Astronomy

NASA's next big eye on the cosmos is now fully assembled. On Nov. 25, technicians joined the inner and outer portions of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in the largest clean room at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

"Completing the Roman observatory brings us to a defining moment for the agency," said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya. "Transformative science depends on disciplined engineering, and this team has delivered—piece by piece, test by test—an observatory that will expand our understanding of the universe. As Roman moves into its final stage of testing following integration, we are focused on executing with precision and preparing for a successful launch on behalf of the global scientific community."

After final testing, Roman will move to the launch site at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch preparations in summer 2026. Roman is slated to launch by May 2027, but the team is on track for launch as early as fall 2026. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will send the observatory to its final destination a million miles from Earth.

"With Roman's construction complete, we are poised at the brink of unfathomable scientific discovery," said Julie McEnery, Roman's senior project scientist at NASA Goddard. "In the mission's first five years, it's expected to unveil more than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies. We stand to learn a tremendous amount of new information about the universe very rapidly after Roman launches."

Observing from space will make Roman very sensitive to infrared light—light with a longer wavelength than our eyes can see—from far across the cosmos. Pairing its crisp infrared vision with a sweeping view of space will allow astronomers to explore myriad cosmic topics, from dark matter and dark energy to distant worlds and solitary black holes, and conduct research that would take hundreds of years using other telescopes.

"Within our lifetimes, a great mystery has arisen about the cosmos: why the expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating. There is something fundamental about space and time we don't yet understand, and Roman was built to discover what it is," said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington.

"With Roman now standing as a complete observatory, which keeps the mission on track for a potentially early launch, we are a major step closer to understanding the universe as never before. I couldn't be prouder of the teams that have gotten us to this point."

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Of the seven Earth-sized worlds orbiting the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, one planet in particular has attracted the attention of scientists. This planet orbits the star within the "Goldilocks zone"—a distance where water on its surface is theoretically possible, but only if the planet has an atmosphere. And where there is water, there might be life.

Two recent scientific papers detail initial observations of the TRAPPIST-1 system obtained by a research group using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. In these publications, the authors, including Sukrit Ranjan with the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, present a careful analysis of the results so far and offer several potential scenarios for what the planet's atmosphere and surface may be like.

While these reports are intriguing and show progress toward characterizing the nearest potentially earth-like exoplanet, Ranjan urges caution in a third paper, also appearing in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, arguing that more rigorous studies are needed to determine whether TRAPPIST-1e has an atmosphere at all and whether preliminary hints of methane detected by James Webb are indeed signs of an atmosphere or have their origin with its host star.

The TRAPPIST system, so named after the survey that discovered it—"Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope project"—is located about 39 light-years from Earth. It resembles a miniature version of our solar system. The star and all its planets would comfortably fit inside the orbit of planet Mercury. A "year" for any given TRAPPIST planet lasts mere days by Earth standards.

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The outer planets of the solar system are swarmed by ice-wrapped moons. Some of these, such as Saturn's moon Enceladus, are known to have oceans of liquid water between the ice shell and the rocky core and could be the best places in our solar system to look for extraterrestrial life. A new study published Nov. 24 in Nature Astronomy sheds light on what could be going on beneath the surface of these worlds and provides insights into how their diverse geologic features may have formed.

"Not all of these satellites are known to have oceans, but we know that some do," said Max Rudolph, associate professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Davis and lead author on the paper. "We're interested in the processes that shape their evolution over millions of years and this allows us to think about what the surface expression of an ocean world would be."

Boeing and NASA have agreed to keep astronauts off the company's next Starliner flight and instead perform a trial run with cargo to prove its safety.

Monday's announcement comes eight months after the first and only Starliner crew returned to Earth aboard SpaceX after a prolonged mission. Although NASA test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams managed to dock Starliner to the International Space Station in 2024, the capsule had so many problems that NASA ordered it to come back empty, leaving the astronauts stuck there for more than nine months.

Engineers have since been poring over the thruster and other issues that plagued the Starliner capsule. Its next cargo run to the space station will occur no earlier than April, pending additional tests and certification.

Boeing said in a statement that it remains committed to the Starliner program with safety the highest priority.

We just live too far apart.

Led by researchers at the University of Maryland and Cornell University, the study charts temperatures across WASP-18b, a massive gas giant classified as an "ultra-hot Jupiter" located 400 light-years from Earth. The team applied a method known as 3D eclipse mapping, also called spectroscopic eclipse mapping, marking the first time this technique has been used to build a full 3D temperature map. The work expands on a 2D eclipse map the group released in 2023 using highly sensitive observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

"This technique is really the only one that can probe all three dimensions at once: latitude, longitude and altitude," said the paper's co-lead author Megan Weiner Mansfield, an assistant professor of astronomy at UMD. "This gives us a higher level of detail than we've ever had to study these celestial bodies."

With this approach, scientists can begin charting atmospheric differences across many exoplanets observable by JWST, much as ground-based telescopes once documented Jupiter's Great Red Spot and its banded clouds.

So, if an academic paper is published in an open journal by an average citizen with an obsession for learning from online sources. So, there are no credentials but a decent work history. A prestigious college downloads the paper. What are the possible reasons?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/36650439