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Webb's Stellar Nursery, Dark Matter Mapped & Mars Ice Site | Ep.1
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The James Webb Space Telescope reveals thousands of newborn stars in the Lobster Nebula while a new dark matter map delivers ten times more detail than ever before. Plus: a crewed Mars landing site with shallow ice, Euclid's 60-million-star mosaic, a SETI scan of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, and fresh evidence for Europa's subsurface ocean.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The James Webb Space Telescope has just delivered its sharpest look yet at a stellar nursery, and the images from the Lobster Nebula are stopping scientists in their tracks. Thousands of newborn stars captured in a single field, five thousand five hundred light-years away, in a region called Pismis twenty-four.
Connected to that same capability, a separate team using Webb data has published the most detailed dark matter map ever produced. The target was the COSMOS field, a patch of sky that cosmologists have studied for years.
On the human exploration side, researchers have identified Amazonis Planitia as a strong candidate for a future crewed Mars landing, and the key factor is water ice less than one meter below the surface. That depth matters enormously.
ESA's Euclid telescope added its own milestone, capturing over sixty million stars in the galactic bulge in a single mosaic image. The immediate scientific value isn't just the count.
The third confirmed interstellar object to pass through our solar system, designated 3I/ATLAS, prompted a rapid SETI response. The Allen Telescope Array scanned it for artificial radio transmissions.
Finally, ground-based radar observations of Europa have confirmed that its ice shell behaves like a mirror for certain radio frequencies, which is consistent with the subsurface liquid ocean hypothesis. The Europa Clipper mission is on its way.
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