Space

This week Ayers has a time-lapse sequence she captured from the Cupola as the International Space Station soared near Central and South America.

The most distinct feature is a lightning strike near Panama City. This illuminates the clouds below. Above the strike is a reddish phenomenon known as a sprite, which sometimes occurs in the atmosphere between 50 and 90 km above a lightning strike near the surface of the planet. This appears to be a "jellyfish" sprite. It is rendered beautifully.

But wait, there's more! The lightning strike is so bright that its reflection can be seen in the space station's structure, at the top of the image. Additionally the atmosphere's airglow can be clearly seen in the orange line just above the atmosphere.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30686153

The James Webb Space Telescope's deepest view of a single target yet depicts spinning arcs of light that are galaxies from the universe's distant past, the European Space Agency said Tuesday.

The new image took the world's most powerful telescope more than 120 hours to capture, making it the longest Webb has ever focused on a single target.

In the world of black holes, there are generally three size categories: stellar-mass black holes (about five to 50 times the mass of the sun), supermassive black holes (millions to billions of times the mass of the sun), and intermediate-mass black holes with masses somewhere in between.

While we know that intermediate-mass black holes should exist, little is known about their origins or characteristics—they are considered the rare "missing links" in black hole evolution.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Astronomers have discovered a strange new object in our Milky Way galaxy.

An international team reported Wednesday that this celestial object — perhaps a star, pair of stars or something else entirely — is emitting X-rays around the same time it’s shooting out radio waves. What’s more, the cycle repeats every 44 minutes, at least during periods of extreme activity.

Located 15,000 light-years away in a region of the Milky Way brimming with stars, gas and dust, this object could be a highly magnetized dead star like a neutron or white dwarf, Curtin University’s Ziteng Andy Wang said in an email from Australia.

Or it could be “something exotic” and unknown, said Wang, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory spotted the X-ray emissions by chance last year while focusing on a supernova remnant, or the remains of an exploded star. Wang said it was the first time X-rays had been seen coming from a so-called long-period radio transient, a rare object that cycles through radio signals over tens of minutes.

Given the uncertain distance, astronomers can’t tell if the weird object is associated with the supernova remnant or not. A single light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.

By MARCIA DUNN

Updated 5:21 PM GMT+2, May 28, 2025

Video description excerpt:

In November 2023 Voyager 1 stopped communicating with Earth, the telemetry it was sending contained no information, but engineers working on the spacecraft could tell it was still listening. It would take months of experimenting to understand the problem and develop a fix using techniques that had never been employed before and designing software for a 50 year old computer using pen and paper.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30532739