Andy Tomaswick

Recent Articles

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  The Habitable Worlds Observatory Could Find More Very Massive Stars

  July 15, 2025

  Very massive stars (VMSs)have had a massive impact on the formation of our universe. However, there aren’t very many of them, with only around 20 known specimens in the Milky Way and Large Magellanic Cloud. Even observing those is difficult for the current generation of telescopes, which is where an unexpected technological champion might play a role. According to a new paper by Fabrice Martins of CNRS and a group of European and American researchers, the upcoming Habitable World Observatory (HWO) might be our most useful tool when it comes to finding these elusive giants.

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  A Solar Gravitational Lens Telescope Is The Only Feasible Way To Get High Resolution Pictures Of A Habitable Exoplanet

  July 14, 2025

  Sometimes in order to support an idea, you first have to discredit alternative, competing ideas that could take resources away from the one you care about. In the scientific community, one of the most devastating ways you can do that is by making the other methods appear to be too expensive to be feasible, or, better yep, prove they wouldn’t work at all due to some fundamental limitation. That is what a recent paper by Dr. Slava Turyshev, the world’s most prominent proponent of a Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) telescope mission, does. He examines how effective alternative telescope technologies would be at creating a 10x10 pixel map of an exoplanet about 32 light years away. Unsurprisingly, there’s only one that is able to do so without giant leaps and bounds in technology development - the SGL telescope.

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  Funding Astrobiology Challenges Can Bring Us Closer To Understanding the Origins of Life

  July 11, 2025

  Astrobiology can be split into two very distinct fields. There’s the field that astronomers are likely more familiar with, involving large telescopes, exoplanets, and spectroscopic signals that are pored over to debate whether they show signs of life. But there is another camp, collective known as the Origins researchers that focus on developing a scientific understanding of how life originally developed on Earth. A new paper from Cole Mathis at Arizona State and Harrison B. Smith at the Institute of Science in Tokyo suggests a new path forward to tackling those challenges - set them up as competitions and let a hefty prize motivate scientific teams and individuals to pursue them.

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  Tracking Molecules In the Interstellar Medium

  July 11, 2025

  Stars don’t form out of nothing, but tracking the gas and dust that do eventually form stars is hard. They float around the galaxy at almost absolute zero, emitting essentially no light, and generally making life difficult for astronomers. But, part of how they make life difficult is actually the key to studying them - they have “absorption lines” that detail what kind of material the light is passing through on its way to Earth. A new paper from Harvey Liszt of America’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Maryvonne Gerin of the Sorbonne details how tracking those absorption lines via radio astronomy can trace the “dark neutral medium” of interstellar gas throughout the galaxy.

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  Little Red Dots Lead To Big Discoveries

  July 10, 2025

  Names are a strange thing in astronomy. Sometimes scientists come up with grandiose, simple name, like the Extremely Large Telescope. Other times, they come up with unique sounding names, like quasars. And sometimes they come up with names that, while descriptive in some sense, are completely misleading in others. That is the case for Little Red Dots (LRD) - active galactic nuclei in the early universe that show up as a little red dot in the images captured by whatever telescope found them. However, they actually represent supermassive black holes hundreds of millions of times the size of our Sun. A new paper from Federica Loiacono and her colleagues at Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy describes one of these behemoths they found with the James Webb Space Telescope at a period of the early universe, about 11 billion years ago, known as the “cosmic noon”.

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  Finding PBHs Using The LSST Will Be A Statistical Challenge

  July 09, 2025

  With the recent first light milestone for the Vera Rubin observatory, it's only a matter of time before one of astronomy’s most long-awaited surveys begins. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is set to start on November 5th, and will scan the sky of billions of stars for at least ten years. One of the most important things it hopes to find is evidence (or lack thereof) of primordial black holes (PBHs), one of the primary candidates for dark matter. A new paper from researchers at Durham University and the University of New Mexico looks at the difficulties the LSST will have in finding those enigmatic objects, especially the statistical challenges, and how they might be overcome.

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  New Heat Sink Tested in Space Uses Melting Wax to Regulate Temperature

  July 09, 2025

  It's cold in space, but overheating is a bigger problem than low temperatures. That's because the only way to regulate a spacecraft's heat is through radiation, or slowing down its computing. Engineers have tested a new type of heat sink in space that contains a wax-based phase change material that melts within the normal operating temperature range of the electronics, absorbing heat and then helping to radiate it away. The heat sink was part of a CubeSat launched in August 2024.

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  High Frequency Gravitational Waves Could Be Detect By Changing The Angle Of A Mirror

  July 08, 2025

  Gravitational waves come in all shapes and sizes - and frequencies. But, so far, we haven’t been able to capture any of the higher frequency ones. That’s unfortunate, as they might hold the key to unlocking our understanding of some really interesting physical phenomena, such as Boson clouds and tiny block hole mergers. A new paper from researchers at Notre Dame and Caltech, led by PhD student Christopher Jungkind, explores how we might use one of the world’s most prolific gravitational wave observatories, GEO600, to capture signals from those phenomena for the first time.

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  What if you Threw a Paper Airplane from the Space Station?

  July 08, 2025

  Here's a thought experiment. What would happen if you were on the International Space Station, folded up a paper airplane, and threw it from the station? According to a new paper, it would fall from orbit in just 3.5 days, but still keep aerodynamic stability until about 120 km. Then it would heat up and combust at about 90-110 km altitude. It's a fun idea, but there are actual practical uses to probe the density of the atmosphere or test thin-film space technologies.

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  Quaoar's Atmosphere Doesn't Exist And Its Rings Shouldn't

  July 08, 2025

  The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can tell us a lot about the subjects of its observations if it spends enough time with them. That includes lonely rocks on the edges of our solar system, such as the Trans-Neptunian Object (TNO) Quaoar. Recent observations using the NIRCam on JWST and pre-published on arXiv by researchers at the University of Central Florida, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and Kyoto University add a plethora of new data to our understanding of this enigmatic object, including insights into what might be causing its ring system and its hydrocarbon atmosphere.

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  Primordial Black Holes Could Have Accelerated Early Star Formation

  July 07, 2025

  The search for dark matter requires all of the best models, theories, and ideas we can throw at it. A new paper from Julia Monika Koulen, Stefano Profumo, and Nolan Smyth from the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) tackles the implications of the sizes and abundance of one of the more interesting dark matter candidates - primordial black holes (PBHs).

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  How To Use Fusion To Get To Proxima Centauri's Potentially Habitable Exoplanet

  July 06, 2025

  Proxima Centauri b is the closest known exoplanet that could be in the habitable zone of its star. Therefore, it has garnered a lot of attention, including several missions designed to visit it and send back information. Unfortunately, due to technological constraints and the gigantic distances involved, most of those missions only weigh a few grams and require massive solar scales or pushing lasers to get anywhere near their target. But why let modern technological levels limit your imagination when there are so many other options, if still theoretical, options to send a larger mission to our nearest potentially habitable neighbor? That was the thought behind the Master’s Thesis of Amelie Lutz at Virginia Tech - she looked at the possibility of using fusion propulsion systems to send a few hundred kilogram probe to the system, and potentially even orbit it.

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  A Dense Group of Quasars Form the "Cosmic Himalayas"

  June 28, 2025

  Quasars provide some of the most spectacular light shows in the universe. However, they are typically exceedingly rare since they are caused by massive astrophysical forces that don’t happen very often. So it came as quite a surprise when scientists found a group of 11 of them hanging on in the same general area, in what appeared to be equivalent to the galactic countryside. A new paper from Yongming Liang and their co-authors at the University of Tokyo describes this finding, which they dubbed the Cosmic Himalayas, and some of the weird astronomical circumstances that place the discovery in context.

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  Roman Telescope Core Components Complete Vibration Testing

  June 28, 2025

  Spacecraft violently shake, rattle, and roll on their way into space aboard a giant explosion. Therefore, they must also be tested to make sure they can withstand those forces before getting to their orbit for deployment. One of NASA’s major observatories recently completed part of its trials, with the core portion of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully completing its shock and vibration testing a few weeks ago.

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  A Supermassive White Dwarf Is Pulsating Rapidly, Revealing Details Of Its Interior

  June 28, 2025

  Scientists are constantly finding new ways to look at things, and that’s especially true for objects that represent an outlier of their specific type. Adjectives like “biggest”, “brightest”, or “fastest spinning” all seem to attract scientific studies - perhaps because they’re an easier sell to funding agencies. No matter the reason, that means we typically get a lot of good science on specific objects that represent their particular class of objects well, and a new paper from Ozcan Caliskan from Istanbul University in Turkey hits that nail on the head when it comes to the most massive known white dwarf star.

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  Webb Directly Images A Saturn-Sized Star In A Nearby System

  June 27, 2025

  One of Webb’s strong points is its ability to directly image planets around another solar system. The telescope has been in operation for long enough now that a flood of those images are starting, as more and more systems come under the telescope’s gaze. One of those is described in a recent paper and press release from NASA. According to the paper, the planet in a nearby system is about the size of Saturn, which would make it the smallest planet ever found by direct observation.

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  Exoplanet Hunters May Be Misrepresenting The Likelihood Of Their Findings

  June 27, 2025

  There’s nothing to get a scientist’s heart pumping like a good, old-fashioned statistical debate. When it comes to topics like finding Earth analogues or hints of a biosignature in an atmosphere, those statistical debates could have real world consequences, both for the assignment of additional observational resources, but also for humanity’s general understanding of itself in the Universe. A new paper from two prominent exoplanet hunters, David Kipping from Columbia and Björn Benneke from UCLA, argues that their colleagues in the field of exoplanet detection have been doing statistics all wrong for decades, and make a argument for how better to present their results to the public.

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  Reorienting MRO Massively Increases Its Subsurface Scanning Power

  June 27, 2025

  Orientation is more important than most people thing when it comes to sensing. A common example would be when the lasers of a garage door are mis-aligned, forcing the door to remain open until they are brought back in line. But when it comes to scientific sensors, orientation is even more important. So it was with great fanfare that NASA announced a new way to orient sensors on one of the most venerable of its spacecraft - the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) - and the resultant scientific discoveries it enabled.

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  Citizen Scientists Help Discover 8,000 New Eclipsing Binaries

  June 27, 2025

  Despite the proliferation of AI based research lately, sometimes researchers need a human eye to make true discoveries. That collaboration was in evidence in a recent paper by Dr. Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at the SETI Institute and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who led a team of almost 1,800 to review a dataset from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) that led to the discovery of almost 8,000 new eclipsing binary systems.

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  A Statistical Analysis of Exoplanet Habitability Turns Up One Great Candidate - And Significant Observational Bias

  June 26, 2025

  The search for life beyond our planet continues, and one of the most underappreciated tools in an astrobiologists' toolkit is statistics. While it might not be as glamorous as directly imaging a planet’s atmosphere or finding a system with seven planets in it, statistics is absolutely critical if we want to be sure that what we’re seeing is real and not just an artifact of the data, or of our observational techniques themselves. A new paper by Caleb Traxler and their co-authors at the Department of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine takes on that challenge head-on by statistically analyzing a set of about 10% of the total number of exoplanets found and judging their habitability.