A new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a stunning and fashionable sight: the Sombrero Galaxy, named for its resemblance to the traditional Mexican hat. With its wide, flat shape reminiscent of the hat’s wide brim, the galaxy, also known as Messier 104, has outer rings that are clearly visible for the first time.
The Sombrero Galaxy is located 30 million light-years away, in the constellation of Virgo, and it has been previously imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. But while in the Hubble image, the galaxy appears as an opaque, pale disk, in the new Webb image you can see an outer blue disk, with a small bright core right at the center.
The difference in the two images is because of the different wavelengths that the telescopes operate in. Hubble takes images primarily in the visible light part of the spectrum, which is the same wavelength as our eyes see, and galaxies with large amounts of dust like the Sombrero therefore appear opaque. But Webb operates in the infrared portion of the spectrum, meaning it can peer through the dust to see structures that would otherwise be invisible.
The Webb image also shows more detail about the dust that makes up the outer portion of the galaxy’s ring. If you look closely, you can see that the blue-white shape is clumpy, with dust unevenly distributed in pockets that are denser in some places than others. This region is interesting to scientists because it is contains molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that are usually found in regions where many young stars are forming. But the rate of star formation in this galaxy is quite low, with the rings of the Sombrero producing half as many stars per year as our own galaxy.
Another feature of this image is the bright glow at the galaxy’s center, which is an area around the galaxy’s supermassive black hole called an active galactic nucleus (AGN). This region isn’t as bright as some other AGNs, as the black hole at the center is relatively calm, not chowing down on huge amounts of material as is seen in some other galaxies.
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.