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Webb's Dark Matter Map, Starship Flight 14 & First Exoplanet Radio Signal
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The James Webb Space Telescope has produced the sharpest dark matter map ever made, while SpaceX stacks Starship for its first orbital flight and scientists detect radio waves directly from an exoplanet for the first time. Six stories shaping the frontier of space and astronomy today.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
For the first time, we have a map of dark matter sharp enough to show how it actually shaped the universe. The James Webb Space Telescope has produced the highest-resolution dark matter map ever made, covering an area two and a half times the size of the full moon on the sky, and what it reveals is the invisible scaffolding that built every galaxy we can see.
Buried in that same Webb dataset is something harder to explain. A galaxy designated XMM-VID1-2075 shows no measurable rotation.
Closer to home, SpaceX has fully stacked Booster 21 and Ship 41 on Pad 2 at Starbase in Texas. Starship Flight 14 is targeting a launch window that opens September twenty-eighth, roughly seventy-two hours from now, pending Federal Aviation Administration sign-off.
A separate detection milestone, quieter but significant. Scientists have achieved the first-ever direct radio signal detection from an exoplanet.
China executed six orbital launches in seven days across mid-September, deploying more than thirty satellites using three separate rocket families. Lijian-1, Kuaizhou-11, and Long March-12 all flew within the same week.
And finally, an amateur astronomer studying satellite imagery spotted something unusual in the Quebec wilderness. A field expedition confirmed it: a twenty-five-kilometre impact crater, now named Uhackatik, approximately three hundred and ninety million years old.
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