NASA, CSA, JAXA, JPL And Other Space Stuff

Would you like to go to space?

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"There's going to be a new world order out there, and we've got to lead it," US President Joe Biden said after Russia's war in Ukraine upended global geopolitics. Far from Earth, that transition is already happening.

The lack of cooperation between the US and China on space exploration is particularly dangerous in an era where the cosmos are becoming more crowded. Billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos along with emerging markets such as Rwanda and the Philippines are launching more and more satellites to bridge the digital divide and explore commercial opportunities.

The stakes are even higher when it comes to the US and China, which are erecting economic barriers in the name of national security as ideological divisions widen over the pandemic, political repression and now Vladimir Putin's war. Their inability to cooperate on space risks not only an arms race, but also clashes over extracting potentially hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of resources on the moon and elsewhere.

"Our concern in the West is more about who sets the rules of the road, particularly access to resources," said Malcolm Davis, a former official with Australia's defense department who now researches space policy at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra.

"The biggest risk is you have two opposite set of rules," he said. "You could have a Chinese company on the moon in the 2030s claiming territory with a resource on it, in the same way the Chinese have claimed the entire South China Sea."

At the center of the dispute is the US-drafted Artemis Accords, a non-legally binding set of principles to govern activity on the moon, Mars and beyond. The initiative, which NASA says is grounded in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, forms the foundation of the space agency's effort to put astronauts on the moon this decade and kick-start mining operations of lucrative lunar elements.

So far 19 countries have agreed to support the accords, including four — Romania, Colombia, Bahrain and Singapore — that signed up after Putin's invasion spurred a US-led effort to isolate Russia. Underscoring the divide, Ukraine was an early Artemis club member after President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's government signed in late 2020.

One of China's main problems with the Artemis Accords is a provision allowing nations to designate areas of the moon as "safety zones" -- regions on the lunar surface that others should avoid. For the Americans and their Artemis partners, the exclusive areas are a way to comply with obligations under the Outer Space Treaty, which requires countries to avoid "harmful interference" in space.

To China, however, the safety zones are thinly disguised land grabs in violation of international law. Beijing wants any rule-making to be settled at the UN, where it can count on support from a wider group of countries eager for friendly ties with the world's second-biggest economy.

"It's time the US woke up and smelled the coffee," the official China Daily proclaimed in a January editorialthat criticized how NASA "invented" the concept of safety zones to allow governments or companies to reserve areas of the moon. "The world is no longer interested in its divisive, hegemonic schemes."

Unlike Earth, the moon may contain large amounts of helium-3, an isotope potentially useful as an alternative to uranium for nuclear power plants because it's not radioactive. Chinese state media in 2019 said the moon is "sometimes referred to as the Persian Gulf of the solar system," with experts believing 5,000 tons of coal could be replaced by about three tablespoons of helium-3.

While there's not yet proof that helium-3 can do what boosters claim, Chinese researchers are already looking for the element in moon rocks brought back to Earth in late 2020 by one of China's lunar missions. The moon could also prove valuable as a source of water, taken from ice at the lunar poles, to make rocket fuel that could power missions to Mars and other places in the solar system.

Beijing is upset about being left out of the process and pressured to accept principles that were crafted by the US instead of at the UN, according to Jessica West, senior researcher and managing editor for the Space Security Index project at Project Ploughshares, the peace research institute of The Canadian Council of Churches.

The conflict over who makes the rules, she added, shows the world has lots of work left to avoid a clash in space.

"I'm not sure people expected the explosion of space activity that happened," West said. "We're just not adequately prepared."
 

In a new study, an international team of astrophysicists has discovered several mysterious objects hiding in images from the James Webb Space Telescope: six potential galaxies that emerged so early in the universe's history and are so massive they should not be possible under current cosmological theory.

Each of the candidate galaxies may have existed at the dawn of the universe roughly 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, or more than 13 billion years ago. They're also gigantic, containing almost as many stars as the modern-day Milky Way Galaxy.

"It's bananas," said Erica Nelson, co-author of the new research and assistant professor of astrophysics at CU Boulder. "You just don't expect the early universe to be able to organize itself that quickly. These galaxies should not have had time to form."

Nelson and her colleagues, including first author Ivo Labbé of the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, published their results Feb. 22 in the journal Nature.

The latest finds aren't the earliest galaxies observed by James Webb, which launched in December 2021 and is the most powerful telescope ever sent into space. Last year, another team of scientists spotted several galaxies that likely coalesced from gas around 350 million years after the Big Bang. Those objects, however, were downright shrimpy compared to the new galaxies, containing many times less mass from stars.

The researchers still need more data to confirm that these galaxies are as large, and date as far back in time, as they appear. Their preliminary observations, however, offer a tantalizing taste of how James Webb could rewrite astronomy textbooks.

"Another possibility is that these things are a different kind of weird object, such as faint quasars, which would be just as interesting," she said.

Fuzzy dots

There's a lot of excitement going around: In 2022, Nelson and her colleagues, who hail from the United States, Australia, Denmark and Spain, formed an ad hoc team to investigate the data James Webb was sending back to Earth.

Their recent findings stem from the telescope's Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey. These images look deep into a patch of sky close to the Big Dipper—a relatively boring, at least at first glance, region of space that the Hubble Space Telescope first observed in the 1990s.

Nelson was peering at a postage stamp-sized section of one image when she spotted something strange: a few "fuzzy dots" of light that looked way too bright to be real.

"They were so red and so bright," Nelson said. "We weren't expecting to see them."

She explained that in astronomy, red light usually equals old light. The universe, Nelson said, has been expanding since the dawn of time. As it expands, galaxies and other celestial objects move farther apart, and the light they emit stretches out—think of it like the cosmic equivalent of saltwater taffy. The more the light stretches, the redder it looks to human instruments. (Light from objects coming closer to Earth, in contrast, looks bluer).

The team ran calculations and discovered that their old galaxies were also huge, harboring tens to hundreds of billions of sun-sized stars worth of mass, on par with the Milky Way.

These primordial galaxies, however, probably didn't have much in common with our own.

"The Milky Way forms about one to two new stars every year," Nelson said. "Some of these galaxies would have to be forming hundreds of new stars a year for the entire history of the universe."

Nelson and her colleagues want to use James Webb to collect a lot more information about these mysterious objects, but they've seen enough already to pique their curiosity. For a start, calculations suggest there shouldn't have been enough normal matter—the kind that makes up planets and human bodies—at that time to form so many stars so quickly.

"If even one of these galaxies is real, it will push against the limits of our understanding of cosmology," Nelson said.

Seeing back in time

For Nelson, the new findings are a culmination of a journey that began when she was in elementary school. When she was 10, she wrote a report about Hubble, a telescope that launched in 1990 and is still active today. Nelson was hooked.

"It takes time for light to go from a galaxy to us, which means that you're looking back in time when you're looking at these objects," she said. "I found that concept so mind blowing that I decided at that instant that this was what I wanted to do with my life."

The fast pace of discovery with James Webb is a lot like those early days of Hubble, Nelson said. At the time, many scientists believed that galaxies didn't begin forming until billions of years after the Big Bang. But researchers soon discovered that the early universe was much more complex and exciting than they could have imagined.

"Even though we learned our lesson already from Hubble, we still didn't expect James Webb to see such mature galaxies existing so far back in time," Nelson said. "I'm so excited."

——————


Abstract:

Galaxies with stellar masses as high as ~ 10,10 solar masses have been identified out to redshifts z ~ 6, approximately one billion years after the Big Bang. It has been difficult to find massive galaxies at even earlier times, as the Balmer break region, which is needed for accurate mass estimates, is redshifted to wavelengths beyond 2.5 μm. Here we make use of the 1-5 μm coverage of the JWST early release observations to search for intrinsically red galaxies in the first ≈ 750 million years of cosmic history. In the survey area, we find six candidate massive galaxies (stellar mass > 10,10 solar masses) at 7.4 ≤ z ≤ 9.1, 500–700 Myr after the Big Bang, including one galaxy with a possible stellar mass of ~10,11 solar masses. If verified with spectroscopy, the stellar mass density in massive galaxies would be much higher than anticipated from previous studies based on rest-frame ultraviolet-selected samples.
JWST keeps on delivering and expanding our understanding of the universe, by challenging current cosmology theories.