Space

In the wee morning hours on Sunday (Jan. 21), a tiny asteroid came hurtling through the sky and smashed into Earth's atmosphere near Berlin, producing a bright but harmless fireball visible for miles around. Such sightings typically occur a few times a year — but this one was unique because it was first detected by scientists roughly three hours before impact — only the eighth time that researchers have spotted one of these space rocks before it hit.

The asteroid, dubbed 2024 BXI, was first discovered by self-proclaimed asteroid hunter Krisztián Sárneczky, an astronomer at the Piszkéstető Mountain Station, part of Konkoly Observatory in Hungary. He identified the cosmic rock using the 60-cm Schmidt telescope at the observatory. Shortly after the space rock's discovery, NASA gave a detailed prediction of where and when the meteor would strike.

An interesting story about a rarely discussed feature of the Space Shuttle, that lives on in the commercial crew capsules, to prevent travelers from killing everyone onboard.

Japan's space agency said early Saturday that its spacecraft is on the moon, but is still "checking its status." More details will be given at a news conference, officials said.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, came down onto the lunar surface at around 12:20 a.m. Tokyo time Saturday (1520 GMT Friday). No astronauts were onboard the spacecraft.

If SLIM landed successfully, Japan would become the fifth country to accomplish the feat after the United States, the Soviet Union, China and India.

. . .

Just under an hour until the launch of Axiom Space's third private crew rotation to the International Space Station!

Launch thread with more info and webcast links has been posted over at [email protected]: Axiom-3 Launch Discussion and Updates Thread!

Columbia researchers analyzing images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have found that galaxies in the early universe are often flat and elongated, like breadsticks—and are rarely round, like balls of pizza dough.

"Roughly 50 to 80% of the galaxies we studied appear to be flattened in two dimensions," explained Viraj Pandya, a NASA Hubble Fellow at Columbia University and the lead author of a new paper slated to appear in The Astrophysical Journal that outlines the findings. The paper is currently published on the arXiv preprint server.

A public lecture from a scientist adding to the conversation. What makes this lecture interesting is he is not disproving that alien life can exist, but instead trying to curb expectations because of the little data we have to back up claims. More importantly is the message that it is important for scientists to be care of biases when discussing this topic.

Astronomers have discovered a ring-shaped cosmic megastructure, the proportions of which challenge existing theories of the universe.

The so-called Big Ring has a diameter of about 1.3bn light years, making it among the largest structures ever observed. At more than 9bn light years from Earth, it is too faint to see directly, but its diameter on the night sky would be equivalent to 15 full moons.

The observations, presented on Thursday at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans, are significant because the size of the Big Ring appears to defy a fundamental assumption in cosmology called the cosmological principle. This states that above a certain spatial scale, the universe is homogeneous and looks identical in every direction.

“From current cosmological theories we didn’t think structures on this scale were possible,” said Alexia Lopez, a PhD student at the University of Central Lancashire, who led the analysis. “We could expect maybe one exceedingly large structure in all our observable universe.”

In a system with two known planets, astronomers spotted something new: A small object transiting across the sun-sized star. This turned out to be another planet, which was extra hot and Earth-sized.

The newly spotted planet, called HD 63433 d, is tidally locked, meaning there is a dayside that always faces its star and a side that is constantly in darkness. This exoplanet, or planet outside of our solar system, orbits around the star HD 63433 (TOI 1726) in the HD 63433 planetary system. This scorching world is the smallest confirmed exoplanet younger than 500 million years old. It's also the closest discovered Earth-sized planet this young, at about 400 million years old.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/12547911

Congrats to ULA on the first flight of Vulcan. Really looking forward to the first flight of Dream Chaser. I want to see that baby Shuttle fly!

It will be interesting to see if the Vulcan + Kuiper launches can approach the pace of the Falcon 9 + Starlink launches over the next few years.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/12547860

China's lunar program has been making some interesting progress the past few years. Glad to see that there is some international collaboration as well.

With the recently launched Starlink satellites capable of direct-to-device, it is interesting to see Iridium pursuing this as well. I wonder if Kuiper will follow suit?

not unexpected, but a bummer