Euclid's first images

ESA's Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark universe. The space telescope is aiming to create a map of the large-scale structure of the universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky.

I know I'm cheating a bit here (the images were released yesterday, 07/11, not October 🫣), but this is too exciting to not talk about now! These images are the first to be released from the mission and they look absolutely incredible. There are 5 in total – check them out here: esa.int/euclid.

Nobel Prize

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L'Huillier for their generation of attosecond pulses. An attosecond is equal to 1e−18 seconds (0.000000000000000001 seconds). To put this into perspective, an attosecond is to one second as one second is to the age of the universe!

Native carbon on Europa

A couple of papers (alpha, beta) published within the last couple of months have shown that, using James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data, native carbon exists on Jupiter's moon Europa.

Paper alpha searched for plumes on Europa and couldn't detect anything. Paper beta analysed the spectra coming from the moon and mapped the distribution of carbon dioxide on Europa and, from this, concluded that the carbon dioxide was derived from an internal carbon source.

Europa is one of the few places in our Solar System which is thought to possibly support life – it has a water-ice crust with a liquid salty ocean below it. Life as we know it (i.e., humans and all the animals and insects on Earth) need carbon to survive, which is why this result is so interesting!

This comes just in time for the launch of ESA's JUICE mission to explore 3 of Jupiter's moons – Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa – in addition to NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which'll conduct 44 different flybys of Europa.

Jupiter-Mass Binary Objects (JUMBOs) in Orion / Trapezium Cluster

Following on from the images of the Orion Nebula last month, Pearson and McCaughrean claim to have found 540 free floating planets in a cluster of stars in the Orion Nebula. Unlike stars, planets are relatively small and do not emit energy, making them pretty hard to spot. However, when they are newly formed, they're still quite hot due to the immense pressures involved. This leads to a "glow" in the infrared band. From this, a mass can be estimated.

They found that 9% of the planets detected were in a binary system – two planets orbiting one another – and these systems were given the name "JUMBOs" (Jupiter-Mass Binary Objects). Follow up observations to obtain the spectra of these objects will take place in Spring 2024.

Record-breaking black hole discovered

By combining data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a team of researchers was able to find the telltale signature of a growing black hole just 470 million years after the big bang!

The black hole was found in a galaxy named UHZ1 in the direction of the galaaxy cluster Abell 2744, located 3.5 billion light-years from Earth. Webb data, however, has revealed that the galaxy is much more distant than the cluster at 13.2 billion light-years from Earth – this means that the black hole was in existence when the universe was only 3% of its current age!

Two weeks of observations with Chandra showed the presence of intense, superheated, X-ray emitting gas in this galaxy – a trademark for a growing supermassive black hole (SMBH). This discovery is so important for understanding how some SMBHs can reach colossal masses so soon after the big bang. Do they form directly from the collapse of massive clouds of gas, creating black holes weighing between 10,000 and 100,000 Suns? Or do they come from explosions of the first stars that create black holes weighing only between 10 and 100 Suns?

The research team found strong evidence that the newly discovered black hole was born massive. Its mass is estimated to fall between 10 and 100 million Suns, based on the brightness and energy of the X-rays. This mass range is similar to that of all the stars in the galaxy where it lives, which is in stark contrast to black holes in the centers of galaxies in the nearby universe that usually contain only about a tenth of a percent of the mass of their host galaxy’s stars. The large mass of the black hole at a young age, plus the amount of X-rays it produces and the brightness of the galaxy detected by Webb, all agree with theoretical predictions in 2017 by co-author Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University for an “Outsize Black Hole” that directly formed from the collapse of a huge cloud of gas.

published: 08/11/23 by kaan evcimen