Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
Spitzer Leads NASA's Great Observatories to Uncover Black Holes, Other Hidden Objects in the Distant Universe
-
Similar Topics
-
By NASA
Lisa Pace knows a marathon when she sees one. An avid runner, she has participated in five marathons and more than 50 half marathons. Though she prefers to move quickly, she also knows the value of taking her time. “I solve most of my problems while running – or realize those problems aren’t worth worrying about,” she said.
She has learned to take a similar approach to her work at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “Earlier in my career, I raced to get things done and felt the need to do as much as possible on my own,” she said. “Over time, I’ve learned to trust my team and pause to give others an opportunity to contribute. There are times when quick action is needed, but it is often a marathon, not a sprint.”
Official portrait of Lisa Pace.NASA/Josh Valcarcel Pace is chief of the Exploration Development Integration Division within the Exploration Architecture, Integration, and Science Directorate at Johnson. In that role, she leads a team of roughly 120 civil servants and contractors in providing mission-level system engineering and integration services that bring different architecture elements together to achieve the agency’s goals. Today that team supports Artemis missions, NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative and other areas as needed.
Lisa Pace, seated at the head of the table, leads an Exploration Development Integration Division team meeting at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. NASA/James Blair “The Artemis missions come together through multiple programs and projects,” Pace explained. “We stitch them together to ensure the end-to-end mission meets its intended requirements. That includes verifying those requirements before flight and ensuring agreements between programs are honored and conflicts resolved.” The division also manages mission-level review and flight readiness processes from planning through execution, up to the final certification of flight readiness.
Leading the division through the planning, launch, and landing of Artemis I was a career highlight for Pace, though she feels fortunate to have worked on many great projects during her time with NASA. “My coolest and most rewarding project involved designing and deploying an orbital debris tracking telescope on Ascension Island about 10 years ago,” she said. “The engineers, scientists, and military personnel I got to work and travel with on that beautiful island is tough to top!”
Pace says luck and great timing led her to NASA. Engineering jobs were plentiful when she graduated from Virginia Tech in 2000, and she quickly received an offer from Lockheed Martin to become a facility engineer in Johnson’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division, or ARES. “I thought working in the building where they keep the Moon rocks would be cool – and it was! Twenty-five years later, I’m still here,” Pace said.
During that time, she has learned a lot about problem-solving and team building. “I often find that when we disagree over the ‘right’ way to do something, there is no one right answer – it just depends on your perspective,” she said. “I take the time to listen to people, understand their side, and build relationships to find common ground.”
Lisa Pace, right, participates in a holiday competition hosted by her division.Image courtesy of Lisa Pace She also emphasizes the importance of getting to know your colleagues. “Relationships are everything,” she said. “They make the work so much more meaningful. I carry that lesson over to my personal life and value my time with family and friends outside of work.”
Investing time in relationships has given Pace another unexpected skill – that of matchmaker. “I’m responsible for setting up five couples who are now married, and have six kids between them,” she said, adding that she knew one couple from Johnson.
She hopes that strong relationships transfer to the Artemis Generation. “I hope to pass on a strong NASA brand and the family culture that I’ve been fortunate to have, working here for the last 25 years.”
Explore More
3 min read Meet Rob Navias: Public Affairs Officer and Mission Commentator
Article 5 days ago 5 min read Heather Cowardin Safeguards the Future of Space Exploration
Article 1 week ago 5 min read Driven by a Dream: Farah Al Fulfulee’s Quest to Reach the Stars
Article 2 weeks ago View the full article
-
By NASA
Keith Barr was born only months before the historic Apollo 11 landing in 1969. While he was too young to witness that giant leap for mankind, the moment sparked a lifelong fascination that set him on a path to design technology that will carry astronauts farther into space than ever before.
Today, Barr serves as a chief engineer and Orion Docking Lidar Field Test lead at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. He spearheads the field testing of docking lidars for the Orion spacecraft, which will carry astronauts to the Moon on the Artemis III mission. These lidars are critical to enabling Orion to autonomously dock with the human landing system on Artemis III — the mission that will land astronauts near the Moon’s South Pole for the first time in history.
Keith Barr prepares for a wind lidar test flight in one of the U.S. Navy’s Twin Otter aircraft in support of the AC-130 Gunship lidar program. “The Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions are some of humanity’s greatest technical achievements,” he said. “To be part of the Artemis chapter is a profound honor.”
In recognition of his contributions, Barr was selected as a NASA Space Flight Awareness Honoree in 2025 for his exceptional dedication to astronaut safety and mission success. Established in 1963, NASA’s Space Flight Awareness Program celebrates individuals who play a vital role in supporting human spaceflight. The award is one of the highest honors presented to the agency’s workforce.
With a career spanning over 25 years at Lockheed Martin, Barr is now recognized as a renowned leader in lidar systems—technologies that use laser light to measure distances. He has led numerous lidar deployments and test programs across commercial aviation, wind energy, and military markets.
In 2019, Barr and his team began planning a multi-phase field campaign to validate Orion’s docking lidars under real-world conditions. They repurposed existing hardware, developed a drone-based simulation system, and conducted dynamic testing at Lockheed Martin facilities in Littleton, Colorado, and Santa Cruz, California.
In Littleton, the team conducted two phases of testing at the Space Operations Simulation Center, evaluating performance across distances ranging from 50 meters to docking. At the Santa Cruz facility, they began much farther out at 6,500 meters and tested down to 10 meters, just before the final docking phase.
Of all these efforts, Barr is especially proud of the ingenuity behind the Santa Cruz tests. To simulate a spacecraft docking scenario, he repurposed a lidar pointing gimbal and test trailer from previous projects and designed a drone-based test system with unprecedented accuracy.
“An often-overlooked portion of any field campaign is the measurement and understanding of truth,” he said. “The system I designed allowed us to record lidar and target positions with accuracy never before demonstrated in outdoor docking lidar testing.”
Testing at the Santa Cruz Facility in California often began before sunrise and continued past sunset to complete the full schedule. Here, a drone hovers at the 10-meter station-keeping waypoint as the sun sets in the background. The test stand at the Santa Cruz Facility had once been used for Agena upper stage rockets—a key piece of hardware used during the Gemini program in the 1960s. “We found a Gemini-era sticker on the door of the test bunker—likely from the time of Gemini VIII, the first space docking completed by Neil Armstrong and David Scott,” Barr said. “This really brought it home to me that we are simply part of the continuing story.”
Keith Barr operates a wind lidar during a live fire test in an AC-130 Gunship aircraft. He is seated next to an open door while flying at 18,000 feet over New Mexico in January 2017. Barr spent more than two decades working on WindTracer—a ground-based Doppler wind lidar system used to measure wind speed and turbulence at airports, wind farms, and in atmospheric research.
The transition from WindTracer to Orion presented new challenges. “Moving onto a space program has a steep learning curve, but I have found success in this new arena and I have learned that I can adapt and I shouldn’t be nervous about the unknown,” he said. “Learning new technologies, applications, and skills keeps my career fun and exciting and I look forward to the next giant leap—whatever it is.”
Keith Barr stands beside the Piper Cherokee 6 aircraft during his time as a captain for New England Airlines. Barr’s passion for flight moves in tandem with his pursuit of innovation. Over his career, he has flown over 1.6 million miles on commercial airlines. “I often joke that I’m on my fourth trip to the Moon and back—just in economy class,” he said.
Before specializing in lidar systems, Barr flew as a captain and assistant chief pilot at New England Airlines, operating small aircraft like the Piper Cherokee 6 and the Britten-Norman Islander.
He also worked at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, contributing to several NASA airborne missions aimed at unraveling the science behind global ozone depletion.
Keith Barr boards NASA’s DC-8 aircraft at Ames Research Center in California before heading to Salina, Kansas, to support a 1996 research mission studying how airplane emissions affect clouds and the atmosphere. As Barr reflects on his journey, he hopes to pass along a sense of legacy to the Artemis Generation. “We are in the process of writing the next chapter of human space exploration history, and our actions, successes, and troubles will be studied and analyzed well into the future,” he said. “We all need to consider how our actions will shape history.”
Explore More
3 min read NASA, ISRO Research Aboard Fourth Private Astronaut Mission to Station
Article 6 days ago 3 min read I Am Artemis: Lili Villarreal
Lili Villarreal fell in love with space exploration from an early age when her and…
Article 6 days ago 6 min read NASA Tests New Ways to Stick the Landing in Challenging Terrain
Article 2 weeks ago View the full article
-
By NASA
A black hole has blasted out a surprisingly powerful jet in the distant universe, according to a study from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/J. Maithil et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. Weiss; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk A black hole has blasted out a surprisingly powerful jet in the distant universe, according to a new study from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and discussed in our latest press release. This jet exists early enough in the cosmos that it is being illuminated by the leftover glow from the big bang itself.
Astronomers used Chandra and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to study this black hole and its jet at a period they call “cosmic noon,” which occurred about three billion years after the universe began. During this time most galaxies and supermassive black holes were growing faster than at any other time during the history of the universe.
The main graphic is an artist’s illustration showing material in a disk that is falling towards a supermassive black hole. A jet is blasting away from the black hole towards the upper right, as Chandra detected in the new study. The black hole is located 11.6 billion light-years from Earth when the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the leftover glow from the big bang, was much denser than it is now. As the electrons in the jets fly away from the black hole, they move through the sea of CMB radiation and collide with microwave photons. These collisions boost the energy of the photons up into the X-ray band (purple and white), allowing them to be detected by Chandra even at this great distance, which is shown in the inset.
Researchers, in fact, identified and then confirmed the existence of two different black holes with jets over 300,000 light-years long. The two black holes are 11.6 billion and 11.7 billion light-years away from Earth, respectively. Particles in one jet are moving at between 95% and 99% of the speed of light (called J1405+0415) and in the other at between 92% and 98% of the speed of light (J1610+1811). The jet from J1610+1811 is remarkably powerful, carrying roughly half as much energy as the intense light from hot gas orbiting the black hole.
The team was able to detect these jets despite their great distances and small separation from the bright, growing supermassive black holes — known as “quasars” — because of Chandra’s sharp X-ray vision, and because the CMB was much denser then than it is now, enhancing the energy boost described above.
When quasar jets approach the speed of light, Einstein’s theory of special relativity creates a dramatic brightening effect. Jets aimed toward Earth appear much brighter than those pointed away. The same brightness astronomers observe can come from vastly different combinations of speed and viewing angle. A jet racing at near-light speed but angled away from us can appear just as bright as a slower jet pointed directly at Earth.
The researchers developed a novel statistical method that finally cracked this challenge of separating effects of speed and of viewing angle. Their approach recognizes a fundamental bias: astronomers are more likely to discover jets pointed toward Earth simply because relativistic effects make them appear brightest. They incorporated this bias using a modified probability distribution, which accounts for how jets oriented at different angles are detected in surveys.
Their method works by first using the physics of how jet particles scatter the CMB to determine the relationship between jet speed and viewing angle. Then, instead of assuming all angles are equally likely, they apply the relativistic selection effect: jets beamed toward us (smaller angles) are overrepresented in our catalogs. By running ten thousand simulations that match this biased distribution to their physical model, they could finally determine the most probable viewing angles: about 9 degrees for J1405+0415 and 11 degrees for J1610+1811.
These results were presented by Jaya Maithil (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian) at the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Anchorage, AK, and are also being published in The Astrophysical Journal. A preprint is available here. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory Learn more about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and its mission here:
https://www.nasa.gov/chandra
https://chandra.si.edu
Visual Description
This release is supported by an artist’s illustration of a jet blasting away from a supermassive black hole.
The black hole sits near the center of the illustration. It resembles a black marble with a fine yellow outline. Surrounding the black hole is a swirling disk, resembling a dinner plate tilted to face our upper right. This disk comprises concentric rings of fiery swirls, dark orange near the outer edge, and bright yellow near the core.
Shooting out of the black hole are two streaky beams of silver and pale violet. One bright beam shoots up toward our upper right, and a second somewhat dimmer beam shoots in the opposite direction, down toward our lower left. These beams are encircled by long, fine, corkscrewing lines that resemble stretched springs.
This black hole is located 11.6 billion light-years from Earth, much earlier in the history of the universe. Near this black hole, the leftover glow from the big bang, known as the cosmic microwave background or CMB, is much denser than it is now. As the electrons in the jets blast away from the black hole, they move through the sea of CMB radiation. The electrons boost the energies of the CMB light into the X-ray band, allowing the jets to be detected by Chandra, even at this great distance.
Inset at our upper righthand corner is an X-ray image depicting this interaction. Here, a bright white circle is ringed with a band of glowing purple energy. The jet is the faint purple line shooting off that ring, aimed toward our upper right, with a blob of purple energy at its tip.
News Media Contact
Megan Watzke
Chandra X-ray Center
Cambridge, Mass.
617-496-7998
mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu
Lane Figueroa
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama
256-544-0034
lane.e.figueroa@nasa.gov
View the full article
-
By NASA
5 Min Read 3 Black Holes Caught Eating Massive Stars in NASA Data
A disk of hot gas swirls around a black hole in this illustration. Some of the gas came from a star that was pulled apart by the black hole, forming the long stream of hot gas on the right, feeding into the disk. Credits:
NASA/JPL-Caltech Black holes are invisible to us unless they interact with something else. Some continuously eat gas and dust, and appear to glow brightly over time as matter falls in. But other black holes secretly lie in wait for years until a star comes close enough to snack on.
Scientists have recently identified three supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies, each of which suddenly brightened when it destroyed a star and then stayed bright for several months. A new study using space and ground-based data from NASA, ESA (European Space Agency), and other institutions presents these rare occurrences as a new category of cosmic events called “extreme nuclear transients.”
Looking for more of these extreme nuclear transients could help unveil some of the most massive supermassive black holes in the universe that are usually quiet.
“These events are the only way we can have a spotlight that we can shine on otherwise inactive massive black holes,” said Jason Hinkle, graduate student at the University of Hawaii and lead author of a new study in the journal Science Advances describing this phenomenon.
The black holes in question seem to have eaten stars three to 10 times heavier than our Sun. Feasting on the stars resulted in some of the most energetic transient events ever recorded.
This illustration shows a glowing stream of material from a star as it is being devoured by a supermassive black hole. When a star passes within a certain distance of a black hole — close enough to be gravitationally disrupted — the stellar material gets stretched and compressed as it falls into the black hole. NASA/JPL-Caltech These events as unleash enormous amount of high-energy radiation on the central regions of their host galaxies. “That has implications for the environments in which these events are occurring,” Hinkle said. “If galaxies have these events, they’re important for the galaxies themselves.”
The stars’ destruction produces high-energy light that takes over 100 days to reach peak brightness, then more than 150 days to dim to half of its peak. The way the high-energy radiation affects the environment results in lower-energy emissions that telescopes can also detect.
One of these star-destroying events, nicknamed “Barbie” because of its catalog identifier ZTF20abrbeie, was discovered in 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in California, and documented in two 2023 studies. The other two black holes were detected by ESA’s Gaia mission in 2016 and 2018 and are studied in detail in the new paper.
NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was critical in confirming that these events must have been related to black holes, not stellar explosions or other phenomena. The way that the X-ray, ultraviolet, and optical light brightened and dimmed over time was like a fingerprint matching that of a black hole ripping a star apart.
Scientists also used data from NASA’s WISE spacecraft, which was operated from 2009 to 2011 and then was reactivated as NEOWISE and retired in 2024. Under the WISE mission the spacecraft mapped the sky at infrared wavelengths, finding many new distant objects and cosmic phenomena. In the new study, the spacecraft’s data helped researchers characterize dust in the environments of each black hole. Numerous ground-based observatories additionally contributed to this discovery, including the W. M. Keck Observatory telescopes through their NASA-funded archive and the NASA-supported Near-Earth Object surveys ATLAS, Pan-STARRS, and Catalina.
“What I think is so exciting about this work is that we’re pushing the upper bounds of what we understand to be the most energetic environments of the universe,” said Anna Payne, a staff scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and study co-author, who helped look for the chemical fingerprints of these events with the University of Hawaii 2.2-meter Telescope.
A Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) grant from the agency helped enable Hinkle to search for these black hole events. “The FINESST grant gave Jason the freedom to track down and figure out what these events actually were,” said Ben Shappee, associate professor at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, a study coauthor and advisor to Hinkle.
Hinkle is set to follow up on these results as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign through the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program. “One of the biggest questions in astronomy is how black holes grow throughout the universe,” Hinkle said.
The results complement recent observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope showing how supermassive black holes feed and grow in the early universe. But since only 10% of early black holes are actively eating gas and dust, extreme nuclear transients — that is, catching a supermassive black hole in the act of eating a massive star — are a different way to find black holes in the early universe.
Events like these are so bright that they may be visible even in the distant, early universe. Swift showed that extreme nuclear transients emit most of their light in the ultraviolet. But as the universe expands, that light is stretched to longer wavelengths and shifts into the infrared — exactly the kind of light NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was designed to detect.
With its powerful infrared sensitivity and wide field of view, Roman will be able to spot these rare explosions from more than 12 billion years ago, when the universe was just a tenth of its current age. Scheduled to launch by 2027, and potentially as early as fall 2026, Roman could uncover many more of these dramatic events and offer a new way to explore how stars, galaxies, and black holes formed and evolved over time.
“We can take these three objects as a blueprint to know what to look for in the future,” Payne said.
Explore More
5 min read NASA’s Webb Rounds Out Picture of Sombrero Galaxy’s Disk
Article
1 day ago
2 min read Hubble Filters a Barred Spiral
Article
1 day ago
5 min read Apocalypse When? Hubble Casts Doubt on Certainty of Galactic Collision
Article
2 days ago
View the full article
-
By NASA
Scientists have discovered a star behaving like no other seen before, giving fresh clues about the origin of a new class of mysterious objects.X-ray: NASA/CXC/ICRAR, Curtin Univ./Z. Wang et al.; Infrared: NASA/JPL/CalTech/IPAC; Radio: SARAO/MeerKAT; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk An unusual star (circled in white at right) behaving like no other seen before and its surroundings are featured in this composite image released on May 28, 2025. A team of astronomers combined data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope on Wajarri Country in Australia to study the discovered object, known as ASKAP J1832−0911 (ASKAP J1832 for short).
ASKAP J1832 belongs to a class of objects called “long period radio transients” discovered in 2022 that vary in radio wave intensity in a regular way over tens of minutes. This is thousands of times longer than the length of the repeated variations seen in pulsars, which are rapidly spinning neutron stars that have repeated variations multiple times a second. ASKAP J1832 cycles in radio wave intensity every 44 minutes, placing it into this category of long period radio transients. Using Chandra, the team discovered that ASKAP J1832 is also regularly varying in X-rays every 44 minutes. This is the first time that such an X-ray signal has been found in a long period radio transient.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/ICRAR, Curtin Univ./Z. Wang et al.; Infrared: NASA/JPL/CalTech/IPAC; Radio: SARAO/MeerKAT; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk
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.