The Milky Way is a beauty to behold, with a hundred billion stars streaming in an arch across the night sky. But our eyesight has been limited to what’s visible — until now.
A team of astronomers have just given us a new glimpse of the sky through the Murchison Widefield Array, a $50 million radio telescope in the West Australian outback. They used the array to create the Galactic and Extragalactic All-Sky MWA (GLEAM) survey, which captured the Milky Way and roughly 300,000 other galaxies in one stunning Technicolor image.
“The area surveyed is enormous,” MWA director Dr. Randall Wayth said in a press release. “Large sky surveys like this are extremely valuable to scientists, and they’re used across many areas of astrophysics, often in ways the original researchers could never have imagined.”
Images of the night sky have previously been captured in radio wavelengths but, according to lead author Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker, never like this.
“The human eye sees by comparing brightness in three different primary colors – red, green, and blue,” she said. “GLEAM does rather better than that, viewing the sky in each of 20 primary colors. That’s much better than we humans can manage, and it even beats the very best in the animal kingdom, the mantis shrimp, which can see 12 different primary colors.”
GLEAM surveys the radio wavelengths of the sky at frequencies from 70-230 MHz. In the radio image, red, green, and blue respectively represent the lowest, middle, and highest frequencies captured.
The image isn’t just a pretty sight — it also has scientific value. Hurley-Walker and her team use such measurements to study the affects of galactic collisions and indirectly observe supermassive black holes.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.