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After DART Smashed Into Dimorphos, What Happened to the Larger Asteroid Didymos?

NASA’s DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) slammed into asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022, changing its orbital period. Ground and space-based telescopes turned to watch the event unfold, not only to study what happened to the asteroid, but also to help inform planetary defense efforts that might one day be needed to mitigate potential collisions …

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A Sneak Peek at the Next Generation Very Large Array’s New Antennae

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) recently disclosed a prototype radio telescope antennae for its next generation Very Large Array (ngVLA) to a group of press, scientists, engineers, and government and business leaders from the United States and Germany at the end of a workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the …

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Starlinks are Easily Detected by Radio Telescopes

Visible and infrared astronomers are concerned about light pollution from satellite megaconstellations, and radio astronomers should be concerned too. A team of astronomers used radio telescopes in Australia to image the sky as Starlink satellites overhead. The tests were done at the future Square Kilometer Array facility in Western Australia, using prototype stations that will become part of the array. According to the team, the satellites were easily detectable, and they could see them performing periodic bursts and steady transmissions. When the full SKA comes online, satellites will be another source of radio interference to contend with.

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Planning is Underway for NASA’s Next Big Flagship Space Telescope

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has only been operational for just over a year, but this isn’t stopping the world’s biggest space agency from discussing the next big space telescope that could serve as JWST’s successor sometime in the future. Enter the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), which was first proposed as NASA’s next flagship …

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A New Telescope Could Detect Decaying Dark Matter in the Early Universe

A gap in astronomical knowledge is Cosmic Dawn, a time when the first stars in the Universe formed, ending the cosmological dark ages. If there was dark matter at this early time, its decay might have heated up the intergalactic medium, sending out a signal that could be detectable today. A new paper suggests that the newly built Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) telescope could measure this dark matter decay with 1,000 hours of observation or constrain its presence by three orders of magnitude.

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Astronomers are Hoping the Event Horizon Telescope saw Pulsars Near the Milky Way's Supermassive Black Hole

The Event Horizon Telescope is a collection of radio telescopes across the globe that simultaneously gathered data about the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, acting as a single telescope the size of planet Earth. This revealed the galaxy’s heart in unprecedented detail, helping to confirm the black hole’s event horizon and prove some of Einstein’s predictions about General Relativity. But if those observations happened to contain any signals from pulsars in the area, it would allow for even more precise measurements, as if there were atomic clocks orbiting Sgr A*.

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Chinese Scientists Complete a Concept Study for a 6-Meter Space Telescope to Find Habitable Exoplanets

With JWST safely in space, researchers are designing the next generation of space telescope that could Earth-sized worlds orbiting sunlike stars. Chinese scientists released a concept paper this week for the Tianlin mission, a 6-meter UV/Optical/IR space telescope, which could begin operations in 2045. This telescope would search for rocky planets in the habitable zones around nearby stars and search for biosignatures using direct imaging. The team estimates they could obtain the spectrum of 20 candidate exoplanets in the first five years of operation.