It’s sometimes hard to grasp the scale of our universe, when even our own galaxy is so large and filled with billions of stars. But all of the stars that we have seen in detail are contained within the roughly 100,000 light-year span of our Milky Way galaxy. That is, until now, as astronomers recently observed a star outside of our galaxy up close for the first time.
The researchers looked at star WOH G64, located 160,000 light-years away, using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer. The image shows the main bulk of the star surrounded by a puffy cocoon of dust and gas.
“We discovered an egg-shaped cocoon closely surrounding the star,” said lead researcher Keiichi Ohnaka of the Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile in a statement. “We are excited because this may be related to the drastic ejection of material from the dying star before a supernova explosion.”
The star is located in one of the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, called the Large Magellanic Cloud. This satellite galaxy orbits around the Milky Way and is much smaller, at around one-hundredth of the mass of our galaxy. The star itself is a big one, though, coming in at 2,000 times the size of our sun — making it a type called a red supergiant.
This huge star is undergoing a process of change, in which it is shedding off its outer layers and throwing off dust and gas, creating the cocoon. This material could be what is causing the star to dim, and the fast rate of change suggests it could be set to go supernova soon.
“We have found that the star has been experiencing a significant change in the last 10 years, providing us with a rare opportunity to witness a star’s life in real time,” said fellow researcher Gerd Weigelt of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany.
Jacco van Loon of Keele University agreed: “This star is one of the most extreme of its kind, and any drastic change may bring it closer to an explosive end.”
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.