Astronomers have seen the most energetic cosmic explosions yet, a new class of eruptions termed "extreme nuclear transients" (ENTs). These rare events occur when stars at least three times more massive than our Sun are shredded by supermassive black holes. While such cataclysmic events have been known for years, recent flares detected in galactic centres revealed a brightness nearly ten times greater than typical tidal disruption events. The discovery offers new insight into black hole behaviour and energy release in the universe's most extreme environments.Extreme Flares Detected by Gaia and ZTF Reveal Most Energetic Black Hole Events YetAs per a June 4 Science Advances report, lead researcher Jason Hinkle of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy noticed two mysterious flares from galactic cores in 2016 and 2018, recorded by the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft. The scientists recognised them as ENTs because a third one, observed in 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility, has similar characteristics. These outbursts gave out more energy than supernovae did, and they lasted much longer than short bursts typically seen during tidal disruption events.Tidal disruption events such as Gaia18cdj are associated with flares that are explosive and long-duration. These explosions are greater than 100 times as intense as supernovas and have been occurring for millions to billions of years. They make ENTs an uncommon, energetic, and long-lived event that cosmic explorers might use.The ENTs' brightness lets astronomers focus on distant galactic centres, as well as the feeding habits of black holes in the universe's early days. "These flares are shining a light on the growth of supermassive black holes in the universe," mentioned co-author Benjamin Shappee, a Hubble fellow at IfA. Their visibility on large scales provides a statistical tool for cosmological studies in the future.Such findings are expanding what astrophysicists know about ENTs-but researchers stress that they're not done wrapping their heads around these mysterious objects just yet. The results might also advance new models of how black holes and stars work together and how energy moves across galaxies. Given upcoming missions with better instruments, the discovery of more ENTs will help astronomers learn even more about these violent events in the cosmos. For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube. Gadgets 360 Staff The resident bot. If you email me, a human will respond. More

June 3, 20258 min readWhite House Budget Plan Would Devastate U.S. Space ScienceScientists are rallying to reverse ruinous proposed cuts to both NASA and the National Science FoundationBy Nadia Drake edited by Lee BillingsFog shrouds the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in this photograph from February 25, 2025. Gregg Newton/AFP via GettyLate last week the Trump Administration released its detailed budget request for fiscal year 2026 —a request that, if enacted, would be the equivalent of carpet-bombing the national scientific enterprise.“This is a profound, generational threat to scientific leadership in the United States,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a science advocacy group. “If implemented, it would fundamentally undermine and potentially devastate the most unique capabilities that the U.S. has built up over a half-century.”The Trump administration’s proposal, which still needs to be approved by Congress, is sure to ignite fierce resistance from scientists and senators alike. Among other agencies, the budget deals staggering blows to NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which together fund the majority of U.S. research in astronomy, astrophysics, planetary science, heliophysics and Earth science —all space-related sciences that have typically mustered hearty bipartisan support.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The NSF supports ground-based astronomy, including such facilities as the Nobel Prize–winning gravitational-wave detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), globe-spanning arrays of radio telescopes, and cutting-edge observatories that stretch from Hawaii to the South Pole. The agency faces a lethal 57 percent reduction to its $9-billion budget, with deep cuts to every program except those in President Trump’s priority areas, which include artificial intelligence and quantum information science. NASA, which funds space-based observatories, faces a 25 percent reduction, dropping the agency’s $24.9-billion budget to $18.8 billion. The proposal beefs up efforts to send humans to the moon and to Mars, but the agency’s Science Mission Directorate —home to Mars rovers, the Voyager interstellar probes, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Hubble Space Telescope, and much more —is looking at a nearly 50 percent reduction, with dozens of missions canceled, turned off or operating on a starvation diet.“It’s an end-game scenario for science at NASA,” says Joel Parriott, director of external affairs and public policy at the American Astronomical Society. “It’s not just the facilities. You’re punching a generation-size hole, maybe a multigenerational hole, in the scientific and technical workforce. You don’t just Cryovac these people and pull them out when the money comes back. People are going to move on.”Adding to the chaos, on Saturday President Trump announced that billionaire entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman was no longer his pick for NASA administrator—just days before the Senate was set to confirm Isaacman’s nomination. Initial reports—which have now been disputed—explained the president’s decision as stemming from his discovery that Isaacman recently donated money to Democratic candidates. Regardless of the true reason, the decision leaves both NASA and the NSF, whose director abruptly resigned in April, with respective placeholder “acting” leaders at the top. That leadership vacuum significantly weakens the agencies’ ability to fight the proposed budget cuts and advocate for themselves. “What’s more inefficient than a rudderless agency without an empowered leadership?” Dreier asks.Actions versus WordsDuring his second administration, President Trump has repeatedly celebrated U.S. leadership in space. When he nominated Isaacman last December, Trump noted “NASA’s mission of discovery and inspiration” and looked to a future of “groundbreaking achievements in space science, technology and exploration.” More recently, while celebrating Hubble’s 35th anniversary in April, Trump called the telescope “a symbol of America’s unmatched exploratory might” and declared that NASA would “continue to lead the way in fueling the pursuit of space discovery and exploration.” The administration’s budgetary actions speak louder than Trump’s words, however. Instead of ushering in a new golden age of space exploration—or even setting up the U.S. to stay atop the podium—the president’s budget “narrows down what the cosmos is to moon and Mars and pretty much nothing else,” Dreier says. “And the cosmos is a lot bigger, and there’s a lot more to learn out there.”Dreier notes that when corrected for inflation, the overall NASA budget would be the lowest it’s been since 1961. But in April of that year, the Soviet Union launched the first human into orbit, igniting a space race that swelled NASA’s budget and led to the Apollo program putting American astronauts on the moon. Today China’s rapidprogress and enormous ambitions in space would make the moment ripe for a 21st-century version of this competition, with the U.S. generously funding its own efforts to maintain pole position. Instead the White House’s budget would do the exact opposite.“The seesaw is sort of unbalanced,” says Tony Beasley, director of the NSF-funded National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). “On the one side, we’re saying, ‘Well, China’s kicking our ass, and we need to do something about that.’ But then we’re not going to give any money to anything that might actually do that.”How NASA will achieve a crewed return to the moon and send astronauts to Mars—goals that the agency now considers part of “winning the second space race”—while also maintaining its leadership in science is unclear.“This is Russ Vought’s budget,” Dreier says, referring to the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), an unelected bureaucrat who has been notorious for his efforts to reshape the U.S. government by weaponizing federal funding. “This isn’t even Trump’s budget. Trump’s budget would be good for space. This one undermines the president’s own claims and ambitions when it comes to space.”“Low Expectations” at the High FrontierRumors began swirling about the demise of NASA science in April, when a leaked OMB document described some of the proposed cuts and cancellations. Those included both the beleaguered, bloated Mars Sample Return (MSR) program and the on-time, on-budget Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the next astrophysics flagship mission.The top-line numbers in the more fleshed-out proposal are consistent with that document, and MSR would still be canceled. But Roman would be granted a stay of execution: rather than being zeroed out, it would be put on life support.“It’s a reprieve from outright termination, but it’s still a cut for functionally no reason,” Dreier says. “In some ways, [the budget] is slightly better than I was expecting. But I had very low expectations.”In the proposal, many of the deepest cuts would be made to NASA science, which would sink from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion. Earth science missions focused on carbon monitoring and climate change, as well as programs aimed at education and workforce diversity, would be effectively erased by the cuts. But a slew of high-profile planetary science projects would suffer, too, with cancellations proposed for two future Venus missions, the Juno mission that is currently surveilling Jupiter, the New Horizons mission that flew by Pluto and two Mars orbiters. (The Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan would survive, as would the flagship Europa Clipper spacecraft, which launched last October.) NASA’s international partnerships in planetary science fare poorly, too, as the budget rescinds the agency’s involvement with multiple European-led projects, including a Venus mission and Mars rover.The proposal is even worse for NASA astrophysics—the study of our cosmic home—which “really takes it to the chin,” Dreier says, with a roughly $1-billion drop to just $523 million. In the president’s proposal, only three big astrophysics missions would survive: the soon-to-launch Roman and the already-operational Hubble and JWST. The rest of NASA’s active astrophysics missions, which include the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), would be severely pared back or zeroed out. Additionally, the budget would nix NASA’s contributions to large European missions, such as a future space-based gravitational-wave observatory.“This is the most powerful fleet of missions in the history of the study of astrophysics from space,” says John O’Meara, chief scientist at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and co-chair of a recent senior review panel that evaluated NASA’s astrophysics missions. The report found that each reviewed mission “continues to be capable of producing important, impactful science.” This fleet, O’Meara adds, is more than the sum of its parts, with much of its power emerging from synergies among multiple telescopes that study the cosmos in many different types, or wavelengths, of light.By hollowing out NASA’s science to ruthlessly focus on crewed missions, the White House budget might be charitably viewed as seeking to rekindle a heroic age of spaceflight—with China’s burgeoning space program as the new archrival. But even for these supposedly high-priority initiatives, the proposed funding levels appear too anemic and meager to give the U.S. any competitive edge. For example, the budget directs about $1 billion to new technology investments to support crewed Mars missions while conservative estimates have projected that such voyages would cost hundreds of billions of dollars more.“It cedes U.S. leadership in space science at a time when other nations, particularly China, are increasing their ambitions,” Dreier says. “It completely flies in the face of the president’s own stated goals for American leadership in space.”Undermining the FoundationThe NSF’s situation, which one senior space scientist predicted would be “diabolical” when the NASA numbers leaked back in April, is also unsurprisingly dire. Unlike NASA, which is focused on space science and exploration, the NSF’s programs span the sweep of scientific disciplines, meaning that even small, isolated cuts—let alone the enormous ones that the budget has proposed—can have shockingly large effects on certain research domains.“Across the different parts of the NSF, the programs that are upvoted are the president’s strategic initiatives, but then everything else gets hit,” Beasley says.Several large-scale NSF-funded projects would escape more or less intact. Among these are the panoramic Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scheduled to unveil its first science images later this month, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope. The budget also moves the Giant Magellan Telescope, which would boast starlight-gathering mirrors totaling more than 25 meters across, into a final design phase. All three of those facilities take advantage of Chile’s pristine dark skies. Other large NSF-funded projects that would survive include the proposed Next Generation Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico and several facilities at the South Pole, such as the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.If this budget is enacted, however, NSF officials anticipate only funding a measly 7 percent of research proposals overall rather than 25 percent; the number of graduate research fellowships awarded would be cleaved in half, and postdoctoral fellowships in the physical sciences would drop to zero. NRAO’s Green Bank Observatory — home to the largest steerable single-dish radio telescope on the planet — would likely shut down. So would other, smaller observatories in Arizona and Chile. The Thirty Meter Telescope, a humongous, perennially embattled project with no clear site selection, would be canceled. And the budget proposes closing one of the two gravitational-wave detectors used by the LIGO collaboration—whose observations of colliding black holes earned the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics—even though both detectors need to be online for LIGO’s experiment to work. Even factoring in other operational detectors, such as Virgo in Europe and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) in Japan, shutting down half of LIGO would leave a gaping blind spot in humanity’s gravitational-wave view of the heavens.“The consequences of this budget are that key scientific priorities, on the ground and in space, will take at least a decade longer—or not be realized at all,” O’Meara says. “The universe is telling its story at all wavelengths. It doesn’t care what you build, but if you want to hear that story, you must build many things.”Dreier, Parriott and others are anticipating fierce battles on Capitol Hill. And already both Democratic and Republican legislators have issued statement signaling that they won’t support the budget request as is. “This sick joke of a budget is a nonstarter,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, ranking member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, in a recent statement. And in an earlier statement, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Appropriations, cautioned that “the President’s Budget Request is simply one step in the annual budget process.”The Trump administration has “thrown a huge punch here, and there will be a certain back-reaction, and we’ll end up in the middle somewhere,” Beasley says. “The mistake you can make right now is to assume that this represents finalized decisions and the future—because it doesn’t.”

By CHRIS McGOWAN This image of Jupiter from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) shows stunning details of the majestic planet in infrared light. (Image courtesy of NASA, ESA and CSA) Special effects have been used for decades to depict space exploration, from visits to planets and moons to zero gravity and spaceships – one need only think of the landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Since that era, visual effects have increasingly grown in realism and importance. VFX have been used for entertainment and for scientific purposes, outreach to the public and astronaut training in virtual reality. Compelling images and videos can bring data to life. NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) produces visualizations, animations and images to help scientists tell stories of their research and make science more approachable and engaging. A.J. Christensen is a senior visualization designer for the NASA Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. There, he develops data visualization techniques and designs data-driven imagery for scientific analysis and public outreach using Hollywood visual effects tools, according to NASA. SVS visualizations feature datasets from Earth-and space-based instrumentation, scientific supercomputer models and physical statistical distributions that have been analyzed and processed by computational scientists. Christensen’s specialties include working with 3D volumetric data, using the procedural cinematic software Houdini and science topics in Heliophysics, Geophysics and Astrophysics. He previously worked at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ Advanced Visualization Lab where he worked on more than a dozen science documentary full-dome films as well as the IMAX films Hubble 3D and A Beautiful Planet – and he worked at DNEG on the movie Interstellar, which won the 2015 Best Visual Effects Academy Award. This global map of CO2 was created by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio using a model called GEOS, short for the Goddard Earth Observing System. GEOS is a high-resolution weather reanalysis model, powered by supercomputers, that is used to represent what was happening in the atmosphere. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) “The NASA Scientific Visualization Studio operates like a small VFX studio that creates animations of scientific data that has been collected or analyzed at NASA. We are one of several groups at NASA that create imagery for public consumption, but we are also a part of the scientific research process, helping scientists understand and share their data through pictures and video.” —A.J. Christensen, Senior Visualization Designer, NASA Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) About his work at NASA SVS, Christensen comments, “The NASA Scientific Visualization Studio operates like a small VFX studio that creates animations of scientific data that has been collected or analyzed at NASA. We are one of several groups at NASA that create imagery for public consumption, but we are also a part of the scientific research process, helping scientists understand and share their data through pictures and video. This past year we were part of NASA’s total eclipse outreach efforts, we participated in all the major earth science and astronomy conferences, we launched a public exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History called the Earth Information Center, and we posted hundreds of new visualizations to our publicly accessible website: svs.gsfc.nasa.gov.” This is the ‘beauty shot version’ of Perpetual Ocean 2: Western Boundary Currents. The visualization starts with a rotating globe showing ocean currents. The colors used to color the flow in this version were chosen to provide a pleasing look. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) The Gulf Stream and connected currents. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) Venus, our nearby “sister” planet, beckons today as a compelling target for exploration that may connect the objects in our own solar system to those discovered around nearby stars. (Image courtesy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center) WORKING WITH DATA While Christensen is interpreting the data from active spacecraft and making it usable in different forms, such as for science and outreach, he notes, “It’s not just spacecraft that collect data. NASA maintains or monitors instruments on Earth too – on land, in the oceans and in the air. And to be precise, there are robots wandering around Mars that are collecting data, too.” He continues, “Sometimes the data comes to our team as raw telescope imagery, sometimes we get it as a data product that a scientist has already analyzed and extracted meaning from, and sometimes various sensor data is used to drive computational models and we work with the models’ resulting output.” Jupiter’s moon Europa may have life in a vast ocean beneath its icy surface. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) HOUDINI AND OTHER TOOLS “Data visualization means a lot of different things to different people, but many people on our team interpret it as a form of filmmaking,” Christensen says. “We are very inspired by the approach to visual storytelling that Hollywood uses, and we use tools that are standard for Hollywood VFX. Many professionals in our area – the visualization of 3D scientific data – were previously using other animation tools but have discovered that Houdini is the most capable of understanding and manipulating unusual data, so there has been major movement toward Houdini over the past decade.” Satellite imagery from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows the Sun in ultraviolet light colorized in light brown. Seen in ultraviolet light, the dark patches on the Sun are known as coronal holes and are regions where fast solar wind gushes out into space. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) Christensen explains, “We have always worked with scientific software as well – sometimes there’s only one software tool in existence to interpret a particular kind of scientific data. More often than not, scientific software does not have a GUI, so we’ve had to become proficient at learning new coding environments very quickly. IDL and Python are the generic data manipulation environments we use when something is too complicated or oversized for Houdini, but there are lots of alternatives out there. Typically, we use these tools to get the data into a format that Houdini can interpret, and then we use Houdini to do our shading, lighting and camera design, and seamlessly blend different datasets together.” While cruising around Saturn in early October 2004, Cassini captured a series of images that have been composed into this large global natural color view of Saturn and its rings. This grand mosaic consists of 126 images acquired in a tile-like fashion, covering one end of Saturn’s rings to the other and the entire planet in between. (Image courtesy of ASA/JPL/Space Science Institute) The black hole Gargantua and the surrounding accretion disc from the 2014 movie Interstellar. (Image courtesy of DNEG and Paramount Pictures) Another visualization of the black hole Gargantua. (Image courtesy of DNEG and Paramount Pictures) INTERSTELLAR & GARGANTUA Christensen recalls working for DNEG on Interstellar (2014). “When I first started at DNEG, they asked me to work on the giant waves on Miller’s ocean planet [in the film]. About a week in, my manager took me into the hall and said, ‘I was looking at your reel and saw all this astronomy stuff. We’re working on another sequence with an accretion disk around a black hole that I’m wondering if we should put you on.’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve done lots of accretion disks.’ So, for the rest of my time on the show, I was working on the black hole team.” He adds, “There are a lot of people in my community that would be hesitant to label any big-budget movie sequence as a scientific visualization. The typical assumption is that for a Hollywood movie, no one cares about accuracy as long as it looks good. Guardians of the Galaxy makes it seem like space is positively littered with nebulae, and Star Wars makes it seem like asteroids travel in herds. But the black hole Gargantua in Interstellar is a good case for being called a visualization. The imagery you see in the movie is the direct result of a collaboration with an expert scientist, Dr. Kip Thorne, working with the DNEG research team using the actual Einstein equations that describe the gravity around a black hole.” Thorne is a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist who taught at Caltech for many years. He has reached wide audiences with his books and presentations on black holes, time travel and wormholes on PBS and BBC shows. Christensen comments, “You can make the argument that some of the complexity around what a black hole actually looks like was discarded for the film, and they admit as much in the research paper that was published after the movie came out. But our team at NASA does that same thing. There is no such thing as an objectively ‘true’ scientific image – you always have to make aesthetic decisions around whether the image tells the science story, and often it makes more sense to omit information to clarify what’s important. Ultimately, Gargantua taught a whole lot of people something new about science, and that’s what a good scientific visualization aims to do.” The SVS produces an annual visualization of the Moon’s phase and libration comprising 8,760 hourly renderings of its precise size, orientation and illumination. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) FURTHER CHALLENGES The sheer size of the data often encountered by Christensen and his peers is a challenge. “I’m currently working with a dataset that is 400GB per timestep. It’s so big that I don’t even want to move it from one file server to another. So, then I have to make decisions about which data attributes to keep and which to discard, whether there’s a region of the data that I can cull or downsample, and I have to experiment with data compression schemes that might require me to entirely re-design the pipeline I’m using for Houdini. Of course, if I get rid of too much information, it becomes very resource-intensive to recompute everything, but if I don’t get rid of enough, then my design process becomes agonizingly slow.” SVS also works closely with its NASA partner groups Conceptual Image Lab (CIL) and Goddard Media Studios (GMS) to publish a diverse array of content. Conceptual Image Lab focuses more on the artistic side of things – producing high-fidelity renders using film animation and visual design techniques, according to NASA. Where the SVS primarily focuses on making data-based visualizations, CIL puts more emphasis on conceptual visualizations – producing animations featuring NASA spacecraft, planetary observations and simulations, according to NASA. Goddard Media Studios, on the other hand, is more focused towards public outreach – producing interviews, TV programs and documentaries. GMS continues to be the main producers behind NASA TV, and as such, much of their content is aimed towards the general public. An impact crater on the moon. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) Image of Mars showing a partly shadowed Olympus Mons toward the upper left of the image. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) Mars. Hellas Basin can be seen in the lower right portion of the image. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) Mars slightly tilted to show the Martian North Pole. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) Christensen notes, “One of the more unique challenges in this field is one of bringing people from very different backgrounds to agree on a common outcome. I work on teams with scientists, communicators and technologists, and we all have different communities we’re trying to satisfy. For instance, communicators are generally trying to simplify animations so their learning goal is clear, but scientists will insist that we add text and annotations on top of the video to eliminate ambiguity and avoid misinterpretations. Often, the technologist will have to say we can’t zoom in or look at the data in a certain way because it will show the data boundaries or data resolution limits. Every shot is a negotiation, but in trying to compromise, we often push the boundaries of what has been done before, which is exciting.”

News Astronomy A dwarf galaxy just might upend the Milky Way’s predicated demise The Large Magellanic Cloud could prevent a smashup between the Milky Way and Andromeda There’s about a 50 percent chance that the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy will merge into a single giant galaxy, dubbed Milkomeda, in the next 10 billion years, a new analysis shows. B. Whitmore/STScI, the Hubble Heritage Project, NASA, ESA By Nikk Ogasa 17 hours ago It may come down to a coin toss as to whether the Milky Way collides with the Andromeda Galaxy within 10 billion years. While scientists have previously reported that a convergence was certain, an analysis of the latest data suggests the odds are only about 50 percent, researchers report June 2 in Nature Astronomy. The Milky Way’s largest satellite system — the Large Magellanic Cloud — may be our galaxy’s saving grace, the study shows. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

Jarred Roberts, The Conversation Published May 25, 2025 | Comments (1) | The iconic Pinwheel Galaxy, located 25 million light-years away. Hubble Image: NASA, ESA, K. Kuntz (JHU), F. Bresolin (University of Hawaii), J. Trauger (Jet Propulsion Lab), J. Mould (NOAO), Y.-H. Chu (University of Illinois, Urbana) and STScI; CFHT Image: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope/J.-C. Cuillandre/Coelum; NOAO Image: G. Jacoby, B. Bohannan, M. Hanna/NOAO/AURA/NSF My telescope, set up for astrophotography in my light-polluted San Diego backyard, was pointed at a galaxy unfathomably far from Earth. My wife, Cristina, walked up just as the first space photo streamed to my tablet. It sparkled on the screen in front of us. “That’s the Pinwheel galaxy,” I said. The name is derived from its shape–albeit this pinwheel contains about a trillion stars. The light from the Pinwheel traveled for 25 million years across the universe–about 150 quintillion miles–to get to my telescope. My wife wondered: “Doesn’t light get tired during such a long journey?” Her curiosity triggered a thought-provoking conversation about light. Ultimately, why doesn’t light wear out and lose energy over time? Let’s talk about light I am an astrophysicist, and one of the first things I learned in my studies is how light often behaves in ways that defy our intuitions. Light is electromagnetic radiation: basically, an electric wave and a magnetic wave coupled together and traveling through space-time. It has no mass. That point is critical because the mass of an object, whether a speck of dust or a spaceship, limits the top speed it can travel through space. But because light is massless, it’s able to reach the maximum speed limit in a vacuum–about 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second, or almost 6 trillion miles per year (9.6 trillion kilometers). Nothing traveling through space is faster. To put that into perspective: In the time it takes you to blink your eyes, a particle of light travels around the circumference of the Earth more than twice. As incredibly fast as that is, space is incredibly spread out. Light from the Sun, which is 93 million miles (about 150 million kilometers) from Earth, takes just over eight minutes to reach us. In other words, the sunlight you see is eight minutes old. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to us after the Sun, is 26 trillion miles away (about 41 trillion kilometers). So by the time you see it in the night sky, its light is just over four years old. Or, as astronomers say, it’s four light years away. Imagine–a trip around the world at the speed of light. With those enormous distances in mind, consider Cristina’s question: How can light travel across the universe and not slowly lose energy? Actually, some light does lose energy. This happens when it bounces off something, such as interstellar dust, and is scattered about. But most light just goes and goes, without colliding with anything. This is almost always the case because space is mostly empty–nothingness. So there’s nothing in the way. When light travels unimpeded, it loses no energy. It can maintain that 186,000-mile-per-second speed forever. It’s about time Here’s another concept: Picture yourself as an astronaut on board the International Space Station. You’re orbiting at 17,000 miles (about 27,000 kilometers) per hour. Compared with someone on Earth, your wristwatch will tick 0.01 seconds slower over one year. That’s an example of time dilation–time moving at different speeds under different conditions. If you’re moving really fast, or close to a large gravitational field, your clock will tick more slowly than someone moving slower than you, or who is further from a large gravitational field. To say it succinctly, time is relative. Even astronauts aboard the International Space Station experience time dilation, although the effect is extremely small. NASA Now consider that light is inextricably connected to time. Picture sitting on a photon, a fundamental particle of light; here, you’d experience maximum time dilation. Everyone on Earth would clock you at the speed of light, but from your reference frame, time would completely stop. That’s because the “clocks” measuring time are in two different places going vastly different speeds: the photon moving at the speed of light, and the comparatively slowpoke speed of Earth going around the Sun. What’s more, when you’re traveling at or close to the speed of light, the distance between where you are and where you’re going gets shorter. That is, space itself becomes more compact in the direction of motion–so the faster you can go, the shorter your journey has to be. In other words, for the photon, space gets squished. Which brings us back to my picture of the Pinwheel galaxy. From the photon’s perspective, a star within the galaxy emitted it, and then a single pixel in my backyard camera absorbed it, at exactly the same time. Because space is squished, to the photon the journey was infinitely fast and infinitely short, a tiny fraction of a second. But from our perspective on Earth, the photon left the galaxy 25 million years ago and traveled 25 million light years across space until it landed on my tablet in my backyard. And there, on a cool spring night, its stunning image inspired a delightful conversation between a nerdy scientist and his curious wife. Jarred Roberts, Project Scientist, University of California, San Diego. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Isaac Schultz Published January 31, 2025

May 22, 20255 min readHypervelocity Stars Hint at a Supermassive Black Hole Right Next DoorSome stars streaking through the Milky Way at millions of kilometers per hour probably trace back to a supermassive black hole in a neighboring galaxyBy Phil Plait edited by Lee BillingsAn artist’s concept of a hypervelocity star streaking through the Milky Way, surrounded by slower-moving stars. NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (Caltech-IPAC)An astonishing fact only known for the past few decades is that every big galaxy in the universe has a supermassive black hole at its heart. This was suspected in the 1980s, and observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, which has peered deep into the cores of galaxies all across the sky, confirmed it. The “normal” kinds of black holes made when stars explode range from five to about 100 times the mass of the sun, more or less. But these central galactic monsters are millions of times more massive, and some have grown to the Brobdingnagian heft of billions of solar masses.A lot of mysteries still remain, of course, such as how they formed early in the history of the universe, how they grew so humongous so fast and what role they played in their host galaxy’s formation. But one odd question still nagging at astronomers is: What’s the galaxy size cutoff where this trend stops? In other words, is there some lower limit to how massive a galaxy can be and still harbor one of these beasts?The inklings of an answer are emerging from a surprising place: studies of rare stars moving through our own galaxy at truly ludicrous speeds.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Orbiting our Milky Way galaxy is a menagerie of smaller “dwarf” galaxies, some so tiny and faint you need huge telescopes to see them at all. But two are so large and close that they’re visible to the unaided eye from the Southern Hemisphere: the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is the bigger and closer of the two, and it’s not clear if it harbors a supermassive black hole (SMBH). If such an SMBH exists there, it must be quiescent, meaning it’s not actively feeding on matter. As material falls toward such a black hole, it forms a swirling disk of superheated plasma that can glow so brightly it outshines all the stars in the galaxy combined. No such fierce luminescence is seen in the LMC, so we don’t know if an SMBH is there and not actively feeding or if the LMC is simply SMBH-free.But a recent study published in the Astrophysical Journal offers strong evidence that an SMBH does lie at the center of the LMC—based on measurements of stellar motions in our own Milky Way!The study looked at hypervelocity stars, ones that are screaming through space at speeds far higher than stars around them. Some of these stars are moving so rapidly that they have reached galactic escape velocity; the Milky Way’s gravity can’t hold them. In the coming eons, they’ll flee the galaxy entirely. And we have good reason to believe these runaway stars were launched by SMBHs—but how?Such a situation starts with a binary system, two stars orbiting each other. These systems contain a substantial amount of orbital energy, the sum of the kinetic energy of the two stars—their energy of motion—and their gravitational potential energy, the amount of energy released if they were to move closer together.If the binary star approaches a third object, some of that energy can be swapped around. One star can become bound to the third object, for example, while the other star can get a kick in its kinetic energy, flinging it away. The amount of the kick depends in part on the gravity of the third object. A massive black hole, of course, has an incredibly strong gravitational field that can fling the star away at high speed.And I do mean high speed; such a star can be flung away from the black hole at a velocity greater than 1,000 kilometers per second. S5-HVS1, for example, was the first confirmed such hypervelocity star, and it’s moving at more than 1,700 kilometers per second. Feel free to take a moment to absorb that fact: an entire star has been ejected away from a black hole at more than six million kilometers per hour. The energies involved are terrifying.We have seen a few of these stars in our galaxy, and careful measurements suggest they’re moving away from the center of the Milky Way, which is pretty convincing evidence that Sagittarius A*, our own Milky Way’s SMBH, is to blame.But not all of the high-velocity stars that have been detected appear to come from our galactic center. Fortunately, Gaia, the sadly now decommissioned European Space Agency astronomical observatory, was designed to obtain extremely accurate measurements of the positions, distances, colors and other characteristics of well more than a billion stars—including their velocity.There are 21 known hypervelocity stars at the outskirts of the Milky Way. Using the phenomenally high-precision Gaia measurements, the astronomers behind the new research examined the stars’ 3D velocities through space. They found that five of them have ambiguous origins, while two definitely come from the Milky Way center. Of the 14 still left, three clearly come from the direction of the LMC.The trajectories of these stars effectively point back to their origin, and based on our current knowledge, that origin must be a supermassive black hole. Even better, although the remaining 11 stars have trajectories that are consistent with both Milky Way and LMC origins, the researchers found that five are more likely to have come from our home galaxy and the other six are more likely to have come from the LMC.So there could be nine known hypervelocity stars plunging through our galaxy that were ejected by a supermassive black hole in another galaxy.Using some sophisticated math, the team found that the most likely mass of the black hole is 600,000 or so times the mass of the sun. This isn’t huge for an SMBH—it’s very much on the low end of the scale, in fact—but then, the LMC is a small galaxy, only 1 percent or so the mass of the Milky Way. We know that the mass of a black hole tends to scale with its host galaxy’s mass (because they form together and affect each other’s growth), so this lower mass is consistent with that.If this is true, then our satellite galaxy is shooting stars at us! And there may be more of them yet to be found, hurtling through space unseen on the other side of our galaxy, or so far out that they’re difficult to spot and even harder to study. And all this helps us get a clearer—but still quite hazy!—sense of just how far down the galactic scale we can expect to find big black holes.Black holes are funny. Most people would worry about falling into one, as well as a host of other terrors, but now you can add “having to dodge intergalactic stellar bullets” to that list.

Key Take-aways on the Hubble Space Telescope: The Hubble Space Telescope launched on April 24, 1990 and is celebrating its 35th anniversary in 2025.The telescope has a 2.4-meter mirror, main types of science instruments, including a suite of spectrographs and cameras that have been upgraded through five astronaut-serviced missions.From mapping dark matter to refining the Hubble Constant, the rate at which the universe expands, the Hubble Space Telescope has been central to some of the most transformative discoveries of the past half-century.On April 24, 1990, Space Shuttle Discovery launched from Kennedy Space Center carrying one of the most ambitious science instruments ever built: the Hubble Space Telescope. Suspended in low-Earth orbit at an altitude of some 320 miles, far above the atmospheric distortions that blur ground-based views, Hubble promised to revolutionize astronomy. And though it had a bit of a bumpy start, over the past 35 years, it has done just that.From capturing the earliest glimpses of galaxy formation to measuring the expansion rate of the universe, Hubble has been at the heart of modern astronomy for decades. Its images are now iconic: pillars of gas birthing stars, spirals of galactic arms stretching into the void, and clusters of galaxies bending light itself with their gravity."As we celebrate Hubble’s 35th anniversary," reads a recent Presidential Message, "we honor the brilliant scientists, engineers, and visionaries who made such a daring feat possible. Their courage and innovation inspire us all to take risks, dream big, and forge new paths into the unknown."Hubble Space Telescope Keeps EvolvingLaunched before the birth of today’s youngest astronomers, Hubble remains a vital part of modern astrophysics.Sam Cutler, a Ph.D. student in astronomy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has worked with Hubble data throughout his academic career, even contributing to the telescope’s widest near-infrared (NIR) image of the universe. That image was made possible by a clever and innovative technique called Drift And SHift (DASH), which dramatically boosts the telescope’s data collection rate."The most surprising thing about being a part of this imaging," Cutler says, "was how, even 30+ years after launch, we were still learning new ways to utilize Hubble to expand our understanding of the Universe. […] It was a lot of fun to share these results and pitch it as ‘we can teach this old dog new tricks.’"The DASH method allowed astronomers to collect eight times more NIR data in a single orbit compared to typical observing strategies. This efficiency gives Hubble the power to scan much larger areas of the sky while retaining its signature resolution, which is something ground-based telescopes have long struggled to match.JWST and the Hubble TelescopePillars of Creation - furnished by NASA. (Image Credit: Mikolaj Niemczewski/Shutterstock)Even as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captures headlines for its stunning early-universe observations, Hubble still provides critical context and groundwork. That’s especially true for rare or distant galaxies that require both high resolution and wide survey coverage."Although [DASH] doesn’t go as deep as something like the Ultra-Deep Field, it covers a lot of on-sky area, which is really important when you’re trying to find very rare things," says Cutler. "DASH combines the survey area of a ground-based telescope with the depth and spatial resolution of Hubble, which really allows us to find these more distant, massive galaxies that are both rare and faint."Hubble, in other words, has become a sort of cosmic scout later in life. It often surveys broad swaths of the universe, flagging intriguing targets for more detailed scrutiny by JWST. "The two telescopes work really well together," says Cutler, “with JWST able to go back and answer all the questions we had about these galaxies that were discovered with Hubble."This synergy is no accident. In fact, the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in May 2027, is explicitly designed to complement both Hubble and JWST. Roman will offer image quality on par with Hubble but with a field of view 100 times larger, says Cutler, helping accelerate wide-area surveys of the universe.Technical Aspects and Hubble’s Missions(Image Credit: Dima Zel/Shutterstock)Despite its age, Hubble’s technical specs are still impressive: a 2.4-meter mirror, five main types of science instruments, including a suite of spectrographs and cameras that have been upgraded through five astronaut-serviced missions. But its most enduring contribution may be the culture it created around open data, long-term research, and collaboration.The Hubble Legacy Archive has amassed more than 160 terabytes of data, freely available to the global scientific community. This treasure trove from over a million Hubble observations has led to the publication of more than 21,000 scientific papers."To have been able to work with Hubble data and use this abundance of knowledge that generations of astronomers have passed down, it really makes me appreciate all the work that has gone into that," says Cutler. "It also makes me hopeful that one day the tips I’ve learned about JWST and the months of head scratching won’t be in vain, and a future grad student will be able to use them in their research someday!"Hubble’s Lifespan and BeyondHubble’s longevity is itself a scientific marvel. Designed for a roughly 15-year mission, the telescope has more than doubled that lifespan, continuing to operate despite aging components and the end of crewed servicing missions in 2009. NASA and ESA engineers have kept it going through remote upgrades, software patches, and careful planning around equipment failures.From mapping dark matter to refining the Hubble Constant, the rate at which the universe expands, the Hubble Space Telescope has been central to some of the most transformative discoveries of the past half-century. And as it marks 35 years in space, it remains an enduring symbol of both scientific ambition and engineering excellence.Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:NASA. Hubble ImagesNASA. InstrumentsJake Parks is a freelance writer and editor who specializes in covering science news. He has previously written for Astronomy magazine, Discover Magazine, The Ohio State University, the University of Wisconson-Madison, and more.

The Large Magellanic Cloud, which is visible only from the Southern Hemisphere, has been caught in the crosshairs of the Hubble Space Telescope.