our galaxy travel through space

The Milky Way Galaxy

Like early explorers mapping the continents of our globe, astronomers are busy charting the spiral structure of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Using infrared images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have discovered that the Milky Way's elegant spiral structure is dominated by just two arms wrapping off the ends of a central bar of stars. Previously, our galaxy was thought to possess four major arms.

The annotated artist's concept illustrates the new view of the Milky Way. The galaxy's two major arms (Scutum-Centaurus and Perseus) can be seen attached to the ends of a thick central bar, while the two now-demoted minor arms (Norma and Sagittarius) are less distinct and located between the major arms.

The major arms consist of the highest densities of both young and old stars; the minor arms are primarily filled with gas and pockets of star-forming activity.

The artist's concept also includes a new spiral arm, called the "Far-3 kiloparsec arm," discovered via a radio-telescope survey of gas in the Milky Way. This arm is shorter than the two major arms and lies along the bar of the galaxy.

Our Sun lies near a small, partial arm called the Orion Arm, or Orion Spur, located between the Sagittarius and Perseus arms.

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A cosmic time machine: how the James Webb Space Telescope lets us see the first galaxies in the universe

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology

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Sara Webb does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Swinburne University of Technology provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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It has been an exciting week with the release of breathtaking photos of our Universe by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Images such as the one below give us a chance to see faint distant galaxies as they were more than 13 billion years ago.

It’s the perfect time to step back and appreciate our first-class ticket to the depths of the Universe and how these images allow us to look back in time.

These images also raise interesting points about how the expansion of the Universe factors into the way we calculate distances at a cosmological scale.

Modern time travel

Looking back in time might sound like a strange concept, but it’s what space researchers do every single day.

Our Universe is bound by the rules of physics, with one of the best-known “rules” being the speed of light. And when we talk about “light”, we’re actually referring to all the wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum, which travel at around a whooping 300,000 kilometres per second.

Light travels so fast that in our everyday lives it appears to be instantaneous. Even at these break-neck speeds, it still takes some time to travel anywhere across the cosmos.

When you look at the Moon, you actually see it as it was 1.3 seconds ago. It’s only a tiny peek back in time, but it’s still the past. It’s the same with sunlight, except the photons (light particles) emitted from the Sun’s surface travel just over eight minutes before they finally reach Earth.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, spans 100,000+ light-years. And the beautiful newborn stars seen in JWST’s Carina Nebula image are 7,500 light-years away. In other words, this nebula as pictured is from a time roughly 2,000 years earlier than when the first ever writing is thought to have been invented in ancient Mesopotamia.

Anytime we look away from the Earth, we’re looking back in time to how things once were. This is a superpower for astronomers because we can use light, as observed throughout time, to try to puzzle together the mystery of our universe.

What makes JWST spectacular

Space-based telescopes let us see certain ranges of light that are unable to pass through Earth’s dense atmosphere. The Hubble space telescope was designed and optimised to use both ultraviolet (UV) and visible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The JWST was designed to use a broad range of infrared light. And this is a key reason the JWST can see further back in time than Hubble.

Galaxies emit a range of wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma rays to radio waves, and everything in between. All of these give us important information about the different physics occurring in a galaxy.

When galaxies are near us, their light hasn’t changed that much since being emitted, and we can probe a vast range of these wavelengths to understand what’s happening inside them.

But when galaxies are extremely far away, we no longer have that luxury. The light from the most distant galaxies, as we see it now, has been stretched to longer and redder wavelengths due to the expansion of the universe.

This means some of the light that would have been visible to our eyes when it was first emitted has since lost energy as the universe expanded. It’s now in a completely different region of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is a phenomenon called “ cosmological redshift ”.

And this is where the JWST really shines. The broad range of infrared wavelengths detectable by JWST allow it to see galaxies Hubble never could. Combine this capability with the JWST’s enormous mirror and superb pixel resolution, and you have the most powerful time machine in the known universe.

Read more: Two experts break down the James Webb Space Telescope's first images, and explain what we've already learnt

Light age does not equal distance

Using the JWST, we will be able to capture extremely distant galaxies as they were only 100 million years after the Big Bang – which happened around 13.8 billion years ago.

So we will be able to see light from 13.7 billion years ago. What’s about to hurt your brain, however, is that those galaxies are not 13.7 billion light-years away. The actual distance to those galaxies today would be ~46 billion light-years.

This discrepancy is all thanks to the expanding universe, and makes working on a very large scale tricky.

The universe is expending due to something called “ dark energy ”. It’s thought to be a universal constant, acting equally in all areas of space-time (the fabric of our universe).

And the more the universe expands, the greater the effect dark energy has on its expansion. This is why even though the universe is 13.8 billion years old, it’s actually about 93 billion light-years across.

We can’t see the effect of dark energy on a galactic scale (within the Milky Way) but we can see it over much greater cosmological distances.

Sit back and enjoy

We live in a remarkable time of technology. Just 100 years ago, we didn’t know there were galaxies outside our own. Now we estimate there are trillions, and we are spoilt for choice.

For the foreseeable future, the JWST will be taking us on a journey through space and time each and every week. You can stay up to date with the latest news as NASA releases it.

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'The early universe is nothing like we expected': James Webb telescope reveals 'new understanding' of how galaxies formed at cosmic dawn

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have observed five extremely dense proto-globular clusters along a hair-thin arc of glittering stars. The discovery could help them understand how the earliest galaxies formed.

The James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ) has discovered what could be the earliest star clusters in the universe.

JWST spotted the five proto-globular clusters — swarms of millions of stars bound together by gravity — inside the Cosmic Gems arc, a galaxy that formed just 460 million years after the Big Bang . 

The Cosmic Gems arc gets its name from its appearance: When seen from our solar system , the star-studded galaxy looks like a hair-thin crescent due to the powerful gravitational influence of a foreground galaxy, which magnifies and distorts the distant galaxy's appearance. 

The galaxy is the most highly magnified region seen in the first 500 million years of our universe, giving astronomers an unprecedented window into how the stirrings of the first stars sculpted galaxies during cosmic dawn. 

Cosmic dawn is the time encompassing the first billion years of the universe. Roughly 400 million years after the Big Bang, the Epoch of Reionization began, in which light from nascent stars stripped hydrogen of their electrons, leading to a fundamental reshaping of galaxy structures . 

"The early universe is nothing like we expected," study first author Angela Adamo , an astronomer at Stockholm University, told Live Science. "Galaxies are more luminous, they form stars at break-neck speed, and they do so in massive and dense star clusters. We are building a new understanding of how early galaxies formed."

The researchers published their findings June 24 in the journal Nature .

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Related: James Webb telescope confirms there is something seriously wrong with our understanding of the universe

Lights on at cosmic down

As stars form, they fling out material in the form of winds and jets of ionized plasma — a process known as stellar feedback. 

"To form these 5 star clusters this tiny galaxy had to do so with very high efficiency," Adamo said. "The stellar feedback from the stars in star clusters must have been tremendous."

Scientists discovered the Cosmic Gems arc in 2018 using the Hubble Space Telescope . Usually, galaxies from such an early time emit light that is far too faint to be detected by telescopes. But a phenomenon called gravitational lensing can help astronomers view them. 

As Einstein outlined in his theory of general relativity , gravity is the curving and distortion of space-time in the presence of matter and energy. This curved space, in turn, sets the rules for how energy and matter move. 

This means that even though light travels in a straight line, light can be bent and magnified by the presence of gravity. In this case, the galaxy SPT-CL J0615-5746 sits between the Cosmic Gems arc and our solar system, bending and magnifying the early galaxy's light so it can be viewed by telescopes.

By pointing JWST at this region of curved space, astronomers observed the Cosmic Gems arc in unprecedented detail, resolving the five globular clusters nestled within. They found that the clusters were incredibly dense, being roughly three orders of magnitude denser than star-forming regions observed closer to Earth.

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The clusters are among the first to ever be observed. But it's still unclear whether they are the first to exist, Adamo said. 

"In principle, I would expect star formation to take place in a clustered fashion even in quite primordial galaxies," she added. "But to form [massive] proto globular clusters, the host galaxy needs to be capable of creating and retaining enough mass in gas. So it all depends on how fast primordial galaxies can grow."

To learn more about the cosmos's first embers in the region, the researchers will follow up with a spectroscopic analysis using the JWST. This will enable astronomers to reconstruct the physical properties of the clusters, further constrain their ages, and trace the impact the clusters' stars had on their wider galaxy.

Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.

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Guide to our Galaxy

This virtual journey, from the centre of the Milky Way to its outskirts, shows the different components that make up our Galaxy, which is home to about a hundred billion stars.

With a mass of four million Suns, a supermassive black hole (known as Sagittarius A*) sits at the centre of the Galaxy, its enormous gravity governing the orbits of stars in its vicinity. Stars have been observed orbiting this black hole at distances as close as a few light-days.

Moving outwards, we fly through a multitude of stars of the Galactic Bulge. The bulge is located in the central portion of the Milky Way and hosts about ten billion stars, which are mainly old and red. The bulge has an overall elongated shape that resembles that of a peanut-shaped bar, with a half-length of about 10 000 light-years, making the Milky Way a barred spiral galaxy.

Beyond the bulge, the journey continues across the Galaxy, flying through the younger population of stars in the stellar disc. Home to most of the Milky Way's stars, the stellar disc is a flattened structure with a radius of about 50 000 light-years and a vertical height of only 1000 light-years. The stellar disc is embedded in a slightly larger structure, the gaseous disc. Stars in the disc are arranged in a spiral arm pattern and orbit the centre of the Galaxy.

The discs and bulge are embedded in the stellar halo, a spherical structure which consists of a large number of globular clusters – the oldest population of stars in the Galaxy – as well as many isolated stars. The stellar halo extends out to a radius of about 100 000 light-years.

Astronomers believe that, like most galaxies, the Milky Way is embedded in an even larger halo of invisible dark matter. Since it does not emit any light, the presence of the dark matter halo can only be inferred indirectly by its gravitational effect on the motions of stars in the Galaxy.

Having seen our Galaxy from afar, we zoom into the disc again and change viewing direction, revealing a face-on view of the spiral arm structure of the Milky Way. The position of the Sun, located at a distance of about 26 000 light-years from the Galactic Centre – roughly half way between the centre and the outskirts of the Milky Way – is shown.

Finally, an indication is given of the size of the survey of stellar distances performed by ESA’s Hipparcos mission, which operated between 1989 and 1993. The Hipparcos catalogue, published in 1997, contains the position, proper motion and distance of more than 100 000 stars up to 300 light-years away from the Sun.

The survey performed by ESA’s Gaia mission will probe a billion stars, about 1% of the total number of stars in our Galaxy, out to 30 000 light-years away – a hundred times farther than Hipparcos.

Credit: ESA

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What is viewspace.

ViewSpace is a free, web-based collection of digital interactives and videos highlighting the latest developments in astronomy and Earth science.

ViewSpace gives you the opportunity to explore our planet, solar system, galaxy, and universe. Provided free with the support of NASA, ViewSpace is developed by a team of scientists, educators, and communication specialists who collaborate to ensure that content is accurate, up-to-date, engaging, relevant, and accessible to a wide audience.

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ViewSpace interactives allow you to explore objects and materials from different perspectives, discovering how we can combine information to better understand the universe.

Different forms of light: Explore visible and invisible wavelengths of light that help us understand features like the dusty brim of the Sombrero Galaxy roughly 30 million light-years away.

Hidden objects: Unveil invisible light to reveal hidden objects like the stars forming inside Mystic Mountain, a pillar of gas and dust 7,500 light-years from Earth.

ViewSpace videos tell the stories of the planets, stars, galaxies, and universe, giving viewers the opportunity to experience space and Earth as seen with satellites and telescopes.

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ViewSpace is produced by the Office of Public Outreach at the Space Telescope Science Institute , in partnership with the NASA's Universe of Learning project and NASA's Earth Observing System, Hubble Space Telescope Project, and James Webb Space Telescope Project.

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Data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory are used to create a map of dark matter (blue) in galaxy cluster MACS J0717.5+3745.

What are galaxies; how do they vary; and how do they form, interact, and change over time?

The Penguin and the Egg (Arp 142) is a pair of galaxies that are being distorted by their mutual gravitational attraction.

How do the Sun, planets, moons, comets, and asteroids interact as a system?

Saturn’s moon Titan casts a shadow as it passes between the planet and the Sun.

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With telescopes, we can see details of the Milky Way, including glowing clouds of dust and gas like the Lobster Nebula.

How fast is the universe expanding and what does this tell us about its past and future?

Over time, space expands, stretching the wavelenghts of light and causing the distant galaxies seen in the Ultra Deep Field image from the Hubble Space Telescope to look redder than the closer galaxies.

How do we detect and study planets orbiting other stars?

Changes in the brightness of starlight, measured by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, indicates the presence of a planet orbiting the star.

What happens to stars at the end of their lives, and how do stellar explosions affect the space around them?

Visible, infrared, and X-ray light from supernova remnant Cassiopeia A reveal remains of an exploded star.

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The enormous mass of galaxy cluster Abell 370 bends the space around it, magnifying and distorting the light from more distant galaxies into arc-like streaks.

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How and where do stars form, and how do they shape their surroundings?

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An image captured by the Landsat 8 satellite in May 2018 shows active lava flows from Kilauea volcano in Hawaii.

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A map of the sky from the Planck Space Telescope highlights variations in the cosmic microwave background radiation—energy left over from the big bang some 13.8 billion years ago.

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NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive satellite (SMAP) helps scientists monitor droughts, predict floods, and improve farm productivity.

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Earth is screaming through space at 1.3 million mph. A simple animation by a former NASA scientist shows what that looks like.

• As Earth rotates on its axis, it orbits the sun , which orbits the center of the Milky Way , which itself is barreling through space.
• A simple animation by the former NASA scientist James O'Donoghue shows how fast all those objects are moving.
• Earth is relatively slow, but against the background of cosmic radiation , we're rocketing through space. We just can't feel it because our speed is constant.
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You can't feel it, but we're rocketing through space at 1.3 million mph.

That's because the Earth is orbiting the sun, which is orbiting the center of the galaxy, which is barreling through the cosmic wind of radiation released during the Big Bang. 

A simple animation created by the planetary scientist James O'Donoghue  puts the whole thing in perspective.

"People often talk about how we are standing on a ball (Earth) which rotates at great speed, and that this ball orbits another at an even greater speed. Sometimes this is extended to how fast we orbit the center of our Milky Way," O'Donoghue, who used to work at NASA and is now employed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, told Business Insider in an email.

He added: "In all the confusion of big numbers and directions, I simply wanted to put all this information into context in a single frame so people could understand where they're headed — and how fast."

On the left side of the animation, numbers indicate the speeds of Earth's rotation, its orbit around the sun, the solar system's orbit around the Milky Way's center, and the galaxy hurtling through space. The dots moving across the right side of the animation show how quickly each object travels 150 kilometers.

As you can see, Earth's rotation is relatively slow, whereas the Milky Way is barreling through space, traveling 600 kilometers (373 miles) every second.

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Normally, O'Donoghue said, people portray the Milky Way's speed by how quickly it's approaching the nearby Andromeda galaxy. But that isn't necessarily the best point of comparison.

"There are so many galaxies moving at different velocities relative to our own, so I figured I'd skip that step and go straight to the biggest apparently moving thing I could think of — the CMB," O'Donoghue said, referring to the cosmic microwave background. That's the faint radiation left over from the Big Bang that fills all of space.

"Measurements of it indicate it is coming from a particular direction, kind of like a wind," O'Donoghue added.

But since all of this is moving, speed is relative.

So although Earth orbits the sun at 66,600 mph, and the sun orbits the Milky Way at 514,500 mph, our solar system's speed relative to the CMB is about 827,000 mph. Zoom out further, and our entire galaxy is zipping through the CMB at about 1.3 million mph.

Of course, in your everyday life on Earth, you don't notice that we're moving so quickly.

As Elon Musk said on Twitter, this video "makes it clear that you can only sense acceleration, not velocity." 

That is, you can sense only changes in speed. When you're in a car, even though you might be driving at 80 mph, you don't feel that motion. You can watch the world whoosh past the car window, of course, just as astronomers observe the Earth's movements by looking to the sky. But you notice the speed only when someone hits the brakes or the gas.

That's why we don't sense the Earth's rotation, or the movement of the solar system as it rockets around the Milky Way's center. Those things are constant. As the animation shows, they're relative too.

Watch: Elon Musk explains the one thing that went wrong with SpaceX's Falcon Heavy flight

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How does earth move through space now we know, on every scale.

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On the largest scales, it isn't just the Earth and the Sun that move, but the entire galaxy and ... [+] local group, as the invisible forces from gravitation in intergalactic space must all be added up together.

Ask a scientist for our cosmic address, and you'll get quite a mouthful. Here we are, on planet Earth, which spins on its axis and revolves around the Sun, which orbits in an ellipse around the center of the Milky Way, which is being pulled towards Andromeda within our local group, which is being pushed around inside our cosmic supercluster, Laniakea, by galactic groups, clusters, and cosmic voids, which itself lies in the KBC void amidst the large-scale structure of the Universe. After decades of research, science has finally put together the complete picture, and can quantify exactly how fast we're moving through space, on every scale.

Within the Solar System, Earth's rotation plays an important role in causing the equator to bulge, ... [+] in creating night-and-day, and in helping power our magnetic field that protects us from cosmic rays and the solar wind.

Most likely, as you’re reading this right now, you’re sitting down, perceiving yourself as stationary. Yet we know — at a cosmic level — we’re not so stationary after all. For one, the Earth rotates on its axis, hurtling us through space at nearly 1700 km/hr for someone on the equator. That might sound like a big number, but relative to the other contributions to our motion through the Universe, it's barely a blip on the cosmic radar. That’s not really all that fast, if we switch to thinking about it in terms of kilometers per second instead. The Earth spinning on its axis gives us a speed of just 0.5 km/s, or less than 0.001% the speed of light. But there are other motions that matter more.

The speed at which planets revolve around the Sun far exceeds the rotation speeds of any of them, ... [+] even for the fastest ones like Jupiter and Saturn.

Much like all the planets in our Solar System, Earth orbits the Sun at a much speedier clip than its rotational speed. In order to keep us in our stable orbit where we are, we need to move at right around 30 km/s. The inner planets — Mercury and Venus — move faster, while the outer worlds like Mars (and beyond) move slower than this. As the planets orbit in the plane of the solar system, they change their direction-of-motion continuously, with Earth returning to its starting point after 365 days. Well, almost to its same exact starting point.

An accurate model of how the planets orbit the Sun, which then moves through the galaxy in a ... [+] different direction-of-motion. Image credit: Rhys Taylor of http://www.rhysy.net/, via his blog at http://astrorhysy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/and-yet-it-moves-but-not-like-that.html.

Because even the Sun itself isn’t stationary. Our Milky Way galaxy is huge, massive, and most importantly, is in motion. All the stars, planets, gas clouds, dust grains, black holes, dark matter and more move around inside of it, contributing to and affected by its net gravity. From our vantage point, some 25,000 light years from the galactic center, the Sun speeds around in an ellipse, making a complete revolution once every 220–250 million years or so. It’s estimated that our Sun’s speed is around 200–220 km/s along this journey, which is quite a large number compared both Earth's rotation speed and its speed-of-revolution around the Sun, which are both inclined at an angle to the Sun's plane-of-motion around the galaxy.

Although the Sun orbits within the plane of the Milky Way some 25,000-27,000 light years from the ... [+] center, the orbital directions of the planets in our Solar System do not align with the galaxy at all.

But the galaxy itself isn't stationary, but rather moves due to the gravitational attraction of all the overdense matter clumps and, equally, due to the lack of gravitational attraction from all of the underdense regions. Within our local group, we can measure our speed towards the largest, massive galaxy in our cosmic backyard: Andromeda. It appears to be moving towards our Sun at a speed of 301 km/s, which means —when we factor in the motion of the Sun through the Milky Way — that the local group's two most massive galaxies, Andromeda and the Milky Way, are headed towards each other at a speed of around 109 km/s.

The largest galaxy in the Local Group, Andromeda, appears small and insignificant next to the Milky ... [+] Way, but that's because of its distance: some 2.5 million light years away. It is moving towards our Sun, at the present moment, at around 300 km/s.

The Local Group, as massive as it is, isn't completely isolated. The other galaxies and clusters of galaxies in our vicinity all pull on us, and even the more distant clumps of matter exert a gravitational force. Based on what we can see, measure, and calculate, these structures appear to cause an additional motion of approximately 300 km/s, but in a somewhat different direction than all the other motions, put together. And that explains part, but not all, of the large-scale motion through the Universe. There's also one more important effect at play, one that was quantified only recently: the gravitational repulsion of cosmic voids.

The various galaxies of the Virgo Supercluster, grouped and clustered together. On the largest ... [+] scales, the Universe is uniform, but as you look to galaxy or cluster scales, overdense and underdense regions dominate.

For every atom or particle of matter in the Universe that clusters together in an overdense region, there's a region of once-average density that's lost the equivalent amount of mass. Just as a region that's more dense than average will preferentially attract you, a region that's less dense than average will attract you with a below-average amount of force. If you get a large region of space with less matter than average in it, that lack-of-attraction effectively behaves as a repellent force , just as extra attraction behaves as an attractive one. In our Universe, opposite to the location of our greatest nearby overdensities, is a great underdense void. Since we're in between these two regions, the attractive and repulsive forces add up, with each one contributing approximately 300 km/s and the total approaching 600 km/s.

The gravitational attraction (blue) of overdense regions and the relative repulsion (red) of the ... [+] underdense regions, as they act on the Milky Way.

When you add all of these motions together: the Earth spinning, the Earth revolving around the Sun, the Sun moving around the galaxy, the Milky Way headed towards Andromeda, and the local group being attracted to the overdense regions and repulsed by the underdense ones, we can get a number for how fast we're actually moving through the Universe at any given instant. We find that the total motion comes out to 368 km/s in a particular direction, plus or minus about 30 km/s, depending on what time of year it is and which direction the Earth is moving. This is confirmed by measurements of the cosmic microwave background, which appears preferentially hotter in the direction we're moving, and preferentially colder in the direction opposite to our motion.

The leftover glow from the Big Bang is 3.36 millikelvin hotter in one (the red) direction than ... [+] average, and 3.36 millikelvin cooler in (the blue) the other than average. This is due to the total motion of everything through space.

If we ignore the Earth's motion, we find that the Sun moves relative to the CMB at 368 ± 2 km/s, and that when you throw in the motion of the local group, you get that all of it — the Milky Way, Andromeda, the Triangulum galaxy and all the others — are moving at 627 ± 22 km/s relative to the CMB. That larger uncertainty, by the way, is mostly due to uncertainty in the Sun's motion around the galactic center, which is the most difficult component to measure.

The relative attractive and repulsive effects of overdense and underdense regions on the Milky Way. ... [+] The combined effect is known as the Dipole Repeller.

There might not be a universal frame of reference, but there is a frame of reference that's useful to measure: the rest frame of the CMB, which also coincides with the rest frame of the Hubble expansion of the Universe. Every galaxy we see has what we call a “peculiar velocity” (or a speed atop the Hubble expansion) of a few hundred to a few thousand km/s, and what we see for ourselves is exactly consistent with that. Our Sun's peculiar motion of 368 km/s, and our local group's, of 627 km/s, matches up perfectly with how we understand that all galaxies move through space. Thanks to the effect of the dipole repeller , we now, for the first time, understand how that motion happens for us on every cosmic scale.

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Piping Up at the Gates of Dawn

Astronomers have found the earliest and most distant galaxy yet.

The newly discovered galaxy, known as JADES-GS-z14-0, emanates light that is 13.5 billion years old. Credit... NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, B. Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), B. Johnson (CfA), S. Tacchella (Cambridge), P. Cargile (CfA)

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By Dennis Overbye

• June 22, 2024

Since the James Webb Space Telescope began operating two years ago, astronomers have been using it to leapfrog one another millions of years into the past, back toward the moment they call cosmic dawn, when the first stars and galaxies were formed.

Last month, an international team doing research as the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, or JADES, said it had identified the earliest, most distant galaxy yet found — a banana-shaped blob of color measuring 1,600 light-years across. It was already shining with intense starlight when the universe was in its relative infancy, at only 290 million years old, the astronomers said.

The new galaxy, known as JADES-GS-z14-0, is one of a string of Webb discoveries, including early galaxies and black holes, that challenge conventional models of how the first stars and galaxies formed.

“This discovery proves that luminous galaxies were already in place 300 million years after the Big Bang and are more common than what was expected,” the researchers wrote in a paper posted to an online physics archive.

“Galaxy formation models will need to address the existence of such large and luminous galaxies so early in cosmic history,” said the authors, who were led by Stefano Carniani, a professor at the university Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy.

The galaxy was first spotted during a deep space survey with the Webb’s Near Infrared Camera, one of the telescope’s workhorse instruments. Within a patch of southern sky known as the Jades Origin Field, which is about a quarter of the size of a full moon, scientists found 11 galaxies that seemed to date from when the universe was less than 400 million years old — far more than they had expected.

Subsequent studies by Dr. Carniani and his colleagues with the telescope’s infrared spectrograph revealed that the wavelength of light from JADES-GS-z14-0 had been stretched more than 15-fold by the expansion of the universe (a redshift of 14 to use astronomical jargon), similar to the way a siren’s pitch becomes lower as it speeds away. That means light has been coming toward us for 13.5 billion years, since shortly after the universe began. (The universe is about 13.8 billion years old, according to cosmological calculations.)

The light from the galaxy is spread over a diffuse region, which indicates that the glow was coming from stars, not the gullet of a black hole. Its brightness corresponded to the output of hundreds of millions of suns, an astonishing number to have formed and assembled in only 290 million years.

The starlight also contained spectral signatures of oxygen, which did not exist when the universe was first born. That means the stars in that galaxy had already undergone several of the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth, which have enriched the universe with the heavy elements we need to evolve and exist.

How that happened in such a short time is a mystery, one riddle in a sky full of them. Some astronomers have suggested that supermassive black holes — formed from the collapse of primordial gas clouds — could have served as the seeds for galaxies.

In a blog post , Dr. Carniani and Kevin Hainline of the University of Arizona, another member of the JADES team, wrote: “It is likely that astronomers will find many such luminous galaxies, possibly at even earlier times, over the next decade with Webb. We’re thrilled to see the extraordinary diversity of galaxies that existed at Cosmic Dawn!”

Dennis Overbye is the cosmic affairs correspondent for The Times, covering physics and astronomy. More about Dennis Overbye

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Astronomers said they had identified the earliest, most distant galaxy yet found : a banana-shaped blob of color measuring 1,600 light-years across.

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Short Wave: Space Camp

In our wildest dreams, we’re able to warp across the universe to witness its mysteries and discover its quirks up close. In this series, we do exactly that: Regina and Emily blast off into space and travel to the most distant, weirdest parts of our universe — from stars to black holes.

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From planets to black holes, we look at the oddities of space

Jets of gas being released from newly forming stars are captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. NPR/NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (NASA-JPL), Joel Green (STScI) hide caption

If the fabric of the universe is a flat, rubbery sheet, Earth is a pothole that bends the fabric of spacetime into a funnel around it. But what would it be like to overcome Earth’s gravity, lift off from the blue marble we call home and explore the far reaches of the universe?

We explore just that in the Short Wave Space Camp series. It's a 10-part episodic journey through the changing universe with Short Wave hosts Regina Barber and Emily Kwong.

We start with  how to get to outer space in the first place . From there, every Tuesday through Aug. 13, Short Wave will travel farther and earlier into spacetime.

Why we’re going to space

We’ve come a long way from Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite to launch into space.

Scientists have moved far beyond the bounds of Earth's orbit. The James Webb Space Telescope is capturing the most detailed images yet of the infancy of the universe. NASA retrieved its first asteroid sample . Humans have not only gone to Earth's moon, but are now exploring both the sun, via the Parker Solar Probe , and the moons ringing other planets .

The Universe's Baby Pictures (Squee!) From The James Webb Space Telescope

The science powering human curiosity is more sophisticated than ever. Meanwhile, private corporations are fundamentally changing who gets to go to space and how.

Over a decade ago, NASA retired the Space Shuttle program , while SpaceX and now Boeing carry astronauts to the International Space Station. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are ferrying billionaires, like their owners, to space. Earlier this month, SpaceX successfully launched and returned the largest rocket ever built , intended to one day put boots on Mars.

Why the earliest galaxies are sparking drama and controversy among astronomers

As humans push outward into space, scientists are also thinking about planetary defense.

In 2022, NASA's DART mission successfully redirected the asteroid Dimorphous , demonstrating how we might one day divert a space rock on a collision course for earth. Plus, planetary defense experts run drills for how to fend off asteroids every couple of years. That's in spite of the fact that there isn't a substantially sized asteroid that would potentially impact Earth for the next hundred years, as Terik Daly , the planetary defense section supervisor at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory told NPR in a recent interview .

Technical advances like these were once unthinkable.

At the same time, lower Earth orbit is being crowded with space junk, some of which even falls back to Earth. Last year, a large battery pallet crash landed through the roof of a Florida home after detaching from the International Space Station. Events like this beg the question: Who does space belong to? And how do researchers responsibly advance science and space exploration when we still don’t fully understand the universe?

The importance of sustainable space exploration in the 21st century

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Every person has a role to play, and Short Wave wants listeners to be engaged in this evolving discourse. Which is why, all summer, we’re offering a primer on the basics of our universe – and weaving in the latest research, challenges, and opportunities for space exploration along the way.

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Throughout the series, we'll meld basic physics with the latest research in astronomy, discussing everything from black holes and dark energy to dark matter and the life cycle of a star. We'll get into the human experience of living in space. Plus, we'll stretch Einstein’s thought experiment to its breaking point and ask the big questions: Did everything really begin with a bang? How is the universe going to end?

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How far do we travel through the universe in our lifetimes?

17 July 2019

My wife told me I should get out more. I replied that I am just about to celebrate my 66th free trip around the sun. Can anyone tell me how far I have travelled in our galaxy during that time?

Emma Eales , Edinburgh, UK

Earth moves at about 30 kilometres per second around the sun. If you count this as your own journey, you will have travelled about 62 billion kilometres in 66 Earth years.

Herman D’Hondt , Sydney, Australia

The answer depends on what motions you include. The speed of the solar system around the galactic centre is about 230 kilometres per second. If you only include that, then you travel 7.26 billion kilometres per year, or 479 billion kilometres overall.

However, we should also add the distance Earth has travelled around the sun and the distance your London home has travelled around Earth (at a speed of about 0.465 kilometres per second). These are much smaller amounts, but combined they add almost 63 billion kilometres to the total.

Mike Follows , Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, UK

The solar system sits some 26,500 light years from the galactic centre, about halfway along a spiral arm. We orbit the centre of the Milky Way about once every 240 million years.

However, the universe has been expanding ever since the big bang , about 13.8 billion years ago. All galaxies are moving away from each other at a speed proportional to the distance that separates them. We can’t measure our speed relative to our starting point because the universe has no centre or edge. If there were nothing to disturb this motion, we would be stationary relative to the radiation left over from the big bang , the cosmic microwave background radiation. However, we are careering towards the Leo and Virgo constellations, pulled there at more than 600 kilometres per second by a group of galaxies dubbed the Great Attractor . This is nearly three times the speed at which we orbit the centre of the Milky Way.

When we celebrate anniversaries, we really have moved on and we each have an absolutely unique trajectory on the fabric of space-time .

Hillary J. Shaw , Newport, Shropshire, UK

Though you will have travelled about 62.5 billion kilometres around the sun in 66 years, it is a tiny distance in stellar terms: less than 1 per cent of a light year, or around 0.2 per cent of the distance from the sun to the nearest other star.

If you want to “get out more” in stellar terms, consider inventing an antimatter drive that can take you up to 99.9 per cent of light speed (and decelerate again). The resulting time dilation will enable you to tour much of the galaxy within your lifetime. But do take your wife with you, as when you return to Earth it will be many tens of thousands of years later.

David Roffey , London, UK

Movement through space is a big problem for time travel . Assuming you can get past the trivial bit of transporting yourself 66 years into the past, you would then be trillions of kilometres from the spot on the planet that you started from.

You would probably end up in a galactic void, which wouldn’t be good, and you would also have a small but non-zero chance of ending up in the gravity well of a star – even less good.

To answer this question – or ask a new one – email [email protected] .

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October 26, 1998

How fast is the earth moving?

Rhett Herman, a physics professor at Radford University in Virginia, supplies the following answer

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Questions about how fast the earth--or anything, for that matter--is moving are incomplete unless they also ask, "Compared to what?" Without a frame of reference, questions about motion cannot be completely answered.

Consider the movement of the earth's surface with respect to the planet's center. The earth rotates once every 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.09053 seconds, called the sidereal period, and its circumference is roughly 40,075 kilometers. Thus, the surface of the earth at the equator moves at a speed of 460 meters per second--or roughly 1,000 miles per hour.

As schoolchildren, we learn that the earth is moving about our sun in a very nearly circular orbit. It covers this route at a speed of nearly 30 kilometers per second, or 67,000 miles per hour. In addition, our solar system--Earth and all--whirls around the center of our galaxy at some 220 kilometers per second, or 490,000 miles per hour. As we consider increasingly large size scales, the speeds involved become absolutely huge!

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The galaxies in our neighborhood are also rushing at a speed of nearly 1,000 kilometers per second towards a structure called the Great Attractor, a region of space roughly 150 million light-years (one light year is about six trillion miles) away from us. This Great Attractor, having a mass 100 quadrillion times greater than our sun and span of 500 million light-years, is made of both the visible matter that we can see along with the so-called dark matter that we cannot see.

Each of the motions described above were given relative to some structure. Our motion about our sun was described relative to our sun, while the motion of our local group of galaxies was described as toward the Great Attractor. The question arises: Is there some universal frame of reference relative to which we can define the motions of all things? The answer may have been provided by the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite.

In 1989, the COBE satellite was placed in orbit about the earth (again, the earth is the frame of reference!) to measure the long-diluted radiation echo of the birth of our universe. This radiation, which remains from the immensely hot and dense primordial fireball that was our early universe, is known as the cosmic microwave background radiation (CBR). The CBR presently pervades all of space. It is the equivalent of the entire universe "glowing with heat."

One of COBE's discoveries was that the earth was moving with respect to this CBR with a well-defined speed and direction. Because the CBR permeates all space, we can finally answer the original question fully, using the CBR as the frame of reference.

The earth is moving with respect to the CBR at a speed of 390 kilometers per second. We can also specify the direction relative to the CBR. It is more fun, though, to look up into the night sky and find the constellation known as Leo (the Lion). The earth is moving toward Leo at the dizzying speed of 390 kilometers per second. It is fortunate that we won't hit anything out there during any of our lifetimes!

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15 things kids should know about space travel

Professional and amateur astronomers alike love to share facts about our amazing universe: “The brightest star is…,” “A black hole is…,” and lots more. These facts are so incredible that we sometimes overlook our own little corner of the cosmos and how humans have ventured into it. Space exploration, however, goes hand in hand with astronomy. So, I’ve come up with a list of 15 simple facts about spaceflight that you can share with your children — or with your non-astronomer friends.

1. Russia was first

Yep, Russia (then the main country of the Soviet Union) beat the U.S. in spaceflight pretty much every step of the way until NASA landed people on the Moon. The first artificial satellite — Sputnik, launched Oct. 4, 1957 — was Russian. So was the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, who also became the first person to orbit Earth. That happened April 12, 1961. The first woman in space was also Russian. Valentina Tereshkova orbited Earth 48 times starting June 16, 1963. She’s also the only woman who ever flew a mission to space alone.

2. Space begins above our atmosphere

Believe it or not, there is a legal definition for where space begins. That’s because the movements of spacecraft are regulated by different treaties than those of aircraft. Most countries use the Kármán line , which is named for Hungarian-American physicist Theodore von Kármán, the first person to calculate an altitude where space begins. The Kármán line lies 62 miles (100 kilometers) above sea level.

3. Rockets were invented long ago

The Chinese invented rockets perhaps as early as the 10th century. Some historians date their first recorded use to 1232. Early Chinese rockets used gunpowder as fuel, so they were a lot like fireworks. Soldiers attached an arrow to each rocket and launched them at their enemies during battles. By the 15th century, militaries around the world had adopted rocket technology.

4. Robert Goddard was a pioneer rocket man

Goddard was an American inventor who built the first liquid-fueled rocket. Historians credit the launch of his first rocket, on March 16, 1926, with starting the modern age of rocketry. Over the next decade, he and his team launched several dozen rockets, which traveled as fast as 550 mph (885 km/h) and as high as 1.6 miles (2.6 km).

5. Sputnik changed everything

If the question is “When did the Space Age start?” , the answer is “When Sputnik was launched.” In the 1950s, the Soviet Union was in a race with the U.S. to be the first country to send a satellite into space. Scientists and engineers on both sides spent years trying to reach this goal. Then, on Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, which became Earth’s first artificial satellite (i.e., one launched by humans). Sputnik had four radio antennas and measured 23 inches (58 centimeters) across. It orbited Earth once every 96 minutes and 12 seconds. The radio transmitter Sputnik carried only sent back beeps. It worked for three weeks until the batteries ran out. And although the message was simple, it seemed to tell every radio operator on Earth who listened to it, “The Soviet Union is in space.”

6. Alan Shepard was first for the U.S.

Shepard was a naval pilot and one of seven people chosen for Project Mercury, NASA’s first space program. On May 5, 1961, he became the first American and the second person in space. In 1971, he became the fifth astronaut — and, at age 47, the oldest — to walk on the Moon.

7. The “Moon race” began with a speech

On Sept. 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech to a crowd of about 40,000 at Rice University Stadium in Houston, Texas. Among other things, Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” However, The line that most historians think started the race to land a person on the Moon didn’t come from this speech. Instead, it came from an address to Congress May 25, 1961, in which Kennedy said, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” And although Kennedy didn’t live to see it, in July 1969, the U.S. did exactly that.

8. Neil Armstrong was first on the Moon

This naval pilot entered the astronaut program in 1962. He first flew into space in 1966 aboard Gemini 8. That mission featured the first docking of two spacecraft in orbit. Later, he was named commander of the historic Apollo 11 mission, the first human Moon landing.

9. Spacewalks aren’t really walks

Many astronauts have completed an extravehicular activity (EVA) in space. Astronauts often refer to this as a spacewalk. But usually, that term means going outside a vessel in orbit, attached by a cord.

In 1965, the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first human to walk in space. The journey, during his Voskhod 2 mission, lasted 12 minutes. The first U.S. spacewalk took place later in 1965, when astronaut Ed White walked in space for 23 minutes during the Gemini 4 mission.

10. That’s a long time in space

Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov spent 437 days and 18 hours on a single trip to space, the longest ever by any human. He launched to the Mir space station Jan. 8, 1994, and returned to Earth March 22, 1995. The longest spaceflight by a woman is 328 days. NASA astronaut Christina Koch launched to the International Space Station March 14, 2019. She returned to Earth Feb. 6, 2020.

11. This crew went the fastest

On May 26, 1969, the crew of NASA’s Apollo 10 mission (Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan) reached a speed of 24,791 mph (39,897 km/h), or about 32 times faster than the speed of sound on Earth at sea level.

12. Spaceflight is dangerous

As of this writing, 30 humans have been killed in the pursuit of outer space. Six were Soviet or Russian cosmonauts, one was Israeli, and the rest were U.S. astronauts. Of these, 11 were killed during training or test flights and 19 were killed in actual flight. The latter group includes two seven-person crews aboard the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia , which were destroyed during atmospheric flight. The three-man crew of Soyuz 11 are the only people to have died in space.

13. Spacesuits are important

Space is a harsh environment. It’s extremely cold and there’s no atmosphere. Plus, human beings are pretty fragile creatures. So, exploring space means using special suits that allow astronauts to breathe and stay at the right temperature.

In 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin wore the first spacesuit; since then, they have come a long way. In the U.S., the Project Mercury spacesuits were just a bit different from the jumpsuits worn by fighter pilots. Each had a bubble-shaped helmet and its own air supply. The Gemini suits were more advanced and there were several types. One was for wearing inside the spacecraft, while others were for spacewalks.

NASA’s spacesuits took a big leap forward with the Apollo missions. These suits were larger and made so astronauts could walk around on the Moon for hours. The suits were fireproof and had a liquid cooling system inside. The outer layer protected astronauts from possible strikes from micrometeoroids, tiny particles of rock that zip through space at high speeds.

Space shuttle astronauts wore partially pressurized suits adapted from the Air Force. And shuttle astronauts on spacewalks used the advanced extravehicular mobility unit, which gave them a lot more protection.

Future spacesuits will be even better. New models are already being used by SpaceX astronauts and will be used by the men and women who journey back to the Moon.

14. Astronauts use the bathroom in space

Bathrooms became very important for Alan Shepard, NASA’s first astronaut. There was no toilet because the flight would last only 15 minutes. Nobody thought that he might have to wait in his capsule for about four hours before the launch. When he asked to go, the command crew first said no, but finally said OK — but he couldn’t leave the capsule. Luckily, the air flowing through his suit dried everything out before the launch. After that, NASA designed equipment to deal with pee. 

The first one was connected to a plastic tube, a valve, a clamp, and a collection bag. It wasn’t great because it sometimes leaked. In 1962, John Glenn used one on his five-hour flight.

Because the Gemini flights were a lot longer than earlier ones, NASA finally had to deal with poop in space. The first equipment was pretty simple: a bag that the astronauts taped to their butts. NASA’s first space station, Skylab, needed a toilet because astronauts would be living in space for months. Unfortunately, it was just a hole in the wall with a fan for suction and a bag.

With women as part of the space shuttle crews, NASA needed to rethink their toilet design. It was called the Waste Collection System. The opening was much smaller than a regular toilet hole, so an astronaut’s aim had to be good! Today, astronauts on the International Space Station use a much larger toilet and a vacuum sucks waste away. The waste then goes into a container that its jettisoned and burns up in Earth’s atmosphere. Using the bathroom in space is still a pain, but it’s a lot better than it was.

15. The future looks bright

The U.S., Russia, China, India, and other nations are all active with big plans for their space programs. And rather than governments being the only players in space, private companies are now joining the effort. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and more are getting involved in space travel.

The U.S. and China both have plans to return humans to the Moon. Japan and South Korea are planning their first robotic lunar-landing missions, too. Several countries, space organizations, and companies would also like to send humans to Mars. This would be an extremely expensive, time-consuming, and dangerous endeavor.

Many nations are also actively exploring our solar system via robotic craft, including the United Arab Emirates, which recently sent a probe to Mars for the first time. There are missions from the U.S., Europe, and Japan — both planned and underway — to visit asteroids and comets, and other missions will explore the outer planets and their moons.

Editor’s note: This article was first published in 2022 and has been updated.

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Extremely distant galaxy reveals stories of stars from their cradles to their graves

Astronomers have discovered sites of star formation and destruction that existed just 600 million years post-Big Bang.

Astronomers have identified what might be the most distant site of star birth, and death, ever seen. 

The region is located in an interstellar cloud of gas and dust, called a nebula, that also dwells in a galaxy located some 13.2 billion light-years from Earth . This tells us that the area is seen as it was only about 600 million years after the Big Bang . 

When stars reach the end of their fuel supply, used in their intrinsic nuclear fusion processes, their cores collapse while their outer layers erupt explosively outwards in what is known as a supernova. These supernova explosions spread the elements the stars had forged during their lifetimes throughout the stellar bodies' surroundings. Those elements form massive clouds of gas called nebulas in which cool, overly dense regions collapse to birth stars. That means these elements become the building blocks for the next generation of stars, so supernova wreckage can reveal regions where stellar recycling occurs.

Thus, this recent discovery of stellar cradles and graves within the distant interstellar nebula could help astronomers better understand such stellar lifecycles playing out inside massive clouds that existed when the universe was in its infancy.

Related: James Webb Space Telescope reveals how galaxies made the early universe transparent

The new observations were made by a team of astronomers led by Nagoya University scientist, Yoichi Tamura, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), located in the Atacama Desert region of Northern Chile.

The team had observed this distant and early nebula previously, picking up radio waves emitted via oxygen and dust. Distribution of such matter can reveal how sites of stellar birth and death are spread throughout interstellar clouds, but at that time, the team didn’t have the resolution necessary to observe the full nebular structure.

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That changed, however, when the researchers zoomed in on MACS0416_Y1 and observed it for 28 hours with ALMA. 

This lengthy process revealed that regions of dust and oxygen emissions in the nebula weave around each other while avoiding close contact. This could be the result of intense ultraviolet radiation from newly formed stars within the nebula energetically stripping electrons from atoms in the surrounding gas, a process called ionization. 

Measuring the motion of the gas in the nebula also showed the astronomers how this is an environment in which many stars may be born together in mass clusters. 

In addition to this, the team spotted a huge cavity within the dust-dominated regions of the nebula that appears to be about 1,000 light-years wide. This cavity could be a superbubble, or a huge hole in the nebula known to occur in regions where massive stars exist together.

The larger the star, the more rapidly it burns through its fuel for nuclear fusion, ultimately triggering a more massive supernova explosion when it dies. If these supernova blasts are repeated, they can have the effect of clearing gas and dust in the vicinity and creating those superbubble voids like the one spotted by the team. That means while the woven tendrils of gas in the nebula represent the sites of stellar birth, this large void in the same massive cloud of matter potentially signifies stellar death on a large scale  — making this distant nebula both a cradle and a grave for stars. 

Spotting the structure of a nebula in an ancient galaxy that existed 13.2 billion years ago in the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was no simple feat, even for an instrument as powerful as ALMA. 

— Galaxy cluster spied forming in early universe (photos, video)

— Is the puzzling star Betelgeuse going to explode in our lifetime after all?

— Stunning image reveals 1st detection of gas giants being born around a young star (photo)

"It corresponds to capturing the extremely weak light emitted by two fireflies located 3 centimeters apart on the summit of Mount Fuji as seen from Tokyo and being able to distinguish between those two fireflies," team member and University of Tsukuba astronomer Takuya Hashimoto said in a statement. 

The team intends to follow up on this work by making further observations with the James Webb Space Telescope and forthcoming Extremely Large Telescope currently under construction in the Atacama Desert. 

The team's research was published on July 13 in the Astrophysical Journal.

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Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.

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Nasa updates coverage for us spacewalks 90, 91 outside space station.

Tiernan P. Doyle

Nasa headquarters.

NASA will provide live coverage as astronauts conduct two spacewalks outside the International Space Station scheduled for Monday, June 24 and Tuesday, July 2.

The first spacewalk is scheduled to begin at 8 a.m. EDT June 24, and last about six and a half hours. NASA will provide live coverage beginning at 6:30 a.m.

NASA will stream the spacewalk on NASA+ , NASA Television’s public channel, the NASA app , YouTube , and the agency’s website . Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms including social media.

NASA astronauts Tracy C. Dyson and Mike Barratt will exit the station’s Quest airlock to complete the removal of a faulty electronics box, called a radio frequency group, from a communications antenna on the starboard truss of the space station. The pair also will collect samples for analysis to understand the ability of microorganisms to survive and reproduce on the exterior of the orbiting laboratory.

Dyson will serve as spacewalk crew member 1 and will wear a suit with red stripes. Barratt will serve as spacewalk crew member 2 and will wear an unmarked suit. U.S. spacewalk 90 will be the fourth spacewalk for Dyson and the third spacewalk for Barratt. It is the 271st spacewalk in support of space station assembly, maintenance, and upgrades.

U.S. spacewalk 90 was initially scheduled for June 13 but did not proceed as scheduled because of a spacesuit discomfort issue.

The second spacewalk is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. July 2, and last about six and a half hours. NASA will provide live coverage beginning at 7:30 a.m. Astronauts will remove and replace a gyroscope assembly, relocate an antenna, and prepare for future Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer upgrades.

NASA will stream the spacewalk on NASA+ , NASA Television’s public channel, the NASA app , YouTube , and the agency’s website .

Following the completion of U.S. spacewalk 90, NASA will provide an update with participating crew members for U.S. spacewalk 91. It is the 272nd spacewalk in support of space station.

Get breaking news, images, and features from the space station on the station blog , Instagram , Facebook , and X .

Learn more about International Space Station research and operations at:

https://www.nasa.gov/station

Josh Finch / Claire O’Shea Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1100 [email protected] / claire.a.o’[email protected]

Sandra Jones / Anna Schneider Johnson Space Center, Houston 281-483-5111 [email protected] / [email protected]

Related Terms

• International Space Station (ISS)
• ISS Research
• Michael R. Barratt
• Tracy Caldwell Dyson

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How far would we need to travel to leave our Galaxy?

It depends on whereabouts you want to get to; our vast Galaxy is thousands of light-years across, but for a decent vantage point you would need to travel much further.

Dr Alastair Gunn

Asked by: David Pollock, Cumbernauld

Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is a disk of stars about 100,000 light-years across, and about 1,000 light-years thick. The Sun is situated about halfway from the centre and is near the middle of the disk in the vertical direction.

So, to leave our Galaxy, we would have to travel about 500 light-years vertically, or about 25,000 light-years away from the galactic centre. We’d need to go much further to escape the ‘halo’ of diffuse gas, old stars and globular clusters that surrounds the Milky Way’s stellar disk.

Finally, if we wanted to go far enough to see our entire Galaxy in all its glory, we’d need to travel about 48,000 light-years vertically. It’ll be a long time before we have the technology to do this, or even to send a telescope there, so for now we’ll just have to enjoy the incredible images we have of other spiral galaxies .

• Are there any stars between galaxies?
• How long does it take the Sun to orbit the galaxy?

Subscribe to BBC Science Focus Magazine for fascinating new Q&As every month and follow @sciencefocusQA on Twitter for your daily dose of fun facts.

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