It’s Happening With Space Even though the James Webb telescope is called the most powerful telescope in the world, there are ones on earth with bigger mirrors. The placement of the Webb telescope gives it an incredible view however. It doesn’t have to look through earth’s atmosphere. The mirror on the Webb telescope which is used to gather the light is 21.7 feet across or 6.6 meters. There are many with bigger mirrors and the Magellan telescope which is under construction, will have 7 mirrors working as one and each mirror will be 8.4 meters giving it a mirror of 368 meters or many times that of the James Webb telescope. A lot of things are happening in space as of the writing of this article, which is about 2.5 weeks ahead of the posting date now. I keep a bank of a month’s worth of articles which decreases when I am not available to write articles for different reasons. We have seen the future of holding companies accountable for cluttering space. Specifically orbital space. Dish network was fined by the FCC for allowing a retired satellite to remain in orbit. It is about time and this policy should be continued. The problem is there are satellites in orbit which are also retired but belong to other countries which we have no control over. A new type of objects have been found. They have been named Jumbos and have been defined as Jupiter-mass binary objects. They are not planets or stars; they are something different. They do not orbit a star. These objects are free floating. This is puzzling scientists because current theories about objects this size do not seem to fit these objects. The size of these objects seem to range down to half the size of Jupiter. The age of these objects has been rated at about 1 million years old, meaning they are very new. The objects have been found in the Orion Nebula. It turns out all those lightning strikes seen in the atmosphere of Venus may not be lightning at all. The Parker probe which has been studying the sun for quite a while may have solved this mystery. The probe was using the planet Venus to swing around as it headed toward the sun for more speed. It discovered something strange in the magnetic field around Venus which might be causing the flashes. This means in a nutshell, disturbances in the magnetic field of Venus are causing the flashes. Sometimes when things happen evidence is left behind, even billions of years later and that is what seems to have happened in our solar system. Certain isotopes are left over after supernova explosions and those isotopes have been found in our solar system. This seems to indicate we were near a supernova explosion relatively early in our formation. It is lucky for us it wasn’t any closer, or we might not be here today to talk about this. There has been a problem vexing astronomers and it is why some of the early galaxies seen by the James Webb telescope seem to be so bright. Until now, this could not be figured out. A new theory has been put forward which seems to contain the answer, which is bursts of light from early star formation. The galaxies were only about 400 million years old and scientists felt they should have been darker. The first supermassive black hole to be photographed just gave up a secret. We have been studying black holes for years and yet they still have kept a lot of their secrets such as what is inside them and more. Anyway, scientists just found out black holes spin, at least the one they photographed was spinning. Scientists are saying this could have something to do with their formation. I guess we will have to wait and see. I read something which really surprised me. Brian May, the lead guitarist for Queen has a doctorate in astrophysics. Not only was this a surprise, but so was the next fact. He aided NASA in the return mission which brought back asteroid samples from the asteroid Bennu. Scientists have identified a new field in science which might become very important in the future, it is space archaeology. Can you imagine how exciting this could become? Just think of teams of archaeologists digging up proof of alien life on distant planets. I am not very happy about the next thing I am going to mention and it is the fact many scientists want to use robots instead of humans to explore space. I believe only humans can appreciate the situation of exploring strange new worlds. One type of robot has been discussed which would be controlled from earth, and right now is impossible to create because signals only travel at the speed of light, so unless we figure out how to create instant messaging to distant planets, say by some sort of quantum connection, this will not work. Another robotic theory for space travel is make a robot intelligent enough to not need guidance and this might be accomplished by a couple of different ways. One way is to copy a human brain into the robot, and we are getting close to this ability, or create a robot brain so sophisticated it rivals a human one. Remember the test where NASA sent a rocket to crash into an asteroid orbiting another asteroid. The mission was named the DART mission which stood for Double Asteroid Redirection Test. I am talking about this again, since the asteroid has just been examined again and it is doing something totally unexpected. It was found that Dimorphos, the orbiting asteroid which was hit that orbited the asteroid Didymos, is still slowing down. It was thought it would speed up to what the speed was before the collision. The Ingenuity helicopter on Mars has found some wreckage on Mars. It certainly looks like it came from earth, as a matter of fact it was part of the rover landing package. It is sort of a circular object with debris around it. The rover observed an eclipse by one of its moons. I now would like to say goodbye forever to the Arecibo radio telescope. It is true it collapsed several years ago, but there was always the hope it might be rebuilt. That is not going to happen. An announcement was made an educational center will be built there teaching STEM education which is Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. There will be no astronomy. The truth is the telescope was outclassed by the moveable receivers of the Very Large Array and which can either act as one giant dish or individual dishes. It can also be tied in with other receivers all over the world.
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