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Webb's Stellar Nurseries, Record Black Hole & Euclid's Ancient Quasars
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
James Webb reveals massive stars destroying planet-forming disks in the Carina Nebula, while astronomers confirm a 36-billion-solar-mass black hole and ESA's Euclid doubles the census of ancient quasars. Today's briefing also covers SpaceX's BlueBird satellite launch and an ISS spacewalk power upgrade.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
New James Webb Space Telescope images show something that shouldn't work in anyone's favor. Massive newborn stars in the Carina Nebula are destroying the very dust disks that surround nearby young stars, the same disks where planets form.
The second major development involves a black hole that may be the most massive ever measured. It sits inside the galaxy known as the Cosmic Horseshoe, and the mass estimate is thirty-six billion times that of our Sun.
Running parallel to that is a finding from ESA's Euclid telescope. It's identified thirty-one ancient quasars from the universe's first seven hundred and seventy million years.
On the commercial side, SpaceX launched three AST SpaceMobile BlueBird Block two satellites on August fifth from Cape Canaveral. These are satellites eleven through thirteen in the BlueBird constellation, designed for direct-to-device mobile coverage.
And on August sixth, NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Anil Menon completed a spacewalk to modify the station's three-B power channel. The work prepares that section of the International Space Station for an upcoming solar array installation.
The through-line across today's briefing is really infrared astronomy doing what it was built to do. Webb shows us destruction inside stellar nurseries.
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