Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
Webb sees carbon-rich dust grains in the first billion years of cosmic time
-
Similar Topics
-
By European Space Agency
The X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) has revealed an unexpected difference between the powerful winds launching from a disc around a neutron star and those from material circling supermassive black holes. The surprisingly dense wind blowing from the stellar system challenges our understanding of how such winds form and drive change in their surroundings.
View the full article
-
By NASA
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help scientists better understand our Milky Way galaxy’s less sparkly components — gas and dust strewn between stars, known as the interstellar medium.
One of Roman’s major observing programs, called the Galactic Plane Survey, will peer through our galaxy to its most distant edge, mapping roughly 20 billion stars—about four times more than have currently been mapped. Scientists will use data from these stars to study and map the dust their light travels through, contributing to the most complete picture yet of the Milky Way’s structure, star formation, and the origins of our solar system.
Our Milky Way galaxy is home to more than 100 billion stars that are often separated by trillions of miles. The spaces in between, called the interstellar medium, aren’t empty — they’re sprinkled with gas and dust that are both the seeds of new stars and the leftover crumbs from stars long dead. Studying the interstellar medium with observatories like NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will reveal new insight into the galactic dust recycling system.
Credit: NASA/Laine Havens; Music credit: Building Heroes by Enrico Cacace [BMI], Universal Production Music “With Roman, we’ll be able to turn existing artist’s conceptions of the Milky Way into more data-driven models using new constraints on the 3D distribution of interstellar dust,” said Catherine Zucker, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Solving Milky Way mystery
Scientists know how our galaxy likely looks by combining observations of the Milky Way and other spiral galaxies. But dust clouds make it hard to work out the details on the opposite side of our galaxy. Imagine trying to map a neighborhood while looking through the windows of a house surrounded by a dense fog.
Roman will see through the “fog” of dust using a specialized camera and filters that observe infrared light — light with longer wavelengths than our eyes can detect. Infrared light is more likely to pass through dust clouds without scattering.
This artist’s concept visualizes different types of light moving through a cloud of particles. Since infrared light has a longer wavelength, it can pass more easily through the dust. That means astronomers observing in infrared light can peer deeper into dusty regions.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Light with shorter wavelengths, including blue light produced by stars, more easily scatters. That means stars shining through dust appear dimmer and redder than they actually are.
By comparing the observations with information on the source star’s characteristics, astronomers can disentangle the star’s distance from how much its colors have been reddened. Studying those effects reveals clues about the dust’s properties.
“I can ask, ‘how much redder and dimmer is the starlight that Roman detects at different wavelengths?’ Then, I can take that information and relate it back to the properties of the dust grains themselves, and in particular their size,” said Brandon Hensley, a scientist who studies interstellar dust at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Scientists will also learn about the dust’s composition and probe clouds to investigate the physical processes behind changing dust properties.
Clues in dust-influenced starlight hint at the amount of dust between us and a star. Piecing together results from many stars allows astronomers to construct detailed 3D dust maps. That would enable scientists like Zucker to create a model of the Milky Way, which will show us how it looks from the outside. Then scientists can better compare the Milky Way with other galaxies that we only observe from the outside, slotting it into a cosmological perspective of galaxy evolution.
“Roman will add a whole new dimension to our understanding of the galaxy because we’ll see billions and billions more stars,” Zucker said. “Once we observe the stars, we’ll have the dust data as well because its effects are encoded in every star Roman detects.”
Galactic life cycles
The interstellar medium does more than mill about the Milky Way — it fuels star and planet formation. Dense blobs of interstellar medium form molecular clouds, which can gravitationally collapse and kick off the first stages of star development. Young stars eject hot winds that can cause surrounding dust to clump into planetary building blocks.
“Dust carries a lot of information about our origins and how everything came to be,” said Josh Peek, an associate astronomer and head of the data science mission office at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. “Right now, we’re basically standing on a really large dust grain — Earth was built out of lots and lots of really tiny grains that grew together into a giant ball.”
Roman will identify young clusters of stars in new, distant star-forming regions as well as contribute data on “star factories” previously identified by missions like NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope.
“If you want to understand star formation in different environments, you have to understand the interstellar landscape that seeds it,” Zucker said. “Roman will allow us to link the 3D structure of the interstellar medium with the 3D distribution of young stars across the galaxy’s disk.”
Roman’s new 3D dust maps will refine our understanding of the Milky Way’s spiral structure, the pinwheel-like pattern where stars, gas, and dust bunch up like galactic traffic jams. By combining velocity data with dust maps, scientists will compare observations with predictions from models to help identify the cause of spiral structure—currently unclear.
The role that this spiral pattern plays in star formation remains similarly uncertain. Some theories suggest that galactic congestion triggers star formation, while others contend that these traffic jams gather material but do not stimulate star birth.
Roman will help to solve mysteries like these by providing more data on dusty regions across the entire Milky Way. That will enable scientists to compare many galactic environments and study star birth in specific structures, like the galaxy’s winding spiral arms or its central stellar bar.
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will conduct a Galactic Plane Survey to explore our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The survey will map around 20 billion stars, each encoding information about intervening dust and gas called the interstellar medium. Studying the interstellar medium could offer clues about our galaxy’s spiral arms, galactic recycling, and much more.
Credit: NASA, STScI, Caltech/IPAC The astronomy community is currently in the final stages of planning for Roman’s Galactic Plane Survey.
“With Roman’s massive survey of the galactic plane, we’ll be able to have this deep technical understanding of our galaxy,” Peek said.
After processing, Roman’s data will be available to the public online via the Roman Research Nexus and the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, which will each provide open access to the data for years to come.
“People who aren’t born yet are going to be able to do really cool analyses of this data,” Peek said. “We have a really beautiful piece of our heritage to hand down to future generations and to celebrate.”
Roman is slated to launch no later than May 2027, with the team working toward a potential early launch as soon as fall 2026.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
Download additional images and video from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
For more information about the Roman Space Telescope, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/roman
By Laine Havens
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Share
Details
Last Updated Sep 16, 2025 EditorAshley BalzerContactAshley Balzerashley.m.balzer@nasa.govLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Galaxies Protostars Stars The Milky Way Explore More
5 min read NASA’s Roman Team Selects Survey to Map Our Galaxy’s Far Side
Article 2 years ago 6 min read NASA’s Roman Mission Shares Detailed Plans to Scour Skies
Article 5 months ago 7 min read One Survey by NASA’s Roman Could Unveil 100,000 Cosmic Explosions
Article 2 months ago View the full article
-
By European Space Agency
Image: First view of aerosols from MetOp Second Generation’s 3MI instrument View the full article
-
By NASA
5 Min Read NASA’s X-59 Moves Toward First Flight at Speed of Safety
NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft is seen at dawn with firetrucks and safety personnel nearby during a hydrazine safety check at U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, on Aug. 18, 2025. The operation highlights the extensive precautions built into the aircraft’s safety procedures for a system that serves as a critical safeguard, ensuring the engine can be restarted in flight as the X-59 prepares for its first flight. Credits: Lockheed Martin As NASA’s one-of-a-kind X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft approaches first flight, its team is mapping every step from taxi and takeoff to cruising and landing – and their decision-making is guided by safety.
First flight will be a lower-altitude loop at about 240 mph to check system integration, kicking off a phase of flight testing focused on verifying the aircraft’s airworthiness and safety. During subsequent test flights, the X-59 will go higher and faster, eventually exceeding the speed of sound. The aircraft is designed to fly supersonic while generating a quiet thump rather than a loud sonic boom.
To help ensure that first flight – and every flight after that – will begin and end safely, engineers have layered protection into the aircraft.
The X-59’s Flight Test Instrumentation System (FTIS) serves as one of its primary record keepers, collecting and transmitting audio, video, data from onboard sensors, and avionics information – all of which NASA will track across the life of the aircraft.
“We record 60 different streams of data with over 20,000 parameters on board,” said Shedrick Bessent, NASA X-59 instrumentation engineer. “Before we even take off, it’s reassuring to know the system has already seen more than 200 days of work.”
Through ground tests and system evaluations, the system has already generated more than 8,000 files over 237 days of recording. That record provides a detailed history that helps engineers verify the aircraft’s readiness for flight.
Maintainers perform a hydrazine safety check on the agency’s quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft at U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, on Aug. 18, 2025. Hydrazine is a highly toxic chemical, but it serves as a critical backup to restart the engine in flight, if necessary, and is one of several safety features being validated ahead of the aircraft’s first flight.Credits: Lockheed Martin “There’s just so much new technology on this aircraft, and if a system like FTIS can offer a bit of relief by showing us what’s working – with reliability and consistency – that reduces stress and uncertainty,” Bessent said. “I think that helps the project just as much as it helps our team.”
The aircraft also uses a digital fly-by-wire system that will keep the aircraft stable and limit unsafe maneuvers. First developed in the 1970s at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, digital fly-by-wire replaced how aircraft were flown, moving away from traditional cables and pulleys to computerized flight controls and actuators.
On the X-59, the pilot’s inputs – such as movement of the stick or throttle – are translated into electronic signals and decoded by a computer. Those signals are then sent through fiber-optic wires to the aircraft’s surfaces, like its wings and tail.
Additionally, the aircraft uses multiple computers that back each other up and keep the system operating. If one fails, another takes over. The same goes for electrical and hydraulic systems, which also have independent backup systems to ensure the aircraft can fly safely.
Onboard batteries back up the X-59’s hydraulic and electrical systems, with thermal batteries driving the electric pump that powers hydraulics. Backing up the engine is an emergency restart system that uses hydrazine, a highly reactive liquid fuel. In the unlikely event of a loss of power, the hydrazine system would restart the engine in flight. The system would help restore power so the pilot could stabilize or recover the aircraft.
Maintainers perform a hydrazine safety check on NASA’s quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft at U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, on Aug. 18, 2025. Hydrazine is a highly toxic chemical, but it serves as a critical backup to restart the engine in flight, if necessary, which is one of several safety features being validated ahead of the aircraft’s first flight. Credits: Lockheed Martin Protective Measures
Behind each of these systems is a team of engineers, technicians, safety and quality assurance experts, and others. The team includes a crew chief responsible for maintenance on the aircraft and ensuring the aircraft is ready for flight.
“I try to always walk up and shake the crew chief’s hand,” said Nils Larson, NASA X-59 lead test pilot. “Because it’s not your airplane – it’s the crew chief’s airplane – and they’re trusting you with it. You’re just borrowing it for an hour or two, then bringing it back and handing it over.”
Larson, set to serve as pilot for first flight, may only be borrowing the aircraft from the X-59’s crew chiefs – Matt Arnold from X-59 contractor Lockheed Martin and Juan Salazar from NASA – but plenty of the aircraft’s safety systems were designed specifically to protect the pilot in flight.
The X-59’s life support system is designed to deliver oxygen through the pilot’s mask to compensate for the decreased atmospheric pressure at the aircraft’s cruising altitude of 55,000 feet – altitudes more than twice as high as that of a typical airliner. In order to withstand high-altitude flight, Larson will also wear a counter-pressure garment, or g-suit, similar to what fighter pilots wear.
In the unlikely event it’s needed, the X-59 also features an ejection seat and canopy adapted from a U.S. Air Force T-38 trainer, which comes equipped with essentials like a first aid kit, radio, and water. Due to the design, build, and test rigor put into the X-59, the ejection seat is a safety measure.
All these systems form a network of safety, adding confidence to the pilot and engineers as they approach to the next milestone – first flight.
“There’s a lot of trust that goes into flying something new,” Larson said. “You’re trusting the engineers, the maintainers, the designers – everyone who has touched the aircraft. And if I’m not comfortable, I’m not getting in. But if they trust the aircraft, and they trust me in it, then I’m all in.”
Share
Details
Last Updated Sep 12, 2025 EditorDede DiniusContactNicolas Cholulanicolas.h.cholula@nasa.govLocationArmstrong Flight Research Center Related Terms
Armstrong Flight Research Center Advanced Air Vehicles Program Aeronautics Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate Ames Research Center Glenn Research Center Langley Research Center Low Boom Flight Demonstrator Quesst (X-59) Supersonic Flight Explore More
3 min read NASA, War Department Partnership Tests Boundaries of Autonomous Drone Operations
Article 20 minutes ago 3 min read NASA, Embry-Riddle Enact Agreement to Advance Research, Educational Opportunities
Article 24 hours ago 4 min read NASA Glenn Tests Mini-X-Ray Technology to Advance Space Health Care
Article 1 week ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Armstrong Flight Research Center
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
By NASA
Honolulu is pictured here beside a calm sea in 2017. A JPL technology recently detected and confirmed a tsunami up to 45 minutes prior to detection by tide gauges in Hawaii, and it estimated the speed of the wave to be over 580 miles per hour (260 meters per second) near the coast.NASA/JPL-Caltech A massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami off Russia in late July tested an experimental detection system that had deployed a critical component just the day before.
A recent tsunami triggered by a magnitude 8.8 earthquake off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula sent pressure waves to the upper layer of the atmosphere, NASA scientists have reported. While the tsunami did not wreak widespread damage, it was an early test for a detection system being developed at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Called GUARDIAN (GNSS Upper Atmospheric Real-time Disaster Information and Alert Network), the experimental technology “functioned to its full extent,” said Camille Martire, one of its developers at JPL. The system flagged distortions in the atmosphere and issued notifications to subscribed subject matter experts in as little as 20 minutes after the quake. It confirmed signs of the approaching tsunami about 30 to 40 minutes before waves made landfall in Hawaii and sites across the Pacific on July 29 (local time).
“Those extra minutes of knowing something is coming could make a real difference when it comes to warning communities in the path,” said JPL scientist Siddharth Krishnamoorthy.
Near-real-time outputs from GUARDIAN must be interpreted by experts trained to identify the signs of tsunamis. But already it’s one of the fastest monitoring tools of its kind: Within about 10 minutes of receiving data, it can produce a snapshot of a tsunami’s rumble reaching the upper atmosphere.
The dots in this graph indicate wave disturbances in the ionosphere as measured be-tween ground stations and navigation satellites. The initial spike shows the acoustic wave coming from the epicenter of the July 29 quake that caused the tsunami; the red squiggle shows the gravity wave the tsunami generated.NASA/JPL-Caltech The goal of GUARDIAN is to augment existing early warning systems. A key question after a major undersea earthquake is whether a tsunami was generated. Today, forecasters use seismic data as a proxy to predict if and where a tsunami could occur, and they rely on sea-based instruments to confirm that a tsunami is passing by. Deep-ocean pressure sensors remain the gold standard when it comes to sizing up waves, but they are expensive and sparse in locations.
“NASA’s GUARDIAN can help fill the gaps,” said Christopher Moore, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Center for Tsunami Research. “It provides one more piece of information, one more valuable data point, that can help us determine, yes, we need to make the call to evacuate.”
Moore noted that GUARDIAN adds a unique perspective: It’s able to sense sea surface motion from high above Earth, globally and in near-real-time.
Bill Fry, chair of the United Nations technical working group responsible for tsunami early warning in the Pacific, said GUARDIAN is part of a technological “paradigm shift.” By directly observing ocean dynamics from space, “GUARDIAN is absolutely something that we in the early warning community are looking for to help underpin next generation forecasting.”
How GUARDIAN works
GUARDIAN takes advantage of tsunami physics. During a tsunami, many square miles of the ocean surface can rise and fall nearly in unison. This displaces a significant amount of air above it, sending low-frequency sound and gravity waves speeding upwards toward space. The waves interact with the charged particles of the upper atmosphere — the ionosphere — where they slightly distort the radio signals coming down to scientific ground stations of GPS and other positioning and timing satellites. These satellites are known collectively as the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS).
While GNSS processing methods on Earth correct for such distortions, GUARDIAN uses them as clues.
SWOT Satellite Measures Pacific Tsunami The software scours a trove of data transmitted to more than 350 continuously operating GNSS ground stations around the world. It can potentially identify evidence of a tsunami up to about 745 miles (1,200 kilometers) from a given station. In ideal situations, vulnerable coastal communities near a GNSS station could know when a tsunami was heading their way and authorities would have as much as 1 hour and 20 minutes to evacuate the low-lying areas, thereby saving countless lives and property.
Key to this effort is the network of GNSS stations around the world supported by NASA’s Space Geodesy Project and Global GNSS Network, as well as JPL’s Global Differential GPS network that transmits the data in real time.
The Kamchatka event offered a timely case study for GUARDIAN. A day before the quake off Russia’s northeast coast, the team had deployed two new elements that were years in the making: an artificial intelligence to mine signals of interest and an accompanying prototype messaging system.
Both were put to the test when one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded spawned a tsunami traveling hundreds of miles per hour across the Pacific Ocean. Having been trained to spot the kinds of atmospheric distortions caused by a tsunami, GUARDIAN flagged the signals for human review and notified subscribed subject matter experts.
Notably, tsunamis are most often caused by large undersea earthquakes, but not always. Volcanic eruptions, underwater landslides, and certain weather conditions in some geographic locations can all produce dangerous waves. An advantage of GUARDIAN is that it doesn’t require information on what caused a tsunami; rather, it can detect that one was generated and then can alert the authorities to help minimize the loss of life and property.
While there’s no silver bullet to stop a tsunami from making landfall, “GUARDIAN has real potential to help by providing open access to this data,” said Adrienne Moseley, co-director of the Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre. “Tsunamis don’t respect national boundaries. We need to be able to share data around the whole region to be able to make assessments about the threat for all exposed coastlines.”
To learn more about GUARDIAN, visit:
https://guardian.jpl.nasa.gov
News Media Contacts
Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-379-6874 / 818-354-0307
jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov
Written by Sally Younger
2025-117
Explore More
5 min read New U.S.-European Sea Level Satellite Will Help Safeguard Ships at Sea
Article 21 hours ago 13 min read The Earth Observer Editor’s Corner: July–September 2025
NOTE TO READERS: After more than three decades associated with or directly employed by NASA,…
Article 2 days ago 21 min read Summary of the 11th ABoVE Science Team Meeting
Introduction The NASA Arctic–Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) is a large-scale ecological study in the northern…
Article 2 days ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.