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Roman Telescope Aces Optics, XLSSC 122 Defies Cosmology & Black Hole Merger
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA's Roman Space Telescope just blew past its image-quality target by 30%, while JWST has found a galaxy cluster so mature it shouldn't exist. Plus: a black hole merger countdown, brain organoids on the ISS, and Perseverance breaks a Mars distance record.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
NASA's Roman Space Telescope has just cleared its toughest optical test, and the result wasn't close. Engineers moved the primary mirror by roughly one-sixteenth the width of a human hair, and that adjustment pushed image quality thirty percent beyond the mission's own requirement.
Meanwhile, the James Webb Space Telescope has handed cosmologists a problem worth paying attention to. The cluster XLSSC one-two-two sits ten point four billion light-years away, placing it squarely at what astronomers call cosmic noon, the period when star formation was near its peak.
There's a separate story that deserves precise framing. Astronomers have identified two supermassive black holes in the galaxy Mrk five-oh-one, orbiting each other on a one-hundred-and-twenty-one-day cycle.
On October fifteenth, SpaceX Dragon delivered a cargo run to the ISS that included something worth flagging. Among the biomedical payloads were three-dimensional brain tissue models, organoids designed to behave like developing brain structures.
Two smaller but concrete developments. On October eleventh, the Perseverance rover logged twenty-eight point one zero miles on Mars, passing Opportunity's long-standing record of twenty-eight point oh-six miles set over more than two decades.
The thread running through today's briefing is precision. Optical precision at Roman.
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