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Too young to be so cool: lessons from three neutron stars
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By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Students from Tropico Middle School in Rosamond, California, build their own paper planes as part of a project during NASA Aero Fair on April 9, 2025.NASA/Genaro Vavuris A new generation of aerospace explorers will soon embark on a hands-on summer experience focusing on careers in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (STEM). This month, NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, and the Flight Test Museum Foundation will launch the 2025 Junior Test Pilot School.
Held at Blackbird Airpark and Joe Davies Heritage Airpark in Palmdale, California, this six-week program invites elementary-aged students to step into the shoes of test pilots and engineers from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, June 16 through July 25. Registration is free through participating school districts and the Flight Test Museum. Students will have direct access to legendary aircraft such as A-12, SR-71, U-2, F-86 Sabre, and NASA Boeing 747 Space Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.
The Junior Test Pilot School combines authentic NASA-designed curriculum, immersive aerospace activities, and direct engagement with engineers, test pilots, and scientists to inspire future aerospace professionals in the Antelope Valley – home to one of the nation’s highest concentrations of STEM careers.
“This program offers more than a glimpse into aerospace, it provides students a hands-on opportunity to solve real-world problems and see themselves in future STEM roles,” said Dr. Amira Flores, program integration manager for NASA’s California Office of STEM Engagement.
Daily lessons cover eight core modules: flight principles, stealth engineering, altitude effects, speed and g-force, payload impact, maneuverability, reconnaissance design, and jet engine systems.
Additionally, in collaboration with NASA Armstrong’s Aero Fair program, students will be guided through the program’s Wildfire Design Challenge by a NASA volunteer. Following the engineering design process, students will collaborate to design and build a prototype of an aerial vehicle that suppresses wildfires.
“Our junior test pilots learn to analyze the aircraft to figure out why they were designed the way they are and think like an engineer,” said Lisa Sheldon Brown, director of education at the Flight Test Museum. “Research shows that academic trajectory is set by fifth grade, making this the critical window to inspire STEM interest and career awareness.”
The program is delivered in partnership with the City of Palmdale and is supported by industry sponsors, including Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. These partners not only provide funding and volunteers but also elevate career exposure by introducing students to diverse aerospace professionals within the region.
NASA Armstrong is a hub of aeronautical innovation and STEM workforce development in the Antelope Valley. Through programs like Aero Fair and partnerships like Junior Test Pilots School, Armstrong inspires and equips the next generation of engineers, pilots, and scientists.
The Flight Test Museum Foundation preserves the legacy and promotes the future of aerospace through education programs and historical preservation at the Blackbird Airpark and forthcoming Flight Test Museum at Edwards Air Force Base in Edwards, California.
For more about NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/armstrong
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Elena Aguirre
Armstrong Flight Research Center, Edwards, California
(661) 276-7004
elena.aguirre@nasa.gov
Dede Dinius
Armstrong Flight Research Center, Edwards, California
(661) 276-5701
darin.l.dinius@nasa.gov
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By European Space Agency
On 31 May, a live performance of The Blue Danube – often referred to as the ‘anthem of space’ – was transmitted by the European Space Agency (ESA) into the vastness of space. The event marked a double celebration: ESA’s 50th anniversary and the 200th birthday of the King of Waltz Johann Strauss II.
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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.
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By NASA
Explore Hubble Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts e-Books Online Activities 3D Hubble Models Lithographs Fact Sheets Posters Hubble on the NASA App Glossary News Hubble News Social Media Media Resources More 35th Anniversary Online Activities 2 min read
Hubble Pinpoints Young Stars in Spiral Galaxy
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy NGC 1317. ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team In this image, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope peers into the spiral galaxy NGC 1317 in the constellation Fornax, located more than 50 million light-years from Earth. Visible in this galaxy image is a bright blue ring that hosts hot, young stars. NGC 1317 is one of a pair, but its rowdy larger neighbor, NGC 1316, lies outside Hubble’s field of view. Despite the absence of its neighboring galaxy, this image finds NGC 1317 accompanied by two objects from very different parts of the universe. The bright point ringed with a crisscross pattern is a star from our own galaxy surrounded by diffraction spikes, whereas the redder elongated smudge is a distant galaxy lying far beyond NGC 1317.
The data presented in this image are from a vast observing campaign of hundreds of observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys. Combined with data from the ALMA array in the Atacama Desert, these observations help astronomers chart the connections between vast clouds of cold gas and the fiercely hot, young stars that form within them. ALMA’s unparalleled sensitivity at long wavelengths identified vast reservoirs of cold gas throughout the local universe, and Hubble’s sharp vision pinpointed clusters of young stars, as well as measuring their ages and masses.
Often the most exciting astronomical discoveries require this kind of telescope teamwork, with cutting-edge facilities working together to provide astronomers with information across the electromagnetic spectrum. The same applies to Hubble’s observations that laid the groundwork for the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s scientific observations.
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Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
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Last Updated May 14, 2025 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By NASA
Explore Webb Webb News Latest News Latest Images Webb’s Blog Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Observatory Overview Launch Deployment Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 5 Min Read Another First: NASA Webb Identifies Frozen Water in Young Star System
For the first time, researchers confirmed the presence of crystalline water ice in a dusty debris disk that orbits a Sun-like star, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The full artist’s concept illustration and full caption is shown below. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI) Is frozen water scattered in systems around other stars? Astronomers have long expected it is, partially based on previous detections of its gaseous form, water vapor, and its presence in our own solar system.
Now there is definitive evidence: Researchers confirmed the presence of crystalline water ice in a dusty debris disk that orbits a Sun-like star 155 light-years away using detailed data known as spectra from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. (The term water ice specifies its makeup, since many other frozen molecules are also observed in space, such as carbon dioxide ice, or “dry ice.”) In 2008, data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope hinted at the possibility of frozen water in this system.
“Webb unambiguously detected not just water ice, but crystalline water ice, which is also found in locations like Saturn’s rings and icy bodies in our solar system’s Kuiper Belt,” said Chen Xie, the lead author of the new paper and an assistant research scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
All the frozen water Webb detected is paired with fine dust particles throughout the disk — like itsy-bitsy “dirty snowballs.” The results published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Astronomers have been waiting for this definitive data for decades. “When I was a graduate student 25 years ago, my advisor told me there should be ice in debris disks, but prior to Webb, we didn’t have instruments sensitive enough to make these observations,” said Christine Chen, a co-author and associate astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “What’s most striking is that this data looks similar to the telescope’s other recent observations of Kuiper Belt objects in our own solar system.”
Water ice is a vital ingredient in disks around young stars — it heavily influences the formation of giant planets and may also be delivered by small bodies like comets and asteroids to fully formed rocky planets. Now that researchers have detected water ice with Webb, they have opened the door for all researchers to study how these processes play out in new ways in many other planetary systems.
Image: Debris Disk Around Star HD 181327 (Artist’s Concept)
For the first time, researchers confirmed the presence of crystalline water ice in a dusty debris disk that orbits a Sun-like star, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. All the frozen water detected by Webb is paired with fine dust particles throughout the disk. The majority of the water ice observed is found where it’s coldest and farthest from the star. The closer to the star the researchers looked, the less water ice they found. NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI) Rocks, Dust, Ice Rushing Around
The star, cataloged HD 181327, is significantly younger than our Sun. It’s estimated to be 23 million years old, compared to the Sun’s more mature 4.6 billion years. The star is slightly more massive than the Sun, and it’s hotter, which led to the formation of a slightly larger system around it.
Webb’s observations confirm a significant gap between the star and its debris disk — a wide area that is free of dust. Farther out, its debris disk is similar to our solar system’s Kuiper Belt, where dwarf planets, comets, and other bits of ice and rock are found (and sometimes collide with one another). Billions of years ago, our Kuiper Belt was likely similar to this star’s debris disk.
“HD 181327 is a very active system,” Chen said. “There are regular, ongoing collisions in its debris disk. When those icy bodies collide, they release tiny particles of dusty water ice that are perfectly sized for Webb to detect.”
Frozen Water — Almost Everywhere
Water ice isn’t spread evenly throughout this system. The majority is found where it’s coldest and farthest from the star. “The outer area of the debris disk consists of over 20% water ice,” Xie said.
The closer in the researchers looked, the less water ice they found. Toward the middle of the debris disk, Webb detected about 8% water ice. Here, it’s likely that frozen water particles are produced slightly faster than they are destroyed. In the area of the debris disk closest to the star, Webb detected almost none. It’s likely that the star’s ultraviolet light vaporizes the closest specks of water ice. It’s also possible that rocks known as planetesimals have “locked up” frozen water in their interiors, which Webb can’t detect.
This team and many more researchers will continue to search for — and study — water ice in debris disks and actively forming planetary systems throughout our Milky Way galaxy. “The presence of water ice helps facilitate planet formation,” Xie said. “Icy materials may also ultimately be ‘delivered’ to terrestrial planets that may form over a couple hundred million years in systems like this.”
The researchers observed HD 181327 with Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph), which is super-sensitive to extremely faint dust particles that can only be detected from space.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
To learn more about Webb, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/webb
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Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Claire Blome – cblome@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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