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Moon Europa. Image taken by #NASAJuno and processed by myself. #Europa #Jupiter #News #Astronomy #Science #NASA #Photography 🐘 @GirlInSpace" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mstdn.social/@GirlInSpace

Astronomers have obtained an improved and independent measurement of the Universe's expansion rate by reanalysing GW170817, the historic collision of two neutron stars detected in 2017 through both gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation. Events like this are known as standard sirens because the gravitational-wave signal directly provides information about the source's distance. When the merger also produces an electromagnetic counterpart, astronomers can identify its host galaxy and measure its redshift, allowing them to estimate the Hubble constant without relying on the traditional cosmic distance ladder based on Cepheid variables and Type Ia supernovae. A major limitation of this method is the relationship between distance and the inclination of the binary system. A merger viewed almost face-on can produce a gravitational-wave signal similar to that of a closer system observed from a different angle. To reduce this uncertainty, researchers studied the relativistic jet launched by GW170817. They combined nearly a year of observations from the Hubble Space Telescope with high-resolution radio interferometry, allowing them to track the apparent motion of the jet across the sky. By comparing these observations with hydrodynamic models, the researchers estimated that the system was viewed at an angle of between approximately 16.8 and 19.2 degrees. They calculated a luminosity distance of about 44 megaparsecs, with an uncertainty of 1.6 megaparsecs, and obtained a Hubble constant of 65.5 kilometres per second per megaparsec, with an uncertainty of 4.4 kilometres per second per megaparsec. The result is not yet precise enough to resolve the Hubble tension, but it is closer to the lower expansion rate inferred from observations of the early Universe than to the higher value obtained from nearby supernovae. Because this measurement comes from the late Universe but does not depend on the traditional distance ladder, it provides an important independent test of current cosmological measurements. The main significance of the study is methodological. It shows that detailed observations of relativistic jets can improve the use of neutron-star mergers as standard sirens by reducing the uncertainty between inclination and distance. Future detections of similar mergers could help determine whether the Hubble tension is caused by systematic errors, limitations in current cosmological models or new physics. 👉 share.google/MwvxHnxHxYwOp9…

Astronomers have made the first confirmed detection of a genuine sugar molecule in the interstellar medium, identifying erythrulose in the molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027 near the centre of the Milky Way, approximately 8.2 kiloparsecs, or 26,700 light-years, from Earth. Erythrulose is a monosaccharide containing four carbon atoms and belongs to the ketose family. On Earth, it occurs naturally in fruits such as raspberries and is also used in some self-tanning products, although its astronomical importance lies in its connection to prebiotic chemistry rather than its terrestrial uses. The discovery clarifies an important chemical distinction. Glycolaldehyde has previously been detected in several interstellar environments and is sometimes informally described as the simplest sugar, but chemically it is a hydroxyaldehyde rather than a true monosaccharide. Erythrulose therefore represents the first molecule satisfying the stricter chemical definition of a sugar to be identified directly in the gas and dust between stars. It is also the first interstellar molecule detected with four oxygen atoms, the largest non-cyclic molecule yet identified in this environment by number of constituent atoms, and only the second chiral molecule reported in interstellar space. The international research team used highly sensitive spectral surveys obtained with the 40-metre Yebes radio telescope in Guadalajara and the IRAM 30-metre telescope at Pico Veleta in Granada. Molecules rotating in space emit or absorb radiation at characteristic radio frequencies, producing a spectral fingerprint that can be compared with measurements made in the laboratory. Recent experiments using ultrafast laser vaporisation had provided the accurate gas-phase rotational spectrum of erythrulose needed for this comparison. The astronomers identified 12 groups of spectral features corresponding to 17 rotational transitions, including six lines with little contamination from other molecules. Their analysis estimated that the probability of these six clean signals aligning by chance was about 0.2%, providing strong statistical support for the identification. Unexpectedly, erythrulose appears to be at least eight to seventeen times more abundant in the cloud than the simpler three-carbon sugars glyceraldehyde and dihydroxyacetone, neither of which was detected. This challenges the intuitive expectation that molecular abundance should steadily decline as additional carbon atoms are added. Quantum-chemical calculations and astrochemical simulations instead indicate that erythrulose can form efficiently on the icy surfaces of microscopic interstellar dust grains through reactions involving abundant two-carbon compounds, especially glycolaldehyde and ethylene glycol. Radiation and cosmic rays can drive reactions within these ices, while shocks travelling through the cloud may later release the newly formed molecules into the gas, where radio telescopes can detect them. The result is relevant to research on the origin of life because sugars perform fundamental biological functions. They provide metabolic energy, form structural components of cells and constitute the molecular backbones of RNA and DNA. Producing sufficient concentrations of sugars under plausible conditions on the primitive Earth remains difficult in laboratory experiments, whereas ribose, glucose and other sugars have been found in meteorites and in samples returned from asteroid Bennu. The detection of erythrulose shows directly that genuine monosaccharides can form before stars and planets are fully assembled, allowing them or their chemical descendants to become incorporated into asteroids, comets and young planetary systems. Erythrulose is not itself the ribose used in RNA, but ketose sugars can rearrange into related aldose sugars when exposed to liquid water. Erythrulose can therefore produce erythrose and threose, molecules involved in chemical pathways that may lead towards ribose or towards simpler nucleic-acid analogues such as threose nucleic acid. Based on the measured abundance and several assumptions about the material delivered by primitive impactors, the researchers estimate that between roughly half a million and fifty million tonnes of erythrulose might have reached the early Earth. This figure is highly model-dependent, however, and the existence and intensity of a discrete Late Heavy Bombardment remain debated. The discovery does not demonstrate that life exists elsewhere, that interstellar sugars directly created life on Earth or that one molecular handedness was preferentially produced. Radio observations identify the molecule but cannot determine whether one of its mirror-image forms is more abundant. Nevertheless, the finding provides strong evidence that interstellar clouds are capable of producing relatively complex, biologically relevant organic chemistry. It strengthens the possibility that young planets throughout the Galaxy may inherit some of the chemical ingredients required for prebiotic reactions rather than having to manufacture all of them from simpler substances after they form. 👉 nature.com/articles/s4155…

The Orion Nebula is one of the nearest and most extensively studied regions of massive-star formation, yet a significant part of its surrounding gas has remained difficult to observe. A new study has now produced the most detailed maps so far of neutral atomic hydrogen, or H I, around the nebula by combining observations from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in the United States with data from China’s FAST radio telescope. Neutral hydrogen emits a weak spectral line at a wavelength of 21 centimetres, making radio observations an essential way to trace gas that is largely invisible at optical and infrared wavelengths. The resulting maps resolve the extended Orion Nebula at a scale of about one arcminute, corresponding to approximately 0.12 parsecs at Orion’s distance of roughly 414 parsecs, or 1,350 light-years. The observations clearly identify an expanding shell of atomic gas surrounding the extended nebula. Its shape broadly matches structures previously detected through the 158-micrometre emission line of ionized carbon, which traces several components of the interstellar medium, including photodissociation regions and molecular gas not easily detected through carbon monoxide. This agreement confirms that the neutral hydrogen forms part of the shell created as radiation, ionization fronts and stellar winds from young massive stars push material away from the central region. Orion therefore provides a nearby laboratory for measuring how massive stars transfer mass, momentum and energy into their surroundings and regulate the evolution of the cloud from which new stars may continue to form. One of the most important results concerns the shell’s mass. Earlier analyses based mainly on ionized-carbon emission suggested that it contained about one thousand solar masses of material. The new H I measurements indicate only around one hundred solar masses of neutral atomic gas in the shell’s front hemisphere, roughly ten times less than the previous estimate. This could mean that the total mass and the mechanical effect of the stellar winds have been overestimated. However, the discrepancy does not necessarily imply that the earlier observations were incorrect: some of the material may exist as molecular hydrogen, which is not directly represented by the atomic-hydrogen measurement. Determining how the mass is divided among ionized, atomic and molecular phases will therefore be necessary before the total energy and momentum of the expanding structure can be established reliably. The maps also show that Orion’s environment is considerably more complex than a single, approximately spherical bubble. The researchers detected a probable secondary cavity within or near the main shell, as well as a narrow, elongated structure of atomic gas projecting away from its boundary. According to the scientific paper, this protrusion extends for about four parsecs, equivalent to roughly thirteen light-years. The feature contains substantial neutral gas and may be associated with two or more interacting or overlapping bubbles, although its precise origin remains uncertain. These structures indicate that the nebula was probably not shaped by one simple expansion event. Instead, its present morphology may record several episodes of stellar feedback produced at different times or by different massive stars. Winds, ultraviolet radiation and ionization fronts can generate cavities, sweep gas into shells and create asymmetric channels through lower-density material. Because these processes may either disperse molecular clouds or compress parts of them sufficiently to encourage further collapse, reconstructing the geometry and motion of the gas is essential for understanding how massive stars influence subsequent generations of star formation. The observations support a more irregular and multiphase picture of Orion, although they do not yet provide a unique reconstruction of every bubble or identify the origin of each feature conclusively. The work is the first major result from the Neutral Atomic Hydrogen in the Solar Neighborhood, or NeAtHood, project. Its broader aim is to map atomic hydrogen in nearby stellar nurseries and connect this component with ionized and molecular gas. Applying the same high-resolution radio techniques to other regions should allow astronomers to test whether Orion’s nested shells and elongated structures are unusual or are common consequences of feedback from massive stars. The study also provides new observational constraints for numerical simulations attempting to reproduce the interaction between young stellar populations and the surrounding interstellar medium. 👉 sci.news/astronomy/hidd…

Many rocky exoplanets orbit so close to their stars that tidal forces are expected to synchronize their rotation with their orbital motion. As a result, the same hemisphere permanently faces the star while the opposite side remains in continuous darkness. This produces a strong and persistent thermal contrast, with an intensely heated dayside and a much colder nightside. Such worlds have often been considered poor candidates for habitability, but new laboratory research suggests that their internal dynamics may create more moderate local environments than surface temperatures alone would indicate. The study focused on mantle convection, the slow movement of material through the rocky layer between a planet’s crust and core. Unlike Earth, where surface heating changes with the day-night cycle and mantle circulation is influenced by a more uniform boundary temperature, a tidally locked planet experiences permanent horizontal as well as vertical temperature gradients. To investigate how these gradients interact, the researchers constructed a laboratory analogue using a rectangular tank filled with a viscous glycerol solution. Different parts of the tank were heated or cooled independently to represent the substellar region facing the star, the antistellar region on the nightside, the planetary surface and the deeper mantle. Temperature-sensitive particles allowed the movement of the fluid to be visualized. Across a wide range of experimental conditions, the fluid developed a persistent, planet-scale circulation. Hot material rose beneath the dayside, moved laterally through the upper mantle, cooled and sank beneath the nightside before returning through the deeper interior. This large overturning loop remained present whether the smaller-scale flow was steady, periodically variable or turbulent. The permanent day-night temperature difference therefore imposed a stable global organization on the mantle, even when local convection became more complex. Thermal plumes also appeared in the experiments, but they behaved differently from many mantle plumes on Earth. Instead of forming at changing locations or being carried beneath moving tectonic plates, the principal upwelling and downwelling regions remained geographically anchored. Rising hot material was concentrated near the substellar point, while sinking cold material was concentrated near the antistellar point. This could produce long-lived volcanic or tectonic activity in specific regions rather than distributing it more evenly across the planet. The experiments showed that the horizontal day-night temperature gradient can be as important as the vertical temperature difference between the surface and deep interior. Even as a planet ages and its internal heat gradually declines, permanent stellar heating of one hemisphere may continue to drive vigorous circulation. Tidally locked planets could therefore preserve mantle convection and localized geological activity for longer than would be expected from their internal heat alone. This circulation also redistributes heat laterally. Rather than leaving the dayside completely overheated and the nightside entirely frozen, mantle flow can carry thermal energy between hemispheres and create a gradual variation in geothermal heat flux. The researchers propose that some intermediate or high-latitude regions could consequently experience moderate subsurface temperatures. Under appropriate conditions, these areas might permit liquid water or hydrothermal environments, even when much of the planet’s surface remains inhospitable. These results do not demonstrate that tidally locked exoplanets are inhabited, or even that a particular planet is habitable. The model is deliberately simplified and does not fully reproduce the complex rheology, three-dimensional geometry, atmospheric circulation, crustal structure, water inventory or chemical composition of a real planet. LHS 3844b, which is used as an illustrative example, is a very hot world with little evidence for a substantial atmosphere and should not itself be interpreted as a promising Earth analogue. However, the research shows that permanent day and night do not automatically eliminate every possible habitable environment. Assessments of these planets must consider not only their atmospheres and surface temperatures, but also the long-term movement of heat and material through their interiors. The persistent hemispheric flow could also influence volcanic outgassing, crust formation and the behaviour of a planet’s liquid core. It may therefore affect whether the planet generates a magnetic field, although the experiment did not directly test this possibility. Overall, the findings broaden the range of environments worth investigating in the search for life by showing that tidal locking can organize internal heat transport in ways that may preserve localized, thermally moderate regions on otherwise extreme worlds. 👉 nature.com/articles/s4146…

.@SpaceX has completed a major ground test ahead of Starship’s thirteenth integrated flight. On July 10, Super Heavy Booster 20 fired all 33 of its upgraded Raptor 3 engines during a static-fire test at Starbase in South Texas. The engines operated for roughly 25 seconds while the booster remained secured to the launch stand, allowing engineers to reproduce much of the mechanical, thermal and propulsion stress expected during an actual liftoff. SpaceX described it as a full-duration, 33-engine static fire, making it one of the final major technical checks before the booster can be cleared for flight. Booster 20 had been transported to the pad the previous day and installed using the launch tower’s large mechanical arms, commonly known as the “Mechazilla” chopsticks. Booster 20 is the second Version 3, or V3, Super Heavy booster to reach the launch pad. It uses the latest Raptor 3 engine configuration and forms part of a substantially redesigned Starship system. Compared with the previous V2 generation, Starship V3 includes improved avionics intended to reduce vehicle mass and increase payload capacity, enlarged propellant tanks and hardware designed to support the transfer of cryogenic propellant between spacecraft in orbit. In-space refuelling is essential to SpaceX’s long-term architecture because a Starship departing for the Moon or Mars cannot carry all the propellant required for those missions in a single launch. Multiple tanker vehicles would therefore need to deliver fuel to a spacecraft already in orbit. The complete vehicle assigned to Flight 13 consists of Booster 20 and the upper-stage spacecraft Ship 40. Ship 40 had already completed a static-fire test of its six Raptor engines on July 2, meaning both stages have now undergone their principal propulsion tests. At the time of reporting, regulatory airspace notices suggested that the launch might occur as early as July 15, although such dates remain provisional and depend on final technical reviews, licensing, range availability and weather conditions. A successful static fire does not guarantee that the rocket is ready to launch, but it provides important evidence that the engines, propellant systems, ground equipment and control software can operate together under conditions approaching those of flight. Flight 13 is expected to follow broadly the same mission profile as Flight 12, the first flight of the V3 configuration. During that previous mission, the Starship upper stage completed its suborbital trajectory and performed a controlled soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean. However, the flight was only partially successful. Booster 19 encountered problems after stage separation and was unable to execute the manoeuvres required for its planned controlled ocean landing. Ship 39 also suffered an engine anomaly, forcing SpaceX to cancel a planned in-space Raptor relight. Flight 13 is therefore intended not only to repeat the elements that worked, but also to investigate and correct the propulsion and control problems that prevented all of Flight 12’s objectives from being completed. The broader goal is to move Starship V3 closer to operational missions. Starship is being designed as a fully reusable launch system capable of carrying more than 100 metric tons to low Earth orbit. SpaceX ultimately intends both Super Heavy and the Starship upper stage to return to Starbase, where they would be caught by the launch tower’s mechanical arms, refurbished and flown again. The company has already caught several earlier Super Heavy boosters and has reused recovered boosters in subsequent tests, but it has not yet attempted to catch the Starship upper stage. Ship follows a more complex return profile: it enters the atmosphere almost horizontally, using thousands of heat-shield tiles to withstand re-entry heating, before performing a rapid “flip and burn” manoeuvre near the surface to rotate vertically and reduce its velocity.

Astronomers have just uncovered one of the universe’s largest known spinning structures: a cosmic filament stretching some 50 million light-years. Within this enormous dark-matter “thread”, part of the so-called cosmic web, lies a razor-thin chain of 14 hydrogen-rich galaxies aligned over about 5.5 million light-years, themselves embedded amid a broader population of roughly 300 galaxies. What makes the discovery especially striking is the coordinated spin. Observations from the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, supplemented by optical data from observatories including Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and Sloan Digital Sky Survey, show that many of the galaxies in the chain rotate on their axis in the same direction as the filament is turning around its central axis. The researchers liken the configuration to a “teacups ride” at a theme park, each galaxy spins like a teacup, while the entire filament (the ride’s platform) rotates too. This dual-level rotation challenges long-standing assumptions about how galaxies get their spin. Traditionally, galactic rotation has been attributed to the angular momentum inherited from the swirling clouds of gas that formed them in the early universe. Over time, mergers and gravitational interactions would seemingly scramble any alignment. But the discovery indicates that the large-scale environment, the cosmic web itself, can imprint a coherent rotational motion on both the galaxies and the filament that hosts them. The finding opens an intriguing window into galaxy formation and evolution. The filament may act as a conduit, funneling hydrogen gas and angular momentum into young galaxies, thereby shaping their rotation, morphology, and star-formation activity over cosmic time. Models that simulate how structure forms in the universe may need revising in light of this evidence, recognizing that the cosmic web’s geometry and motion play a more active role than previously thought. 👉 share.google/at3F9Ks3ntCI2c…

One of the most striking regularities of the universe is that, once objects become large enough, they almost always end up round. This is true for planets, stars, and even black holes, whose defining boundary, the event horizon, is spherical in the simplest cases. The universe certainly produces disks, filaments, and irregular structures, but those shapes usually belong to extended systems made of many particles in motion, such as protoplanetary disks, accretion disks, or galaxies. When it comes to individual, self-gravitating bodies, roundness is the natural outcome. The reason has nothing to do with symmetry being aesthetically preferred and everything to do with gravity and scale. Gravity acts on mass and always pulls toward the center of mass. Its strength follows a simple rule: it decreases with the square of the distance, according to the inverse-square law. That scaling turns out to be crucial. As an object grows, gravity does not just increase, it becomes overwhelmingly dominant compared to the internal strength of the material. For small objects, gravity is weak enough that rock, ice, and metal can easily resist it. Chemical bonds, fractures, and rigid structures hold their shape. This is why asteroids and many small moons look irregular, elongated, or lumpy. We sometimes refer to the size threshold below which bodies remain misshapen as the “potato radius.” Below this limit, gravity simply cannot overcome material strength. Above it, gravity begins to win. Planet formation shifts this balance decisively. Planets form inside disks of gas and dust surrounding young stars. These disks are not uniform; slight density variations allow some regions to grow faster than others. Even a small excess of mass gives one clump slightly stronger gravity, allowing it to attract more material and grow further. Over time, these clumps become planetary embryos, sweeping up gas, dust, and solid debris from their surroundings. As a growing planet accumulates mass, internal pressure rises dramatically. Temperatures increase, and the interior no longer behaves like a rigid solid. Over geological timescales, rock flows. This is not poetic language but physical reality: under high pressure, solid materials deform plastically. The planet behaves like an extremely viscous fluid, slowly but relentlessly responding to gravity. Gravity pulls inward from all directions toward the center. If a portion of the surface protrudes farther out, it experiences a stronger gravitational pull and tends to collapse inward. Regions closer to the center feel less pull. Over time, material redistributes until these differences are minimized. The shape that naturally emerges from this process is a sphere, because a sphere is the configuration in which gravity is balanced equally in every direction and gravitational potential energy is minimized. This state is known as hydrostatic equilibrium. It does not require a planet to be completely molten, nor does it happen instantly. It is the cumulative result of gravity acting continuously over millions or billions of years, steadily erasing large-scale irregularities. Rotation modifies this equilibrium but does not create it. As a planet spins, rotation flings material outward at the equator, working against gravity’s inward pull. The result is a slight equatorial bulge and flattened poles. This is why Earth is not a perfect sphere but an oblate spheroid. Faster rotation exaggerates this effect, but rotation alone cannot make an object round. Without sufficient gravity, spinning bodies remain irregular or fragment rather than smoothing themselves. The limits of gravity’s shaping power can be seen in surface features. Mountains and valleys exist because local forces temporarily resist collapse, but there is a strict limit to how tall a mountain can grow before the underlying rock fails under its own weight. On Earth, even the tallest mountains are tiny compared to the planet’s radius. From a planetary perspective, Earth is extraordinarily smooth. Small bodies never reach this regime. They remain irregular not because gravity behaves differently for them, but because it never becomes strong enough to dominate their structure. Composition matters as well: icy bodies can reach roundness at smaller sizes than rocky ones, because ice deforms more easily under pressure. In the end, planets are round for a simple and unavoidable reason. Once an object becomes massive enough, gravity takes control. It pulls matter inward, flattens extremes, redistributes mass, and drives the object toward the most stable shape available. Sphericity is not a design choice of the universe. It is what matter does when gravity finally wins.

New Horizons is now doing something scientifically valuable far beyond its original Pluto mission: it is measuring how the solar wind changes as it moves into the outer heliosphere, the vast bubble carved out by the Sun’s plasma and magnetic field. Using the Solar Wind Around Pluto instrument, or SWAP, researchers have tracked the solar wind between about 21 and 58 astronomical units from the Sun. The key result is that the solar wind does not simply keep streaming outward at the same speed. It gradually slows as it travels into a region increasingly influenced by material from interstellar space. The physical reason is mass loading. The solar wind is a supersonic flow of charged particles from the Sun, but the heliosphere is not empty. Neutral atoms from the interstellar medium enter this region and can become ionized through charge exchange with solar-wind ions. Once ionized, they are picked up by the solar wind and effectively add mass to the flow. A heavier flow moving through the outer heliosphere loses speed, so New Horizons is directly observing the gradual weakening of the Sun’s dynamical influence with distance. The measurements are important because they extend what Voyager 2 had already shown. Between 30 and 43 AU, New Horizons and Voyager 2 data indicated that the solar wind was about 5–10% slower than near Earth, at 1 AU. New Horizons has now measured the solar wind at 58 AU and found it to be roughly 13–15% slower than at 1 AU. This agrees with models in which interstellar neutral material penetrates the heliosphere and progressively modifies the solar wind before the spacecraft reaches the more abrupt boundary regions farther out. The next major region of interest is the termination shock, where the solar wind slows much more sharply and becomes subsonic relative to the surrounding plasma environment. Voyager 2 crossed that region at about 84 AU and measured a much stronger speed drop, around 46%. New Horizons was reported to be roughly 65–66 AU from the Sun in July 2026, so it may approach the termination-shock region around 2029, depending on the exact structure and motion of the heliosphere. NASA describes the termination shock, heliosheath and heliopause as successive regions on the way from the solar-wind-dominated environment to interstellar space. This matters beyond pure heliophysics. The heliosphere helps regulate how many galactic cosmic rays enter the inner Solar System. Those high-energy particles are a serious radiation hazard for astronauts, spacecraft electronics and long-duration missions beyond Earth’s protective magnetic field. Better measurements of how the heliosphere changes with distance help scientists refine models of cosmic-ray shielding, not only for future lunar and Martian exploration, but also for understanding how other stars create their own astrospheres as they interact with the interstellar medium. In my view, the most interesting aspect is that New Horizons is becoming a kind of second-generation Voyager experiment. It is not just repeating the Voyagers’ path; it is measuring the outer heliosphere under different solar-cycle conditions, with different instrumentation and at a different time. That makes the mission scientifically valuable even after Pluto, because the boundary of the Solar System is not a fixed wall. It is a dynamic plasma environment shaped by the Sun, the interstellar medium and time-dependent solar activity. 👉 share.google/AsRVAY8sgs8rXh…

@AJamesMcCarthy Easy living 🥰

IMPORTANT UPDATE Gregory is in a box

SN 2024afav is not important simply because it was bright, but because of the way its light changed after maximum brightness. Superluminous supernovae are already extreme: they can shine at least ten times brighter than ordinary supernovae, and for years one of the major questions has been what keeps them so luminous after the initial stellar explosion. A leading idea has been that, instead of collapsing directly into a black hole, the core of a massive star can leave behind a newborn magnetar: a neutron star with an exceptionally strong magnetic field and very rapid rotation. As it spins down, that magnetar injects energy into the expanding supernova debris, keeping the event bright for much longer than a normal radioactive-decay-powered supernova would allow. What makes SN 2024afav unusually compelling is that astronomers detected a repeated pattern of bumps in its light curve after peak brightness. The explosion was discovered in December 2024 and monitored for more than 200 days by Las Cumbres Observatory. Rather than fading smoothly, its brightness rose and fell several times, and the spacing between those bumps became shorter with time. The team describes this as a “chirp”: not a sound, of course, but a timing pattern in the light, where the pulses arrive faster and faster. That changing rhythm is the key evidence. The proposed explanation is physically elegant. Some material expelled in the supernova likely fell back toward the newborn compact object and formed an accretion disk around it. If the central object was a rapidly spinning magnetar and the disk was tilted relative to the magnetar’s spin axis, general relativity predicts that the rotating mass should drag nearby spacetime with it. This is the Lense–Thirring effect, or frame dragging. The result would be a wobbling, precessing disk. As that disk moved, it could periodically block or reflect radiation from the magnetar, producing the observed fluctuations in the supernova’s light. As the disk moved inward, the wobble became faster, naturally producing the shortening intervals seen in the “chirp.” The inferred properties are also consistent with a magnetar engine. The team estimates a spin period of about 4.2 milliseconds and a magnetic field roughly 300 trillion times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field. Those values fit the basic picture of a young, highly magnetized neutron star powerful enough to energize the surrounding ejecta. This matters because the magnetar model for superluminous supernovae has been plausible for more than a decade, but direct evidence from inside the still-opaque explosion was difficult to obtain. SN 2024afav gives something closer to a diagnostic signature: not merely a bright light curve that can be fitted by a magnetar model, but a time-dependent pattern tied to the dynamics of a central engine. The result does not mean every superluminous supernova is powered by a magnetar. Some may still be explained by interaction between the supernova shock and dense circumstellar material, and some extreme explosions may involve black holes or other central-engine physics. But this event strongly supports the idea that at least some hydrogen-poor superluminous supernovae are powered by newborn magnetars. It also opens a new observational route: instead of only asking how bright these explosions are, astronomers can look for structure in the light curve that encodes the geometry and relativistic dynamics of the central remnant. Future wide-field surveys, especially with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, should be able to find more of these “chirping” events if they are not exceptionally rare. 👉 share.google/adqR9PtddZTS9C…

Could cosmic structure itself be affecting the expansion of the universe? Cosmology often begins with a useful simplification: on very large scales, the universe is treated as homogeneous and isotropic. That means it looks roughly the same everywhere and in every direction, once we average over enormous distances. Individual galaxies, clusters, filaments, and cosmic voids are not ignored, but they are treated as small-scale structure sitting on top of a smoother background. This assumption is the foundation of modern cosmology. It allows physicists to describe the universe with the Friedmann equations, which come from general relativity and relate the expansion of space to the matter, radiation, curvature, and dark energy it contains. This framework has been extraordinarily successful. It explains the cosmic microwave background, the expansion history of the universe, the formation of large-scale structure, and many other observations with remarkable precision. But there is a subtle question hiding inside that success. What happens when the universe is not perfectly smooth? The real universe is not a uniform mist of matter. It is a cosmic web. Galaxies gather into clusters. Clusters connect along filaments. Between them lie enormous voids, some hundreds of millions of light-years across. Most of the volume of the universe is relatively empty, while much of the matter is concentrated into dense structures. So when cosmologists average the universe and treat it as smooth, are they missing something? That question is known as cosmic backreaction. The basic idea is simple to state, but difficult to calculate: the expansion of an inhomogeneous universe may not be exactly the same as the expansion of a perfectly homogeneous universe with the same average density. In everyday terms, averaging is not always innocent. Imagine a landscape of mountains and valleys. The average height may tell you something useful, but it does not tell you what it is like to walk across the terrain. The shape of the terrain matters. In cosmology, the “terrain” is the distribution of matter and curvature across space. General relativity makes this question especially important because gravity is nonlinear. In a nonlinear theory, averaging first and evolving later is not always the same as evolving first and averaging later. That is the heart of the backreaction problem. In the standard picture, cosmologists first smooth the universe into an idealized background and then study how that smooth background expands. But the actual universe evolves with structure in it. Matter clumps. Voids grow. Dense regions slow their expansion or collapse into bound systems. Underdense regions expand more rapidly. The question is whether all those local differences can feed back into the average expansion of the universe. This is not a denial of cosmic expansion. It is not an alternative to general relativity. It is a question inside general relativity: when spacetime becomes lumpy, how should we correctly define and measure the average expansion? The most dramatic version of the idea asks whether cosmic backreaction could mimic some of the effects usually attributed to dark energy. Since voids occupy such a large fraction of cosmic volume and expand faster than denser regions, perhaps the average expansion could appear to accelerate, or at least be modified, without requiring dark energy to do all the work. That possibility is interesting, but it is also highly constrained. The evidence for accelerated expansion does not come from a single observation. It comes from Type Ia supernovae, the cosmic microwave background, baryon acoustic oscillations, galaxy clustering, gravitational lensing, and the growth of structure. The standard LambdaCDM model, which includes dark matter and dark energy, fits this broad network of data very well. So cosmic backreaction cannot simply be invoked as a vague explanation. It has to reproduce the observations at least as well as the standard model. That is a severe test. Most studies suggest that backreaction is probably too small to replace dark energy entirely, especially on the largest observable scales where the universe appears very close to homogeneous. In the usual perturbative treatments, the effects of inhomogeneities tend to remain small. But the debate has not disappeared, because the conceptual issue is real and the mathematics of averaging in general relativity is not trivial. One reason the subject remains alive is that “the expansion rate of the universe” is not as simple as it sounds. In a perfectly homogeneous universe, there is one clean expansion rate. In the real universe, different regions can behave differently. Voids expand faster. Dense regions expand more slowly. Bound systems like galaxies and clusters no longer participate in the overall expansion in the same way. Observers located in different environments may infer slightly different local expansion rates. This connects backreaction to broader questions about cosmic tensions. The Hubble tension, for example, is the disagreement between the expansion rate inferred from the early universe and the rate measured more directly in the local universe. Cosmic backreaction is not the leading solution to that tension, but it belongs to the family of ideas asking whether our interpretation of cosmic expansion might be affected by structure, environment, and averaging. There is also the related problem of cosmic variance. We observe the universe from one location, inside one particular cosmic environment. If our region sits in a slightly underdense or overdense area, local measurements could be biased relative to the cosmic average. That does not mean the whole cosmological model is wrong, but it means precision cosmology has to be careful about where we are measuring from. The deeper issue is that cosmology asks us to infer the behavior of the whole universe from inside it. We cannot step outside the universe and watch it expand from a distance. We build models from light, redshifts, distances, matter distributions, lensing maps, and the fossil radiation of the early universe. Every inference depends on how well our idealized models capture the messy, structured reality we observe. This is why cosmic backreaction matters even if it does not replace dark energy. It reminds us that the smooth universe is an approximation. A powerful approximation, but still an approximation. The real universe is made of contrasts: dense knots of matter, vast empty regions, curved spacetime, evolving structures, and observers embedded inside that structure. A good cosmological model has to explain both the smooth large-scale behavior and the lumpy details. At present, the safest conclusion is cautious. Cosmic backreaction is a legitimate problem in relativistic cosmology, not a fringe idea by itself. It asks a mathematically precise and physically meaningful question: does the formation of cosmic structure affect the average expansion of the universe? The answer appears to be yes in principle, but probably not strongly enough to remove the need for dark energy in the standard interpretation. Still, the question is valuable. It forces cosmologists to sharpen the foundations of their models. It asks whether the universe we average in equations is exactly the same as the universe we observe through telescopes. And it reminds us that precision cosmology is not only about collecting better data. It is also about understanding what our averages really mean. The universe may be homogeneous on the largest scales. But it is not smooth in the way a mathematical model is smooth. It is a living cosmic web of voids, filaments, clusters, and galaxies. Cosmic backreaction asks whether that web is merely decoration on top of the expansion, or whether it subtly participates in the expansion itself. The answer may not overthrow modern cosmology. But it may help make it more exact.

Neutron stars are often described as the corpses of massive stars, but that description almost makes them sound passive. In reality, they are among the most extreme laboratories in the universe: objects where gravity, nuclear physics, magnetic fields and relativity are pushed into regimes that no experiment on Earth can reproduce. A neutron star is born when a massive star exhausts its nuclear fuel and its core collapses under gravity. The outer layers are expelled in a supernova, while the inner core is compressed into an object only about the size of a city, but with more mass than the Sun. During that collapse, atoms are crushed so violently that electrons and protons are forced together, forming neutrons. The result is matter packed at a density comparable to, and possibly beyond, that inside an atomic nucleus. That is what makes neutron stars so scientifically valuable. They are not just astronomical objects; they are natural experiments in the behaviour of matter under almost impossible pressure. One of the central questions is what actually exists inside them. We know the outer layers contain neutron rich matter, but the deep interior remains uncertain. It may be a superfluid of neutrons, or it may contain more exotic states of matter: hyperons, Bose condensates, or even deconfined quark matter. In other words, a neutron star may contain forms of matter that have not existed freely since the earliest moments of the universe. This is why studying their mass and radius is so important. A slightly larger or smaller radius is not a minor detail; it changes what kinds of matter can survive inside. If a neutron star is very compact, the matter inside must be highly compressible. If it is larger, the internal pressure must be stronger. These measurements help constrain the equation of state, the physical relationship between pressure, density and temperature inside nuclear matter. It is one of the great unsolved problems connecting astrophysics with particle physics. Neutron stars also allow us to test gravity in one of its strongest forms. Their surfaces have gravitational fields billions of times stronger than Earth’s. Light escaping from them is bent and redshifted by the curvature of spacetime. In binary systems, especially when two neutron stars orbit each other, their motion becomes a precise probe of general relativity. When they finally merge, they release gravitational waves: ripples in spacetime that carry information about their masses, spins and internal structure. The merger of two neutron stars is especially important because it links several branches of astrophysics at once. It produces gravitational waves, electromagnetic radiation, gamma ray bursts, kilonovae and heavy elements. Many of the elements heavier than iron, including gold, platinum and rare earth elements, are thought to be forged in these violent collisions through rapid neutron capture. That means neutron stars are not only remnants of dead stars; they are also cosmic factories that help seed galaxies with some of the most valuable and complex elements in nature. Some neutron stars become pulsars. These objects emit beams of radiation from their magnetic poles, and as the star rotates, those beams sweep across space like a lighthouse. When one points toward Earth, we see regular pulses. Some pulsars are so stable that they rival atomic clocks. This makes them powerful tools for testing physics, mapping the interstellar medium and searching for subtle effects such as low frequency gravitational waves. Others become magnetars, a rare and even more extreme class of neutron star with magnetic fields trillions of times stronger than Earth’s. Their magnetic energy can crack the crust, trigger starquakes and release enormous bursts of X rays and gamma rays. A magnetar is a reminder that a neutron star is not simply a dense ball of matter; it is a dynamic object where magnetic stress, crustal physics and relativistic plasma can interact violently. What makes neutron stars so compelling is that they sit at the boundary between what we understand and what we can only infer. They are small enough to seem almost unreal, yet massive enough to warp spacetime dramatically. They are dead stars, but they can pulse, flare, collide and manufacture heavy elements. They are astronomical objects, but their deepest importance may lie in what they reveal about matter itself. Ultimately, the study of neutron stars matters because it does not only ask what these objects are. It asks what matter becomes when gravity has compressed it almost to the limit, how spacetime behaves around ultra compact objects, and how the universe builds some of its heaviest elements. Neutron stars are not just remnants. They are physical extremes made visible.

The Bullet Cluster has long been treated as one of the clearest astrophysical arguments for dark matter, because it shows a striking separation between ordinary matter and gravitational mass. In this system, two galaxy clusters collided at very high speed. The hot intracluster gas, which contains much of the ordinary baryonic matter, interacted, slowed down, heated up, and is visible in X-rays. The galaxies mostly passed through one another, and gravitational lensing maps showed that most of the mass appeared to remain aligned with the galaxy concentrations rather than with the X-ray gas. In the standard interpretation, this made sense if a large amount of collisionless dark matter passed through the collision almost unaffected while the gas lagged behind. @NASA and @chandraxray have historically described this separation as direct evidence that most of the gravitating matter in the Bullet Cluster is dark matter. A new study challenges the strength of that argument, but it does not simply “disprove dark matter.” The work, uses recent JWST data to re-estimate the baryonic mass in the central regions of the Bullet Cluster. The authors focus especially on the brightest cluster galaxies and on the possible contribution of stellar remnants, such as neutron stars and black holes, which are ordinary baryonic objects but largely invisible. Their argument is that if the earlier stellar population was rich in massive stars, then many compact remnants could now contribute significant unseen baryonic mass. In a MOND framework, where gravity behaves differently at very low accelerations, this extra baryonic mass may be enough to account for the strong-lensing signal in the cluster cores without requiring as much, or possibly any, non-baryonic dark matter in those regions. The technical point is not that the Bullet Cluster contains no missing mass problem, but that the missing mass might be smaller than previously inferred if the baryonic budget has been underestimated. The study re-estimates the baryonic masses of three core regions using JWST photometry and compares them with MOND strong-lensing masses. The authors find that the MOND lensing masses fall within the range predicted by their models based on the integrated galaxy-wide initial mass function, or IGIMF, which allows a larger contribution from massive-star remnants. They also explicitly note an important caveat: the physical viability of this scenario still depends on whether the remnant population has the right spatial distribution and dynamical behaviour. That remains to be established. The result is interesting because it reopens a case that many cosmologists considered almost closed. The Bullet Cluster has often been presented as a severe problem for MOND-like alternatives, because the gravitational lensing peaks appear offset from the hot gas, where most of the visible ordinary matter lies. This new analysis argues that, once JWST-based stellar estimates and compact stellar remnants are included, the system may be more compatible with MOND than previously assumed. Even within the standard dark matter model, the authors suggest that the amount of dark matter required in the central Bullet Cluster regions could be reduced, perhaps by around half according to the University of Bonn summary. The careful conclusion is that this study weakens one famous argument for dark matter, rather than overturning the entire dark matter paradigm. Dark matter is supported by several independent observational lines, including gravitational lensing, galaxy dynamics, cluster behaviour, and cosmological measurements; NASA, for example, describes lensing as one of the ways scientists infer dark matter because unseen mass bends the light of background galaxies. If the MOND-plus-remnants explanation survives further scrutiny, it would mean that the Bullet Cluster is not the simple “smoking gun” for dark matter that it has often been portrayed to be. 👉 share.google/c0HtiKOcgvCWGa…

@kamin_amy In the Panthéon in Paris, alongside Pierre Curie. She was originally buried in Sceaux, near Paris, but in 1995 her remains and Pierre’s were transferred to the Panthéon. She became the first woman to be entombed there on her own scientific merits.

@ExploreCosmos_ Do you know where she’s buried?

On this day: Marie Curie and the Nobel Prize that changed the atom. On this day, July 4, 1934, Marie Skłodowska Curie died in France from aplastic anaemia, a blood disease strongly associated with exposure to large amounts of radiation. Her death has often been described as a tragic consequence of the very phenomenon she helped reveal to the world, but her story should not be reduced only to that irony. Curie did not simply become famous because of radiation. She transformed radioactivity from a mysterious observation into a rigorous scientific field, and in doing so changed physics, chemistry and medicine. Her first Nobel Prize came in 1903, when she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel. Becquerel was recognised for discovering spontaneous radioactivity, while Marie and Pierre Curie were honoured for their research into the radiation phenomena he had uncovered. That award made Marie Curie the first woman ever to receive a Nobel Prize, but its scientific importance went far beyond the historical symbolism. It marked the moment when radioactivity became one of the central problems of modern science. What made Curie’s work so powerful was not only that she studied radioactive materials, but how she studied them. She treated radioactivity as something measurable. By analysing uranium and thorium compounds, she showed that the intensity of the radiation depended on the amount of radioactive element present, not on the chemical form of the compound. This was a crucial insight. It suggested that radioactivity was not a normal chemical reaction, nor a superficial property of a mineral, but something arising from within the atom itself. That idea was revolutionary. At the end of the nineteenth century, the atom was still often imagined as stable and indivisible. Curie’s measurements pointed in another direction. They implied that matter contained internal processes capable of releasing energy and producing invisible radiation. Long before nuclear physics had fully developed, her work helped open the conceptual door to the atomic nucleus. One of the decisive moments came through her study of pitchblende, a uranium-rich mineral. Curie found that pitchblende was more radioactive than could be explained by its uranium content alone. Instead of dismissing the anomaly, she followed it. The conclusion was bold but logical: the mineral must contain unknown substances that were far more radioactive than uranium. This reasoning led to the discovery of polonium, named after her native Poland, and radium, the element that would become almost synonymous with the early age of radioactivity. Her second Nobel Prize came in 1911, this time in Chemistry. It recognised her work on radioactivity, especially the discovery of radium and polonium, the isolation of radium, and the study of its properties and compounds. This made Curie the first person to receive two Nobel Prizes, and she remains the only person awarded Nobel Prizes in two different scientific categories. The distinction between the two Nobel Prizes matters. The 1903 Nobel was mainly about a new physical phenomenon: radioactivity as a property that revealed something deep about matter and energy. The 1911 Nobel was about chemical proof. Curie had to show that radium was not merely a strange radiation source or an impurity, but a real element with identifiable properties. That required years of demanding laboratory work, processing large quantities of pitchblende residues under extremely poor conditions to extract tiny amounts of radioactive material. Her work also changed medicine. Radium and X-rays became part of the early development of radiation-based diagnosis and treatment. During World War I, Curie promoted the medical use of X-rays and helped develop mobile radiological units, later known as petites Curies, so surgeons could locate bullets and shrapnel in wounded soldiers more accurately. This practical side of her work is sometimes treated as secondary, but it shows something essential about her scientific character: she believed that research had value not only as knowledge, but as a tool to reduce human suffering. The danger, however, was not yet properly understood. Curie and many of her contemporaries handled radioactive substances without the protective measures that would now be considered basic. Radioactive materials were carried, stored and manipulated at a time when radiological safety did not yet exist as a mature discipline. Her later illness was therefore not simply a personal tragedy; it was also part of the early history of a field that discovered its risks only while people were already working inside them. Marie Curie’s Nobel legacy is extraordinary because it joins intellectual courage with experimental discipline. She did not build her reputation on speculation, but on measurement, chemical separation and evidence. Her discoveries showed that atoms were not inert pieces of matter, that invisible radiation could reveal the internal structure of nature, and that a phenomenon born in the laboratory could reshape medicine, physics and chemistry. On this day, it is worth remembering not only how she died, but what she proved. Marie Curie’s two Nobel Prizes were not decorations attached to an exceptional life. They marked two stages of a scientific revolution: first, the recognition of radioactivity as a fundamental physical phenomenon; then, the chemical isolation of the elements that made that phenomenon impossible to ignore. She did not merely study radiation. She gave science a way to understand it.

Hubble has detected escaping ultraviolet, ionizing light from MXDFz4.4, a very small but intensely active galaxy that existed about 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, near the end of the Era of Reionization. This is important because, in the early Universe, space between galaxies was filled with neutral hydrogen gas that absorbed energetic ultraviolet photons. Over time, that gas became ionized and transparent, but we are still trying to understand exactly which sources supplied enough radiation to clear that cosmic fog. MXDFz4.4 gives a rare, direct view of that process in action. The galaxy is remarkable because it is tiny compared with the Milky Way, yet it is forming stars at a much higher rate. NASA describes it as about 100 times smaller by area than the Milky Way but forming stars around 10 times faster. Its young, massive stars are packed into a small region, and that concentration appears to be crucial: hot, short-lived stars produce strong ultraviolet radiation, while stellar feedback and supernovae can punch channels through surrounding gas, allowing ionizing photons to escape into intergalactic space. This detection was not made by Hubble alone. Hubble provided the key view of the escaping ultraviolet light, but JWST data helped determine the galaxy’s stellar mass, older stellar population and star-formation history, while VLT/MUSE observations fixed the galaxy’s distance and cosmic epoch. The study identifies MXDFz4.4 as a high-redshift Lyman-continuum emitter at z = 4.442, observed roughly 250 million years after the end of reionization, and estimates that a large fraction of its ionizing radiation may be escaping. The result strengthens the idea that compact, rapidly star-forming galaxies played a major role in reionizing the Universe. It does not mean that one galaxy solved the whole problem, but it provides a concrete example of the mechanism we have long suspected: bursts of massive star formation can generate enough energetic radiation, and enough mechanical feedback, to open paths through gas that would otherwise block the light. MXDFz4.4 therefore acts as a nearby-in-time analogue for the galaxies that may have transformed the early Universe from opaque to transparent. What makes the observation especially valuable is that it connects morphology, star formation and photon escape in the same object. The galaxy is not simply bright; its structure and recent bursty star formation help explain why ionizing photons could get out. That gives us a way to test whether similar signatures, compactness, high star-formation-rate density, disturbed gas, Lyα morphology and recent bursts of young stars, can be used to identify other galaxies that contributed to cosmic reionization. In that sense, MXDFz4.4 is less a final answer than a clear observational foothold: a small galaxy showing how young stars may have helped clear the early cosmic fog. 👉 science.nasa.gov/missions/hubbl…

JWST’s “little red dots” are one of the most puzzling populations uncovered in the early universe. They first stood out because they looked extremely compact, very red, and unexpectedly bright in Webb data. At first, some of them appeared to be galaxies almost as massive as the Milky Way when the universe was only about 600 to 700 million years old, which seemed difficult to reconcile with standard galaxy-formation models and led researchers to nickname them “universe breakers.” But as more observations came in, the problem became subtler: the objects were not simply too massive; they seemed to belong to a category we did not yet understand. More than a thousand have now been identified in Webb data, with a few dozen closer analogues in the more recent universe. Spectroscopy changed the interpretation. Instead of behaving like ordinary early galaxies, many little red dots show broadened hydrogen emission lines. That broadening suggests gas moving at thousands of kilometres per second, the kind of motion expected around a very massive compact object, such as an accreting black hole. This pushed us toward the idea that many of these red dots may contain young supermassive black holes growing rapidly inside small early galaxies. But they do not behave like normal active galactic nuclei either. Typical feeding black holes often glow strongly in X-rays and vary in brightness as material in the accretion disk heats, flares, and falls inward. Most little red dots are surprisingly weak in X-rays and appear unusually steady, which makes the standard AGN explanation incomplete. One current interpretation is that the black hole is buried inside an extremely dense cocoon of gas. In that case, the surrounding gas would absorb and reprocess much of the energetic radiation, making the object look red, compact, and strangely quiet at X-ray wavelengths. This is where the idea of a “black hole star” comes in. The term does not mean a normal star with a black hole beside it, but a dense, star-like envelope of gas surrounding a growing black hole. Webb observations of objects such as GLIMPSE-17775 have provided some of the strongest evidence so far for this picture: a rapidly accreting black hole hidden inside a thick, partially ionised gas cocoon whose spectrum mimics some features of dense stellar atmospheres. Even so, the mystery is not solved. The little red dots may not all be the same kind of object. Some show X-rays, some show variability, some may depend on viewing angle, and some may be closer to ordinary accreting black holes than others. A clumpy or uneven gas envelope could make similar objects look different depending on how we see them from Earth. This means “little red dots” may describe a mixed population, or several evolutionary stages of young black holes and compact galaxies, rather than one single astrophysical class. Their importance is that they may be showing us a missing stage in cosmic evolution: the period when the first black holes and galaxies were growing together, hidden inside dense reservoirs of gas. If this interpretation is correct, Webb may be observing early black holes before they became the more familiar quasars and active galactic nuclei seen later in cosmic history. The little red dots are therefore not just odd red specks in deep-space images; they may be direct evidence of how some of the universe’s first massive black holes were assembled.

@EdRodPOV I don't use AI. It's my opinion

@ExploreCosmos_ Your answer or ai?

@ExploreCosmos_ any chance all these earthquakes have something to do w/ a polar shift? 🌎

A drawn diagram does not overturn gravitational lensing. Plasma refraction can exist, especially for radio waves near the Sun, but it is not the same thing as gravitational lensing. Refraction needs a material medium and is wavelength-dependent. Gravitational lensing does not need a medium; it comes from spacetime curvature and is observed in many systems where plasma cannot explain the effect: Einstein rings, multiple images of galaxies, microlensing events, and black hole shadow observations. Also, near the Sun, plasma effects are known and corrected for. They do not replace the gravitational signal. If refraction were the whole explanation, the bending would depend strongly on wavelength and on the local plasma distribution. That is not what the broader observational evidence shows. So the issue is not that “mass curves spacetime” lacks evidence. The issue is that plasma refraction and gravitational lensing are different physical effects, and confusing them does not remove the evidence for GR.

@ExploreCosmos_ We're told mass curves spacetime. The evidence demonstrates otherwise. The image below is crude, but demonstrates the point. I have an extensive video coming on this in the future. For more, see the work of Dr. Edward Dowdye, Jr. youtube.com/watch?v=CnvOyb…

The solar gravitational lens is one of those ideas that sounds almost impossible at first, but comes directly from a well-tested part of physics. According to general relativity, mass bends the path of light. The Sun, simply by being massive, can therefore act as a natural gravitational lens, bending and amplifying light from objects far behind it. A spacecraft placed far beyond the outer Solar System, beginning at roughly 550 astronomical units from the Sun, could use that effect as part of a telescope with a resolution far beyond anything we can build with mirrors alone. Until now, this concept has often been discussed in relation to exoplanets, especially the possibility of one day imaging an Earth-like world around another star. But a new work argues that the same technique could be valuable for other astronomical targets too, particularly objects that are brighter, smaller or more compact. Exoplanets are difficult because they are faint and usually shine only by reflected light. That means a mission would have to collect very weak signals while also dealing with the glow of the solar corona. Other objects, such as white dwarfs, active galactic nuclei, black holes or bright regions inside protoplanetary disks, may offer stronger signals and therefore a different kind of scientific opportunity. One especially interesting target would be a magnetic white dwarf. White dwarfs are the dense remnants left behind after stars like the Sun exhaust their fuel. They are roughly Earth-sized, but contain a large fraction of a stellar core’s mass, making them extreme laboratories for dense matter, magnetic fields and stellar evolution. With a solar gravitational lens mission, it may be possible to map the surface of a nearby magnetic white dwarf with astonishing detail, revealing temperature variations, magnetic structures, accretion regions or debris from disrupted planetary material. That kind of direct surface information is far beyond the reach of current observatories. The same principle could also be applied to black holes. For example, M87*, the supermassive black hole imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope, could in principle be observed with much finer angular resolution using the solar gravitational lens. The EHT image was historic because it showed the ring-like structure around a black hole, but a solar gravitational lens observatory could potentially examine that region in much greater detail, including the emission around the black hole and possibly the base of its relativistic jet. This would not be a normal telescope taking ordinary photographs. The spacecraft would have to scan the light pattern along the focal line, correct for the solar corona, understand the lensing distortion and reconstruct the image computationally. The science is powerful, but the engineering is severe. A mission would need to travel hundreds of astronomical units from the Sun, far beyond Pluto, and navigate with extraordinary precision. It would also be very difficult to change targets, because at those distances even a small shift in viewing direction would require a huge physical displacement of the spacecraft. That makes the solar gravitational lens less like a flexible space telescope and more like a highly specialised observatory for carefully chosen targets. The strongest part of the idea is not only the possibility of sharper images of black holes or exoplanets, but the broader use of general relativity as an observational tool. It shows that gravity is not just something astronomers study; under the right conditions, it can become part of the instrument itself. 👉 share.google/X0fOh5ArLl71Sk…