My guest today is Dr. Thayne Currie, an astrophysicist at NASA-Ames Research Center and the Subaru Telescope. Dr. Currie was part of a team that directly imaged a newly-forming planet, providing evidence of another way large planets can form, and could have formed here in the Solar System.

https://subarutelescope.org/staff/currie/

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An international team of astronomers led by Dr. Marcin Glowacki, who previously worked at the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy and the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, has made an impressive discovery from 5 billion light-years away, according to a statement released by the institution on Thursday.

Using the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa, the researchers discovered a powerful radio-wave laser, called a ‘megamaser’, that is the most distant megamaser of its kind ever detected. Its light has traveled 58 thousand billion billion (58 followed by 21 zeros) kilometers to Earth.

When galaxies collide…

How did it come to be? Megamasers occur when two galaxies violently collide in the Universe.

NASA ’s citizen science projects are collaborations between scientists and interested members of the public. Through these collaborations, volunteers known as citizen scientists have helped make thousands of important scientific discoveries. Aurorasaurus is one such project that tracks auroras around the world in real time via reports on its website and on Twitter.

Aurorasaurus often partners with other organizations to complement science with citizen science and recently Aurorasauraus partnered with NASA’s Loss through Auroral Microburst Pulsations (LAMP) mission. Early on the morning of Saturday, March 5, 2022, the LAMP mission successfully took flight, flying straight into a pulsating aurora.

The ongoing success of the multi-instrument optics alignment for NASA ’s Webb telescope’s near-infrared instruments has moved the attention of the commissioning team to chill as we carefully monitor the cooling of the Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) down to its final operating temperature of less than 7 kelvins (−447 degrees Fahrenheit 0, or-266 degrees Celsius). We are continuing other activities during this slow cooldown which include monitoring the near-infrared instruments. As MIRI cools, other major components of the observatory, such as the backplane and mirrors, also continue to cool and are approaching their operational temperatures.

Last week, the Webb team did a station-keeping thruster burn to maintain Webb’s position in orbit around the second Lagrange point. This was the second burn since Webb’s arrival at its final orbit in January; these burns will continue periodically throughout the lifetime of the mission.

In the last few weeks, we have been sharing some of Webb’s anticipated science, beginning with the study of the first stars and galaxies in the early universe. Today, we will see how Webb will peer within our own Milky Way galaxy at places where stars and planets form. Klaus Pontoppidan, the Space Telescope Science Institute project scientist for Webbthe cool science planned for star and planet formation with Webb:

Would you like to visit a world where it rains rock?

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Since astronomers began finding exoplanets in the 1990s, they’ve uncovered a lot of hot Jupiters, and now NASA’s most venerable telescope is playing meteorologist.

These colossal worlds are gas giants like our own Jupiter but orbit much closer to their parent stars — close enough that their surfaces might boil at stomach-churning temperatures above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,600 degrees Celsius). Now, the Hubble Space Telescope has pierced the veils of two different hot Jupiters, finding some rather bizarre weather, at least by the mundane standards of our solar system. These worlds are more than curiosities; they’re evidence of how a star can influence an orbiting planet’s atmosphere.

Weather predictions here on Earth are more accurate than they’ve ever been; trying to predict the behavior of our wild and wacky Sun is a little more tricky.

Case in point: according to official predictions, the current cycle of solar activity should be mild. But the gap between the prediction and what’s actually happening is pretty significant – and it’s getting wider. Sunspot counts, used as a measure for solar activity, are way higher than the predicted values calculated by the NOAA, NASA, and the International Space Environmental Service.

In fact, sunspot counts have been consistently higher than predicted levels since September 2020. This could mean that, in contrast to predictions, the Sun is in the swing of an unusually strong activity cycle.