking gourd" (Little Dipper) north to freedom.

"It was standing room only," he said. "It got a really favorable response from a lot of people." It was this show that sparked the idea of an astronomy film that, in particular, might fire the imaginations of African American kids.

"The whole idea is to get students interested in astronomy and space science," he said. "From looking to the past, we hope we can inspire them to look toward the future. We want to inspire African American students to go into that area."

It's a propitious time.Several of today's most high-profile astronomers are African American: among them astrophysicistNeil deGrasse Tyson, andDerrick Pitts, chief astronomer of the Franklin Institute. There are a lot of role models.

It's a propitious time, also,for Swangin. Recently an asteroid was named after him. And the namer was none other than his old student, Michael Schwartz co-discoverer of the tiny body in 2001. "He deserves it," Schwartz said.

Asteroid107396 Swangin, located between Mars and Jupiter, has a 4.19 year orbital period around the sun. It has now been observed by close to 500 people. "It's very odd to think that something in space is named after you," Swangin said. "It's like a little bit of immortality."

Another of his students, then an aid worker in the Middle East, named a planetarium after him in Afghanistan (currently, for obvious reasons, offline). Swangin has been teaching for 50-plus years, first at the Newark Museum Planetarium he was director from 1966 to 1981and starting in 2006, in Paterson.Such honors, from his protgs, make him feel those yearshaven't been wasted.

"It just goes to show I've actually had an influence on people," he said. "It signifies I was appreciated for what I did."

Jim Beckerman is an entertainment and culture reporter for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access tohis insightfulreports about how you spend your leisure time,please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email:beckerman@northjersey.com

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New documentary to show centuries before the Greeks, African astronomers named the stars - NorthJersey.com

An imagedepicting a transient star trail, the Space X Falcon 9 passing by Earths Moon, and a glowing aurora were among the category winners of this year's Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition.

Now in its 13th year, Astronomy Photographer of the Year, which is organised annually bythe Royal Observatory Greenwich in association withBBC Sky at Night Magazine, has grown into a respected international competition for astrophotography.

Photographer Shuchang Dong has been announced as this years Overall Winner for his simple yet striking photograph of a solar eclipse titled The Golden Ring.

As winner, Dong walks away with a 10,000 prize as well as the opportunity for his work to be showcased at the exhibition of winning images at the National Maritime Museum, UK.

Commenting on the winning photograph, judge Lszl Francsics said: Perfection and simplicity, that can lead to a winner image. The square crop has a tension with the mystic ring, and the misty bluish sky is the complementary of the yellow ring. A true masterpiece.

Australian photographers Ed Hurst and Steven Mohr have been recognised as shortlisted entrants in the People & Space and the Stars & Nebulae categories, respectively.You can see their impressive stills below.

Aurorae -Dmitrii Rybalka

Skyscapes -Jeffrey Lovelace

People and Space -Deepal Ratnayaka

Our Moon -Nicolas Lefaudeux

Our Sun -Shuchang Dong

Planets, Comets and Asteroids -Frank Kuszaj

Galaxies -Zhong Wu

Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year -Zhipu Wang

If you're keen to see more of the top photographs, you can view the entire gallery of shortlisted images on the competitions website here.

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Brightest stars: The winners of the 2021 Astronomy Photographer of the Year - Australian Photography

Exploring strange new worlds. Understanding the origins of the universe. Searching for life in the galaxy. These are not the plot of a new science fiction movie, but the mission objectives of the James Webb Space Telescope, the long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA is building and launching the Webb in partnership with the European Space Agency and Canada.

The launch, which will propel the Webb to nearly a million miles away, is now scheduled for December 18, 2021. When it fully deploys in space, the Webb will usher in a new age of astronomy, scientists say, and show humanity things it has never seen before.

The Webb represents the culmination of decades, if not centuries, of astronomy, says Sara Seager, a planetary scientist and astrophysicist at MIT. Weve been waiting for this a very long time.

Scientists started thinking about a follow-up even before the Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990. After more than three decades in space, its unclear how much longer this boundary-breaking satellite will be able to scan and photograph the universe.

The Webb was originally supposed to launch in 2010 and cost around $1 billion. Its price tag has since ballooned to $10 billion, and its way overdue. But the wait will be worth it, at least according to the scientists who expect new and revealing glimpses of our universe.

Were going right up to the edge of the observable universe with Webb, says Caitlin Casey, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. And yeah, were excited to see whats there.

The Webb will surpass the Hubble in several ways. It will allow astronomers to look not only farther out in space but also further back in time: It will search for the first stars and galaxies of the universe. It will allow scientists to make careful studies of numerous exoplanets planets that orbit stars other than our sun and even embark on a search for signs of life there.

The Webb is a machine for answering unanswered questions about the universe, for exploring what has been unexplorable until now. Heres a guide to what the Webb is capable of.

The launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, named after famed astronomer Edwin Hubble, was itself a huge leap forward for astronomy. Here on Earth, astronomers seek out remote mountaintops and deserts to build major telescopes for the best chance of viewing a dark sky away from pollution and bright lights. But their view is still marred by the slight haze and luminescence of the Earths atmosphere. Space is the ultimate mountaintop, as NASA explains. Theres no better view of space than the one from, well, space.

Hubble has meant so much during its 30-year run. For one thing, its sent us unforgettable, jaw-droppingly beautiful images like those of the Lagoon Nebula and the Pillars of Creation.

Its also taught us about the age of the universe, about what happens when stars explode, about black holes. It helped establish many of the boundaries that the Webb hopes to push. Most powerfully, its observations have led scientists to believe the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, propelled by something so mysterious that scientists simply call it dark energy.

The Webb, named for the man who led NASA in the decade leading up to the moon landing, is set to take all this a step further. What were going to get is a telescope thats about 100 times more powerful than Hubble, says Amber Straughn, an astrophysicist at NASA who works on the Webb.

How?

The Webb improves on Hubble in two key ways. The first is just its size: Hubble was about the size of a school bus, whereas Webb is more like the size of a tennis court. This thing is enormous, Straughn says. Webb is by far the biggest telescope NASAs ever attempted to send into space.

But its not just the total size of the contraption that matters. When it comes to reflecting telescopes, the key component is the size of its curved mirror. You could sort of think of a telescope mirror like a light bucket, Straughn says. The more light you can collect in this bucket, the fainter and farther-away things you can see in the universe.

Hubbles mirror was an impressive 7.8 feet in diameter. Webbs beautiful, gold-hued mirrors combine for a diameter of 21.3 feet. Overall, that amounts to more than six times the light-collecting area.

What does that mean in practice? Well, consider one of Hubbles most famous images, the Deep Field. In 1995, scientists set the Hubble to stare off into a teeny-tiny patch of sky (about the size of the head of a pinhead, held at arm's length from the viewer) and capture as much light as it could from that one spot.

The image that came back was astounding. Hubble uncovered thousands of galaxies in this teensy patch of sky, helping us refine the number of galaxies thought to exist in the universe.

This photograph also revealed Hubbles larger power as a time machine. In astronomy, the farther away things are, the older they are (because light from faraway places takes a very long time to travel to Earth). That means this Hubble Deep Field is not only a snapshot of space: It also contains the history of our universe. Galaxies in this image appear to us as they were billions of years ago.

What Webb will do is take that field and go even further, UT Austins Casey explains. So the tiny specks of light in the background of the Hubble Deep Field will brighten and become more detailed, well be able to see spiral arms, well be able to see structure, and then well get more specks of light even further in the past. Were seeing farther back in time with Webb.

With Webb, astronomers like Casey will be able to see so far back that theyll potentially spot the very first stars and galaxies. Hubble has seen light dating to about 400 million years after the Big Bang, which took about 13.3 billion years to reach us.

Thats far! But Webb has the capability to take us to 250 million years after the Big Bang, explains Casey, who has been approved to work with the Webb Space Telescope. It might not sound like a big difference. Whats a few hundred million years between friends? Actually, its the difference between seeing the first stars that ever turned on [and] arriving a bit too late after the funeral.

Beyond that are barriers through which even the Webb cannot see. Prior to the first starlight, the universe was shrouded by a dense, obscuring fog of primordial gas, as the National Science Foundation explains. Theres no light that reaches our telescopes from this time, which is called the cosmic dark ages.

(There is some background radiation from the Big Bang called the cosmic microwave background, a faint glow that shines to us from before the dark ages. But for the most part, the dark ages is a blank spot in our timeline of the universe.)

Casey and other astronomers hope the Webb will help them understand the end of the dark ages and figure out what caused this fog to lift. Scientists suspect the starlight from the earliest galaxies did it.

If you have a cloud of gas and it encounters energetic light, that energetic light will ionize that gas and disassociate that cloud, Casey says. And so if that light just has turned on, it then hits that gas and really transforms the entire universe from a dark place to a light place.

The Webbs other advantage is the type of light it collects.

Light comes in a lot of different varieties. The human eye can see only a narrow band known as visible light, but the universe contains lots and lots of light outside this range, including the higher-frequency, higher-energy forms: ultraviolet, gamma rays. Then theres the lower-energy light with longer wavelengths: infrared, microwaves, radio.

The Hubble Space Telescope collects visible light, ultraviolet, and a little bit of infrared. The Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, so it sees light thats in a longer wavelength than what our eyes can see. This seems nerdy and technical, but its actually what allows Webb to look further back in time than the Hubble.

Infrared light is often very old light, due to a phenomenon call redshifting. When a light source is moving away from a viewer, it gets stretched out, morphing into a longer and longer wavelength, growing redder. (The opposite is true as well: As a light source grows closer, the wavelengths shorten, growing bluer.) Its similar to what happens when a siren goes by: The pitch increases as the siren approaches, then decreases as it trails away.

Because space is constantly expanding, the farthest things away from us in the universe are moving away from us. And as light travels through space from those distant galaxies, the light is literally stretched by the expansion of space, Straughn says.

Imagine a star thats really far away. The light from that star may start off in the visible spectrum, but it gets stretched on its journey to us. It grows redder and redder. So when we see distant galaxies with Hubble, theyre sort of these little, tiny red nuggets, Straughn says. Eventually, these very distant, old galaxies grow so red that they drop into the infrared spectrum. Webb can see this ancient light that has become invisible to the human eye.

Conveniently, infrared light has other uses as well. Its a really good type of light to use to look at exoplanets. For instance, if you were on a planet that orbits another star and wanted to see Earth, visible light wouldnt be your best bet.

The Earth peaks in the infrared, says Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory astronomer Kevin Stevenson, who plans to use the Webb in his research. So if we want to be able to study an Earth-like planet in another solar system, What we really want to do is observe at infrared wavelengths, because thats where the light from the Earth is being emitted.

Exoplanet scientists like Stevenson are going to use the Webb to analyze the atmospheres of these worlds: The Webb is capable of determining some of the chemicals in their atmospheres. We can detect water, CO, CO2, methane, Stevenson says. While those arent definitive signs of life on their own, they could begin to ask fascinating questions: What created that methane and carbon dioxide? Could it have been life?

We all want to find another Earth, dont we? Stevenson says. The prospect of answering the question are we alone? has been something that weve been asking ourselves for centuries. And I think with James Webb, this will provide us the first opportunity to really answer that question.

Scientists are clearly raring to go, but the Webb revolution has taken a while. One reason for all the launch delays to the launch has to do with contractor snafus. But a big source of all of them, NASAs Straughn says, is the complexity of the Webb itself.

Because its so big, there arent any rockets that are big enough to launch it fully deployed, Straughn says. The telescope has to be folded up to fit inside a rocket, and has to deploy itself in space. So that whole process of building a deployable telescope in space is the source of a lot of the engineering challenges.

Upping the stakes is the fact that while Hubble was launched to around 340 miles above the Earth, Webb will be almost a million miles away four times the distance from the Earth to the moon.

That means once the Webb is launched, it will be unserviceable by human hands if it breaks. Thats scary, considering the history of the Hubble. Shortly after the Hubble launched in 1990, engineers realized there was a problem with its mirror; the telescopes initial images came back fuzzy, and astronauts had to launch a space shuttle to fix it. That wont be possible with the Webb. It just has to work.

It will be far away for good reason. Because Webb is an infrared telescope, it needs to be kept cold. The Earth itself is warm and glows in infrared. Anything warm glows in infrared light, Straughn says. If the telescope was warm, it would just glow and see itself.

Remarkably, any scientist around the world can apply to use the Webb Space Telescope, provided they write up a project proposal that passes peer review. Its pretty competitive. Last year the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates space telescopes from John Hopkins University in Maryland, put out a call for proposals for Webbs first observing run. About a quarter of the proposals were accepted.

It feels like part of me is still stunned, says Lisa Dang, a physics PhD student at McGill University who was one of the lucky few to get approved to use the Webb. And the other part is having this imposter syndrome like, these data better be really amazing.

Dang is set to study one of the most extreme planets ever discovered: K2-141 b, a planet 202 light-years from Earth and so close to its host star that its surface is believed to be covered by an ocean of lava. If it has clouds, they are likely made out of vaporized rock, which could then precipitate out rock rain. Not much is confirmed about this lava planet, but Dang will use the Webb to study its atmosphere and see whats possible on this extreme world.

Winning the project proposal made me feel like an astronomer for the first time, Dang says. But it also makes K2-141 b very real suddenly.

This is the power of an unprecedented telescope such as the Webb. It will help astronomers like Dang fill in the blank spaces of the cosmos.

Its wild, when you think about it, that were able to piece together the history of what happened before the Earth or the sun even existed, Casey says.

If all goes according to plan, these kinds of breakthroughs could come in a matter of months. Astronomers around the world are waiting for the countdown to begin.

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The Webb Space Telescope is 100x as powerful as the Hubble. It will change astronomy. - Vox.com

Using data from multiple telescopes, scientists have detected clouds on a gas giant exoplanet some 520 light-years from Earth. So detailed were the observations, they even discerned the altitude of the clouds and the structure of the upper atmosphere, with the greatest precision yet.

It's work that will help us better understand exoplanet atmospheres and look for worlds that may have conditions hospitable to life, or biosignatures in their spectra. We're also getting closer to making weather reports for distant alien worlds.

The exoplanet in question is WASP-127b, discovered in 2016. It's a hot and therefore puffy beast, orbiting so close to its star that its year is just 4.2 days. The exoplanet clocks in at 1.3 times the size of Jupiter, but only 0.16 times Jupiter's mass.

This means that its atmosphere is somewhat thin and tenuous perfect for trying to analyze its contents based on the light that streams through it from the exoplanet's host star.

To do this, a team of researchers led by astronomer Romain Allart of the Universit de Montral in Canada combined infrared data from the space-based Hubble Space Telescope, and optical data from the ESPRESSO instrument on the ground-based Very Large Telescope, to peer into different altitudes of WASP-127b's atmosphere.

"First, as found before in this type of planet, we detected the presence of sodium, but at a much lower altitude than we were expecting," Allart said.

"Second, there were strong water vapor signals in the infrared but none at all at visible wavelengths. This implies that water vapor at lower levels is being screened by clouds that are opaque at visible wavelengths but transparent in the infrared."

Figuring out the composition of exoplanetary atmospheres is a tricky thing to do. That's because we can't see most exoplanets directly; we infer their presence based on the effects they have on their host stars. One of these is dimming and brightening when the exoplanet passes between us and the star, the light from the star dims, just a tiny bit.

If it does this enough times, on a regular schedule, then that's one of the telltale signs of an orbiting exoplanet.And we can use this information in other ways, too. When the starlight passes through the exoplanet's atmosphere, wavelengths in the spectrum can be absorbed or by different elements.We call these signatures absorption lines, and we can decode them to see what's in that atmosphere.

Wasp-127b compared to the Solar System. (David Ehrenreich/Universit de Genve, Romain Allart/Universit de Montral)

That's what Allart and his team did, using high-resolution absorption data to narrow down the altitude of the clouds to a surprisingly low cloud layer with atmospheric pressure between 0.3 and 0.5 millibars.

"We don't yet know the composition of the clouds, except that they are not composed of water droplets like on Earth," said Allart.

"We are also puzzled about why the sodium is found in an unexpected place on this planet. Future studies will help us understand not only more about the atmospheric structure, but about WASP-127b, which is proving to be a fascinating place."

The team's analysis also found some peculiar things about how WASP-127b orbits its host star. In the Solar System, where things are orderly, all the planets orbit in the direction of the Sun's rotation, in a more-or-less flat plane around the Sun's equator. This is because of the way the Solar System formed, from a disc of material swirling into the spinning baby Sun.

WASP-127b orbits not just in the opposite direction of its star's rotation, but at a very pronounced angle, almost around the star's poles. The system is thought to be around 10 billion years old, which means something strange is definitely going on in that particular neighborhood.

"Such alignment is unexpected for a hot Saturn in an old stellar system and might be caused by an unknown companion," Allart said.

"All these unique characteristics make WASP-127b a planet that will be very intensely studied in the future."

The research was published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, and presented at the 2021 Europlanet Science Congress.

See the article here:

Astronomers Have Made an Unprecedented Detection of Clouds on a Far-Off Exoplanet - ScienceAlert