Category: 7. Science

NASA’s newest astrophysics space telescope launched in March on a mission to create an all-sky map of the universe. Now settled into low-Earth orbit, SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) has begun delivering its sky survey data to a public archive on a weekly basis, allowing anyone to use the data to probe the secrets of the cosmos.

“Because we’re looking at everything in the whole sky, almost every area of astronomy can be addressed by SPHEREx data,” said Rachel Akeson, the lead for the SPHEREx Science Data Center at IPAC. IPAC is a science and data center for astrophysics and planetary science at Caltech in Pasadena, California.

Other missions, like NASA’s now-retired WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), have also mapped the entire sky. SPHEREx builds on this legacy by observing in 102 infrared wavelengths, compared to WISE’s four wavelength bands.

By putting the many wavelength bands of SPHEREx data together, scientists can identify the signatures of specific molecules with a technique known as spectroscopy. The mission’s science team will use this method to study the distribution of frozen water and organic molecules — the “building blocks of life” — in the Milky Way.

The SPHEREx science team will also use the mission’s data to study the physics that drove the universe’s expansion following the big bang, and to measure the amount of light emitted by all the galaxies in the universe over time. Releasing SPHEREx data in a public archive encourages far more astronomical studies than the team could do on their own.

“By making the data public, we enable the whole astronomy community to use SPHEREx data to work on all these other areas of science,” Akeson said.

NASA is committed to the sharing of scientific data, promoting transparency and efficiency in scientific research. In line with this commitment, data from SPHEREx appears in the public archive within 60 days after the telescope collects each observation. The short delay allows the SPHEREx team to process the raw data to remove or flag artifacts, account for detector effects, and align the images to the correct astronomical coordinates.

The team publishes the procedures they used to process the data alongside the actual data products. “We want enough information in those files that people can do their own research,” Akeson said.

During its two-year prime mission, SPHEREx will survey the entire sky twice a year, creating four all-sky maps. After the mission reaches the one-year mark, the team plans to release a map of the whole sky at all 102 wavelengths.

In addition to the science enabled by SPHEREx itself, the telescope unlocks an even greater range of astronomical studies when paired with other missions. Data from SPHEREx can be used to identify interesting targets for further study by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, refine exoplanet parameters collected from NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), and study the properties of dark matter and dark energy along with ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) Euclid mission and NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

The IPAC archive that hosts SPHEREx data, IRSA (NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive), also hosts pointed observations and all-sky maps at a variety of wavelengths from previous missions. The large amount of data available through IRSA gives users a comprehensive view of the astronomical objects they want to study.

“SPHEREx is part of the entire legacy of NASA space surveys,” said IRSA Science Lead Vandana Desai. “People are going to use the data in all kinds of ways that we can’t imagine.”

NASA’s Office of the Chief Science Data Officer leads open science efforts for the agency. Public sharing of scientific data, tools, research, and software maximizes the impact of NASA’s science missions. To learn more about NASA’s commitment to transparency and reproducibility of scientific research, visit science.nasa.gov/open-science. To get more stories about the impact of NASA’s science data delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for the NASA Open Science newsletter.

By Lauren Leese
Web Content Strategist for the Office of the Chief Science Data Officer 

The SPHEREx mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the agency’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, built the telescope and the spacecraft bus. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions in the U.S., two in South Korea, and one in Taiwan. Caltech in Pasadena managed and integrated the instrument. The mission’s principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech. The SPHEREx dataset will be publicly available at the NASA-IPAC Infrared Science Archive. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

To learn more about SPHEREx, visit:

https://nasa.gov/SPHEREx

Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov

Amanda Adams
Office of the Chief Science Data Officer
256-683-6661
amanda.m.adams@nasa.gov

Figuring out the ages of stars is fundamental to understanding many areas of astronomy – yet, it remains a challenge since stellar ages can’t be ascertained through observation alone.

So, astronomers at the University of Toronto have turned to artificial intelligence for help.

Their new model, called ChronoFlow, uses a dataset of rotating stars in clusters and machine learning to determine how the speed at which a star rotates changes as it ages.

The approach, published recently in The Astrophysical Journal , predicts the ages of stars with an accuracy previously impossible to achieve with analytical models.

“The first ‘Wow’ moment was in the proof-of-concept phase when we realized that this technique actually showed a lot of promise,” says Phil Van-Lane, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s David A. Dunlap department of astronomy and astrophysics who led the research.

Van-Lane worked on the project with Josh Speagle and Gwen Eadie, who are both assistant professors of astrostatistics in the departments of statistical sciences and astronomy and astrophysics.

The research draws on two existing approaches to better estimate stars’ ages.

The first stems from the fact that stars tend to form in clusters. This means researchers can often determine the age of all stars in the cluster by observing the evolutionary stages of a cluster’s higher mass stars, which progress more rapidly than those of lower mass stars. At the same time, researchers know that as stars get older, their spin tends to slow down due to the interaction of the star’s magnetic field with its stellar wind – a phenomenon that is well understood, but difficult to quantify with a simple mathematical formula.

With ChronoFlow, the U of T researchers assembled the largest-ever catalogue of rotating stars in clusters, with about 8,000 stars in over 30 clusters of various ages, by using data from stellar surveys such as Kepler, K2, TESS and GAIA. Next, they used the dataset to train their AI model to predict how the speed at which a star rotates changes as it ages.

“Our methodology can be likened to trying to guess the age of a person,” says Speagle, who guided the project from start to finish. “In astronomy, we don’t know the ages of every star. We know that groups of stars have the same age, so this would be like having a bunch of photos of people at five years old, 15 years old, 30 years old, and 50 years old, then having someone hand you a new photo and ask you to guess how old that person is. It’s a tricky problem.”

The result? ChronoFlow has learned to estimate the ages of other stars with remarkable precision. This is because it models how rotation rates of populations of stars are expected to evolve over time.

The research could have important implications across many aspects of astronomy. Knowing stellar ages is necessary to understanding not only how stars work, but also modeling how exoplanets form and evolve, and learning about the history of the evolution of our own Milky Way as well as that of other galaxies.

The success of ChronoFlow also demonstrates how machine learning models could yield valuable insights into other astrophysical problems.

The model will be available to the public, along with documentation and tutorials which provide steps for anyone to infer the ages of stars from observations. The code can be found on GitHub .

How can scientists study the meteorology of Venus from Earth since there are currently no missions to Venus? This is what a recent study published in Earth, Planets and Space hopes to address as a team of scientists led by the University of Tokyo investigated how Japanese meteorological satellites could be used to study Venusian atmospheric and weather patterns due to the lack of Venus missions. This study has the potential to help researchers develop new methods for studying other planetary bodies without having to send missions directly to study them.

For the study, the researchers used data obtained from the Japanese meteorological satellites Himawari-8 and Himawari-9, which were launched in October 2014 and November 2016, respectively, to study atmospheric weather patterns on Venus, specifically cloud-top temperatures, between July 2015 and February 2025. The goal of the study was to fill a decade-long gap of scientific data resulting from a lack of missions to Venus.

Composite image displaying the size of Venus from Earth. (Credit: 2025 Nishiyama et al. CC-BY-ND)

In the end, the researchers found that past observations of temperature changes conducted from the Japanese Akatsuki spacecraft that studied Venus from December 2015 to April 2024 were underestimated by 15 to 17 percent. They also confirmed longstanding models regarding how temperature changes with altitude in Venus’ atmosphere.

“I think that our novel approach in this study successfully opened a new avenue for long-term and multiband monitoring of solar system bodies,” said Dr. Gaku Nishiyama, who is a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo and lead author of the study. “This includes the moon and Mercury, which I also study at present. We hope this study will enable us to assess physical and compositional properties, as well as atmospheric dynamics, and contribute to our further understanding of planetary evolution in general.”

What new discoveries about studying Venus from Earth will researchers make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

Sources: Earth, Planets and Space, EurekAlert!

An object that appears to be from beyond our Solar System has been spotted hurtling towards the Sun, which if confirmed would be the third visitor from the stars ever detected, the European Space Agency said Wednesday.

The object, which is currently being referred to as A11pl3Z, poses no threat to Earth, the ESA’s planetary defence head Richard Moissl told AFP.

“It will fly deep through the Solar System, passing just inside the orbit of Mars,” but will not hit our neighbouring planet, he said.

Excited astronomers are still refining their calculations, but the object appears to be zooming more than 60 kilometres (37 miles) a second.

This would mean it is not bound by the Sun’s orbit, unlike comets and asteroids, which all originate from within the Solar System.

Its trajectory also “means it’s not orbiting our star, but coming from interstellar space and flying off to there again,” Moissl said.

“We are not 100 percent certain at the moment, but anything else would be a surprise,” he added.

Official confirmation is expected to come from the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, which has recorded more than 100 observations of the object so far.

The NASA-funded ATLAS survey in Hawaii first discovered the object on Tuesday, US astronomer David Rankin wrote on the social media platform Bluesky.

Professional and amateur astronomers across the world then searched through past telescope data, tracing its trajectory back to at least June 14.

The object is currently estimated to be roughly 10-20 kilometres wide, Moissl said. But the object could be smaller if it is made out of ice, which reflects more light.

“It will get brighter and closer to the Sun until late October and then still be observable (by telescope) until next year,” Moissl said.

– Our third visitor –

It would be the third time humanity has detected something coming from the stars.

The first, ‘Oumuamua, was discovered in 2017. It was so strange that at least one prominent scientist became convinced it was an alien vessel — though this has since been dismissed by further research.

Our second interstellar visitor, 2I/Borisov, was spotted in 2019.

Mark Norris, an astronomer at the UK’s University of Central Lancashire, told AFP that the new object appears to be “moving considerably faster than the other two extra-solar objects that we previously discovered.”

The object is currently roughly around the distance from Jupiter away from Earth, Norris said.

He lamented that he would not be able to observe the object on his telescope on Wednesday night, because it is currently only visible in the Southern Hemisphere.

Norris pointed to modelling estimating that there could be as many 10,000 interstellar objects drifting through the Solar System at any given time, though most would be smaller than the newly discovered object.

If true, this suggests that the newly online Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile could soon be finding these dim interstellar visitors every month, Norris said.

Moissl said it is not feasible to send a mission into space to intercept the new object.

Still, these visitors offer scientists a rare chance to study something outside of our Solar System.

For example, if we detected precursors of life such as amino acids on such an object, it would give us “a lot more confidence that the conditions for life exist in other star systems,” Norris said.

dl/gv/giv

The Hubble Space Telescope searches the universe to understand how planets, stars, and galaxies form. Recently, it captured this image of a nebula known as GN 04.32.8 within a larger stellar nursery called the Taurus Molecular Cloud.

What is it?

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the GN 04.32.8 nebula is classified as a reflection nebula, as it does not emit its own light, but instead its clouds of space dust reflect the light of nearby stars.

The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered the clearest, deepest images yet of the Bullet Cluster, unveiling thousands of faint, distant galaxies and offering the most precise map of dark matter in this iconic colliding galaxy cluster.

“With Webb’s observations, we carefully measured the mass of the Bullet Cluster with the largest lensing dataset to date, from the galaxy clusters’ cores all the way out to their outskirts,” said lead author Sangjun Cha, a PhD student at Yonsei University in Seoul.

Previous studies relied on less lensing data, leading to less precise estimates of the system’s mass.

“Webb’s images dramatically improve what we can measure in this scene –  including pinpointing the position of invisible particles known as dark matter,” said co-author Kyle Finner, an assistant scientist at Caltech.

How light shows the dark

The Bullet Cluster is made of two massive galaxy clusters bound by gravity. It acts as a natural gravitational lens that magnifies background galaxies.

James Jee, a professor at Yonsei University and research associate at UC Davis, is a co-author of the study. “Gravitational lensing allows us to infer the distribution of dark matter,” he said.

To visualize this effect, Jee compares it to ripples on a pond. You can’t see the clear water unless there are ripples that distort the shapes of the pebbles below – just as dark matter distorts the light from galaxies behind it.

By measuring thousands of galaxies, the scientists used Webb’s images to weigh visible and invisible mass in the cluster.

The team also mapped the faint glow of intracluster stars – those not bound to any single galaxy. These drifting stars may closely trace dark matter.

Webb’s dark matter reveal

Webb’s observations produced a layered view, combining near-infrared data with X-ray imagery from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, revealing hot gas in pink, the bullet shape in the cluster, and the newly refined dark matter distribution in blue.

“We confirmed the intracluster light can be a reliable tracer of dark matter, even in a highly dynamic environment like the Bullet Cluster,” Cha said.

This strengthens the case that these unbound stars closely trace dark matter’s invisible scaffolding.

The new map reveals detailed structure, including an asymmetric mass region on the left side of the larger cluster. This feature indicates prior collisions that have left behind signatures in the distribution of matter.

Mysterious nature of dark matter

Dark matter does not emit, reflect, or absorb light, making it notoriously difficult to study. Yet the Bullet Cluster offers a rare laboratory, showing dark matter separated from hot gas during a cosmic collision while still aligning with the galaxies.

“As the galaxy clusters collided, their gas was dragged out and left behind, which the X-rays confirm,” Finner explained. “Webb’s observations show that dark matter still lines up with the galaxies – and was not dragged away.”

The results set tighter constraints on the possibility of dark matter particles interacting with each other. They support theories that dark matter passes through itself without friction, consistent with its mysterious and ghostly nature.

Clues to a chaotic past

A plume of molten rock deep beneath eastern Africa is pulsing upward in rhythmic surges, slowly splitting the continent apart and potentially marking the birth of a new ocean.

At least, that’s what a team of researchers led by Emma Watts of the Swansea University in the U.K. recently discovered. More specifically, the scientists’ new study found that the Afar region of Ethiopia is underlain by a plume of hot mantle that rises and falls in a repeated pattern, almost like “a beating heart.” These pulses, the team says, are closely tied to overlying tectonic plates and play a key role in the slow rifting of the African continent.