There’s a massive bulge at the center of the Milky Way galaxy and it’s not just happy to see us. The X-shaped structure has been theorized for years but it’s finally been observed by two astronomers, thanks to their keen eyes, tenacity, and active social media presence.
While working on a project called the Legacy Surveys, Dustin Lang, an astronomer and research associate at the University of Toronto, created an interactive online map that stitched together visible light images of deep space to reveal the network of galaxies well beyond the Milky Way. Lang added data captured by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope to give his map an extra dimension.
“The WISE images are really useful for understanding some of the galaxies and quasars we are interested in, so I added the WISE images to that interactive viewer,” Lang told Digital Trends. “I tweeted out that image because I was happy with how nicely it came out.” Within the scientific Twitter community, it’s not uncommon for disgruntled scientists to tweet out their frustrations while ecstatic ones share their successes, Lang said. “It’s a nice way to have a finger on the pulse of what my colleagues and friends are working on, and sometimes collaborations like this one pop up!”
“I mostly work on studying the web of galaxies far outside the Milky Way, so using the WISE maps for understanding our own galaxy wasn’t on my radar at all,” he added.
Enter postdoctoral researcher Melissa Ness of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. While scrolling through Twitter, Ness noticed something familiar. In the middle of Lang’s image was a conspicuous X-shaped structure — one that computer models had suggested would exist in the Milky Way, but had never been seen. Ness contacted Lang and the two soon met up at a conference. They published a paper on their discovery in The Astronomical Journal last month.
The moral of this story is closer to home than the galactic bulge, thinks Lang. “Melissa and I are both advocates for public release of scientific data, and open science more generally,” he said. “Most of our projects are conducted out in the open, often with code and manuscripts in public GitHub repositories, and we often tweet about what we’re working on.”
This open approach and communication enabled the astronomers to collaborate, link up, and share knowledge. Lang’s high-quality WISE image borrowed data from a high-resolution WISE public release. Ness noticed the X-shaped bulge in Lang’s Twitter image. Without these scientists’ willingness to share and engage with others in their community, we may still wonder whether or not the Milky Way was just happy that we’re here.
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.