The new i3 is here sooner than expected. Although it wasn’t expected to go on sale until this fall, BMW has already opened orders in several markets after “high levels” of early interest.
Relativity Space plans to launch a Mars orbiter in 2028 as part of a new initiative to privately develop planetary missions.
The post Relativity Space to privately develop Mars orbiter mission appeared first on SpaceNews.
VSCO is taking on Adobe with a new Studio Pro editing app rolling out today on iOS and coming to macOS later this year, as Bloomberg reports. At launch, the app offers tools for batch editing, style matching from a reference image, and sharing images through VSCO Galleries. VSCO says more features are coming later, including support for RAW images, advanced export options, and additional advanced editing tools like adjusting image aspect ratios.
A press release says the app is made for managing high-volume editing projects, like "weddings, portraits, events, sports, school photography, and other large-scale photoshoots."
The $500 per ye …
Editor’s Note: This week we’re at the 248th AAS meeting in Pasadena, CA. Along with a team of authors from Astrobites, we will be writing updates on selected events at the meeting and posting each day. Follow along here or at astrobites.com for daily summaries, or follow @astrobites.bsky.social on Bluesky for more coverage. The usual posting schedule for AAS Nova will resume on 22 June.
Kyler Kremer (University of California, San Diego) kicked off day two of AAS 248 with a “dynamic” talk on the complex interactions and environments that exist within globular clusters — the most massive category of stellar clusters, which can contain upwards of one billion stars. Because of the extreme stellar density of these environments, they are thought to be good factories of systems ranging from accreting white dwarfs to millisecond pulsars, which are often spun up to high speeds via accretion from companion stars. Such accretion, whether onto pulsars or other compact objects, can often generate bright X-rays, and as Kremer noted early on in his talk, it was in fact these X-ray sources that provided some of the earliest evidence of the abundance of exotic systems within globular clusters. By the early 2000s, hundreds of X-ray sources had been identified in globular clusters.
Along with these brightly emitting compact binary systems, we expect globular clusters to be home to a vast population of darker, more elusive objects — black holes. Kremer noted that because about one out of every thousand stars is thought to be massive enough to evolve into a black hole, older globular clusters are thought to produce tens or hundreds of thousands of black holes over time. These black holes are then expected to gradually sink towards the centers of the clusters through dynamical friction, where they will increasingly find themselves in the company of other black holes, or black hole binaries. As these massive objects swing by each other, they can occasionally merge or eject black holes out of clusters entirely. This leads to a complex evolutionary history, leaving many open questions in regards to how many black holes should persist in globular clusters today and with what properties.
Luckily, strong evidence for the presence of black holes in globular clusters began to come in around the early 2000s as a result of the direct measurements of stellar orbits around an invisible, at least 4-solar-mass object in NGC 3201. Since this discovery, multiple others have been made via similar techniques. The role of black holes in shaping our observation of globular clusters may go well beyond these isolated systems, however. Theoretical work has also shown that the presence of black hole binaries in the centers of globular clusters may contribute to dynamical heating of the overall cluster. This suggests that globular clusters that have not undergone core collapse, which represents over 80% of clusters, should retain significant black hole populations today.
While individual black holes can often be hard to spot, black hole binaries are becoming increasingly easy to hear, thanks to the advent of gravitational wave astronomy. At facilities like LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA, merging black hole binaries are now regularly detected, creating a population-level catalog of black hole binary properties. While many of these systems can be well explained by black holes formed in the “isolated” channel, meaning originating from a preexisting binary star system, some mergers show signs of a “dynamical” formation history, which can arise in the sort of dense environments globular clusters provide. As one example, there seems to be more black holes in the 40-solar-mass and above range than many models predicted. At these high masses, more potential progenitor stars actually become too large to form black holes thanks to a phenomenon called pair instability. However, such massive black holes could be formed from the repeated mergers of smaller black holes — a hierarchical process that simulations have consistently shown can be highly efficient in globular clusters, especially the most massive ones. On top of this, Kremer noted that individual gravitational wave signals have recently shown other telltale signs of hierarchically formed binary black holes, such as asymmetric masses and spin–orbit misalignment.
Finally, Kremer turned to another class of exotic astrophysical objects to explore other ways globular clusters can generate interesting phenomena: pulsars. Pulsars, like black holes, form from the collapse of massive stars. This rapidly rotating sub-category of neutron stars beams radiation from their poles, which gradually slows them down and depletes the strength of their radio emission over millions or billions of years. Because of this, one would expect older globular clusters to have a slowly rotating and mostly invisible population of pulsars. Instead, we see many rapidly rotating millisecond pulsars in these environments, suggesting that the dense cluster environment allows for many of these systems to be spun back up through accretion from other stars. In contrast, we also see young globular clusters which contain slowly rotating pulsars — another puzzle, yet one that may again be explained by the dense environment. Some researchers believe that these pulsars are formed via the direct merger of multiple white dwarfs, rather than from the collapse of a massive star. Such systems may also be the source of some fast radio bursts; the first fast radio burst associated with a globular cluster was discovered in 2020. It seems like globular clusters may be the gift that just keeps on giving!
This press conference walked through four very different ways our view of the Milky Way and our skies are changing right now — from extreme gas physics at the Galactic Center, to the hidden stellar populations of a cluster, to the rapid flickers of dying stars, and finally, to a very practical question: what are dark night skies actually worth to the public?
Resolving the Supersonic-to-Subsonic Gas Transition in the Galactic Center for the First Time
The galactic center and the surrounding central molecular zone make up the most active star formation region in the Milky Way. [NRAO/AUI/NSF; CC BY 4.0]
Buddhacharya mapped how gas transitions from highly turbulent, supersonic motion to calmer, subsonic motion across a region in the CMZ. This transition is well known in nearby clouds, where it usually precedes gravitational collapse, but it had never been clearly resolved in the CMZ before. Their team found a “calm island” of subsonic gas embedded in the otherwise turbulent sea. This is the first observation of its kind in the galactic center.
The Multi-Age Stellar Populations of Terzan 5 as Revealed by JWST
R. Michael Rich (University of California, Los Angeles) presented new JWST and Hubble Space Telescope observations of Terzan 5, an unusual stellar system near the center of the Milky Way that looks like a globular cluster but doesn’t act like one. Earlier work had already shown that Terzan 5 hosts at least two distinct stellar populations with very different ages and chemical abundances, which is unusual for a typical globular cluster.
Because Terzan 5 sits behind a thick screen of foreground stars and dust, separating real cluster members from contamination is one of the hardest parts of the analysis. The team combined JWST and Hubble imaging to measure stellar proper motions, then used a vector point diagram to isolate the stars that move together with the cluster. They identified two additional stellar populations beyond the two already known. Rich argued that Terzan 5 may be a “fossil fragment,” possibly the leftover core of a small galaxy or early bulge structure that was accreted long ago.
Sub-Day Periodic Variability of Two Central Stars of Planetary Nebulae
Gaoyang Du (Dalian University of Technology) reported the discovery of new short-period signals in the central stars of two planetary nebulae. These central stars are the hot, exposed cores left behind by Sun-like stars at the end of their lives, and finding rapid brightness variations in them tells us about their interior structure and pulsation physics.
Short-period signals well under a day are very hard to recover from the ground because Earth’s rotation introduces strong one-day aliasing, so the team turned to the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which observes continuously from space. Using a neural-network pipeline designed to handle the crowded, contaminated backgrounds these stars sit in, they recovered the previously known variability in NGC 1501 and detected a new signal at roughly half an hour. Follow-up spectroscopy will be needed to pin down whether the signals come from pulsations, rotation, or something else, but the result opens a new window on the rapid variability of dying-star cores.
Artificial Light at Night Significantly Degrades the Value of Public Lands
Jordan Smith (Utah State University) closed the press conference with a very different kind of measurement: the economic value of dark night skies. While astronomers usually treat light pollution as an observing problem, Smith and his collaborators are asking what the public is actually losing and what people would pay to keep dark skies on public lands. The team surveyed 634 visitors across International Dark Sky-certified parks, asking detailed questions about visitation behavior, motivations, and willingness to pay. Combining those surveys with satellite-based sky-brightness data, they estimated how the actual darkness of a site translates into the value visitors place on a trip. Based on the survey results, they found that visitors were willing to pay $45 more per visit to go to a park with skies one level darker on the Bortle scale. That sounds small per visitor, but scaled across all visits to all dark-sky public lands, it represents a very large economic value tied to a public good that current policy frameworks rarely account for.
An illustration of the Bortle scale, which quantifies the degree of light pollution at a given location. [ESO/P. Horálek, M. Wallner; CC BY 4.0]
Carolyn Kierans (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) was awarded the AAS High Energy Astrophysics Division Early Career Prize for her work on developing the next generation of megaelectronvolt (MeV) gamma-ray telescopes. Her talk laid out why the MeV band is so valuable (it contains nuclear emission lines like the 511 keV positron-annihilation line that traces high-energy processes in our galaxy) and why it has been so technologically difficult to observe well, since photons at these energies do not focus easily and the dominant interaction in the detector is Compton scattering. She walked through her work using balloon-borne Compton telescopes to mature the technology, the tools her team has developed in recent years to improve event reconstruction, and the broader roadmap for the next generation of MeV instruments.
Read Astrobites’s interview with Carolyn Kierans.
An image from the Galileo spacecraft of a volcanic plume on Jupiter’s moon Io. [NASA/JPL/University of Arizona]
The team modeled Io’s plumes in order to explain the moon’s lack of impact craters, understand how certain plumes have persisted on Io for more than 45 years, and motivate a possible mission concept that includes a plume flythrough and sample return. They modeled the formation of ash as magma rises in a volcanic vent as well as the trajectory of the ash once it’s ejected into the plume, aiming to 1) match the plume observations from the Galileo spacecraft and 2) understand how an ash-filled plume might look different from one filled only with sulfur dioxide. While Turner found that Galileo data couldn’t discern between the two scenarios, ash makes a dramatic difference at the sub-millimeter wavelengths accessible to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, which the team hopes to use to test this prediction. Finally, returning to the development of the mission concept, Turner proposed using a probe to first fly through the shadow of a plume to assess the particle size before sending the spacecraft through to collect a sample.
Up next, Tunhui Xie (University of California, Los Angeles) turned to Io’s neighbor, Europa. Europa and the other large icy moons of Jupiter are of interest to researchers because they might have subsurface oceans. Observations of Europa from ~30 years ago show that the moon has strange radar properties: its radar albedo is large, and the return signal retains the strong circular polarization of the outgoing signal.
To investigate the moon’s radar weirdness further, Xie’s team observed Europa from 2011 to 2024 and showed that the moon’s albedo (fraction of light reflected from its surface) is roughly constant with longitude. There is some evidence of differences between Europa’s hemispheres, which could be a sign of spiky ice structures called penitentes protruding from the frosty surface; Europa’s trailing hemisphere might be subjected to more particles from Jupiter’s magnetosphere, which could suppress the growth of penitentes in that region and cause a difference in the albedo. Xie also addressed the polarization behavior of the radar signal, showing that this is likely due to the coherent backscatter opposition effect. Finally, Xie showed how observations helped to place an upper bound of 32 meters for the penetration depth of X-band radar photons into Europa’s icy shell.
Penitentes in the Atacama Desert. [ESO/B. Tafreshi (twanight.org); CC BY 4.0]
In some of the earliest spectroscopy taken by a large-aperture telescope, Bolin’s team found cometary volatiles like CN, but not C2 or C3, which are common in comets, giving them a green color. These missing species emerged a couple of months later, which coincided with the comet taking on a greener appearance. As the comet retreated from its encounter with the Sun, these emission features faded. This presentation by Bolin showed how early and continuing monitoring of an interstellar object by a large-aperture telescope can reveal how these objects are affected by their journeys through our solar system.
Moving out of the solar system entirely, Tiffany Kataria (NASA JPL/Caltech) turned the discussion toward exoplanets. Kataria discussed HD 80606b, a 4.1-Jupiter-mass planet on an extremely eccentric (e = 0.93) orbit with a period of 111 days around a solar-type star. Kataria used JWST to observe HD 80606b’s phase curve, which revealed different parts of the planet as it travels along its orbit. Each time the planet makes its extremely close approach to its host star, it gets “flash roasted” and experiences a rapid increase in temperature. This rapid heating event is complex, depending on factors like the planet’s atmospheric chemistry and winds. The JWST data revealed that HD 80606b’s temperature skyrockets an incredible 1,100℉ over the course of its orbit. There’s still much more to learn from the rich spectroscopic dataset from JWST, so keep an eye out for more findings about this flash-roasted exoplanet in the future!
Finally, Aurora Kesseli (IPAC/Caltech) discussed another toasty exoplanet called CoRoT-2b, which is a hot Jupiter on a 1.7-day orbit around its star. Because hot Jupiters orbit their hosts so closely, astronomers expect all of these extreme exoplanets to be tidally locked, with one side of the planet perpetually facing the star and the other side in perpetual darkness. However, CoRoT-2b might be breaking that trend. In 2018, researchers reported that CoRoT-2b had winds that blew in the opposite direction from all other known hot Jupiters. They drew this conclusion from the location of the hottest point on CoRoT-2b, which appeared just after the planet ducked behind its star, rather than just before — unlike all other hot Jupiters studied so far. At the time, researchers hypothesized that the unusual location of the hotspot was due to clouds on one side of the planet, a magnetically induced westward wind, or a lack of tidal locking.
Using new data from the Very Large Telescope and Gemini South, Kesseli found that the planet’s strange properties can be explained best by a lack of tidal locking. CoRoT-2b appears to rotate at 2.24 km/s — far slower than the 4.37 km/s expected if the planet were tidally locked. There are no theories yet that explain why CoRoT-2b wouldn’t be tidally locked, so it remains a mystery for now!
Yi-Ming Wang (Naval Research Laboratory) gave the AAS Solar Physics Division’s George Ellery Hale Prize Lecture for “sustained, foundational contributions to understanding solar magnetism, the solar cycle, and the solar wind.” Wang is perhaps most known for the Wang–Sheeley–Arge solar wind model, which is widely used in space weather forecasting.
Wang began by musing on how his winding career path brought him to solar physics. Initially a theorist who modeled neutron stars, Wang was later hired to do radio astronomy but arrived for the position later than expected, so he was roped into working on solar physics instead — where he learned many things about magnetic fields that he wished he’d known when working on neutron stars!
This 19.3-nanometer image, taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory on 11 December 2023, shows at the center of the Sun’s disk the remnant of a large coronal hole. [NASA/SDO and the AIA, EVE, and HMI science teams]
Next, Wang discussed the source of coronal heating. The solar corona is famously extremely hot, running at a few million degrees compared to the ~6000K solar photosphere. For decades, the Parker nanoflare model has been the leading explanation for how the corona gets so hot. In this model, the places where coronal loops touch down in the solar photosphere are continually wiggled around by random motions of the photosphere, which tangles up the magnetic field lines in the coronal loop. When the current sheets in this system dissipate, the corona is heated. Instead, Wang favors an observationally based model in which the heating comes from magnetic reconnection with underlying small-scale fields.
Finally, Wang briefly touched on the connection between the Sun’s magnetic field and the speed of the solar wind. The solar wind has been measured at Earth since the 1960s, and these measurements have shown that the mass and energy flux density of the solar wind scales with the strength of the footprint magnetic field strength, but the observed solar wind speed is independent of the footprint field strength. Instead, the speed scales inversely with the rate of magnetic flux-tube expansion in the corona. Thus, the solar wind speed at Earth can be calculated from the rate of flux-tube expansion along open magnetic field lines using maps of the photospheric magnetic field.
In the end, Wang’s work on the solar magnetic field did connect back to his earlier work in high-energy astrophysics, with relevance to period changes in binary pulsar systems and other areas. Magnetic fields really do connect all parts of astrophysics!
Read Astrobites’s interview with Yi-Ming Wang.
David Jewitt focused his plenary talk on a rare kind of small body: the three confirmed interstellar objects that have passed through the solar system so far. He opened with the Oort cloud as a framing device. Comets in the Oort cloud did not form there — they formed near the giant planets and were scattered out by gravitational interactions. The same process leaks comets to interstellar space very efficiently: only about 1–10% are trapped into a star’s own Oort cloud. Across the galaxy, that implies a free-floating population on the order of 1024–1025 objects. Seeing some of them pass through our solar system is exactly what we should expect.
Artist’s impression of the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system. ʻOumuamua. [ESO/M. Kornmesser; CC BY 4.0]
Jewitt then turned to what the three objects tell us as a population. The strongest constraint comes from ʻOumuamua, precisely because its discovery was such a near miss: catching one in that brief visibility window implies roughly 1,000 similar objects crossing the solar system per year. The three objects look very different in size, activity, and composition, which is consistent with sampling a broad galactic population, and their velocity dispersion lines up with the disk-heating picture, in which older galactic populations are kinematically hotter. The leading origin story is the same one he set up at the start: scattering from the protoplanetary disks of giant planets around other stars.
Read Astrobites’s interview with David Jewitt.
The post AAS 248: Day 2 appeared first on AAS Nova.
An Ariane 6 with upgraded solid rocket boosters successfully launched three dozen Amazon Leo satellites June 17 as ESA weighs options for increasing the vehicle’s launch rate.
The post Upgraded Ariane 6 launches Amazon Leo satellites appeared first on SpaceNews.
Epic Games has been touting the potential of an interoperable metaverse for years, though that vision hasn't yet become a reality. But with Unreal Engine 6, the next major version of its game development engine, Epic plans to take a big step toward that theoretical future: It will let developers make games that can use a player's Fortnite skins and will let developers build skins of their own that work with Fortnite.
"We're tackling this problem first because we want to prove things out with a system that's complex enough to be a meaningful existence proof of the idea, and one that inherently comes with a ton of player value by respecting t …
Ford is set to become the first to assemble LFP batteries for mainstream consumer auto use in the US, starting with its $30,000 midsize pickup next year.
They hide a vast chemical arsenal that researchers are mining for pain, diabetes, and brain disease therapies.We’ve got another exciting midweek collection of major Green Deal savings, starting with the newly launched Velotric Prime Day Sale with up to $862 savings on a massive list of the brand’s e-bikes – new and legacy – all starting from $999, which includes a return of the T1 ST Plus Lightweight Urban e-bike with a range extender (and other bundled gear) at $1,349. Right behind that, we have Segway’s Early Prime e-scooter sale with up to 50% discounts and up to $405 extra savings after winning the on-page game, giving you options like the Max G2 Electric Scooter down at $595, among others. We also have two power station collections, with EcoFlow launching another 48-hour flash sale that has offers like the expanded 2,048Wh DELTA 2 Portable Power Station bundle at a new $679 low, while Bluetti has four 768Wh to 2,304Wh power station clearance sale deals + our exclusive bonus savings – all starting from $313. Don’t forget about all the hangover deals either, which have been collected together at the bottom of the page, like yesterday’s exclusive Bluetti FridgePower station and bundle launch deals, the Early Prime deals on Segway’s Xyber e-bike with an extra battery + Xafari e-bike, and more.
Head below for other New Green Deals we’ve found today and, of course, Electrek’s best EV buying and leasing deals. Also, check out the new Electrek Tesla Shop for the best deals on Tesla accessories.
An experimental aircraft just achieved a “major milestone” that NASA officials say brings the future of quiet supersonic flight closer to being a reality.
The test flights involved the American space agency’s secretive X-59 aircraft, which reportedly reached speeds of 1.4 Mach—roughly 924 miles per hour—during a flight last Friday.
Reaching an altitude of 55,000 feet, the experimental aircraft’s speed and height during last week’s test flight met the conditions the agency says are required for future flights aiming to achieve supersonic flight without the noisy booms it usually generates.
In a statement, NASA said the aircraft’s tests are far from complete, although Friday’s test marks a significant milestone toward reaching its current mission goals.
“The X-59 still has months of performance testing ahead, but after those are complete, NASA’s Quesst mission will fly the aircraft over several U.S. communities to collect data on public perception of the quiet sonic thump it will make at supersonic speeds,” NASA’s statement on Friday read. “Those community overflights will include flights at Mach 1.4 and 55,000 feet.”
Last week’s test occurred within days of an earlier takeoff that sent the X-59 on its first successful supersonic flight, where the plane reached a top speed of Mach 1.1.
The earlier test also marked a leap forward for the Quesst mission, which is in the process of completing several crucial steps that are expanding the X-59’s capabilities.
Deployed for test flights at various speeds and at different altitudes, flight engineers are currently gauging the aircraft’s flight envelope by having it perform in a range of different flight conditions.
During its current test flights, NASA said the supersonic aircraft was accompanied by a NASA F-15 research aircraft, which still produces a sonic boom when it flies, unlike the X-59. NASA engineers plan to mount a shock-sensing probe on the accompanying aircraft during future flights, which the agency says will collect vital information about the shock waves the experimental aircraft produces.
The resulting experiments will help engineers measure the exact capabilities of the new aircraft and its supersonic performance.
Although designed to function as a “quiet” supersonic aircraft, the X-59 still produces audible signatures, which NASA likens more to being a soft “thump” than a sonic boom.
During its final testing phases, the X-59’s supersonic acoustic signature will also be measured.
If all goes according to plan, the supersonic aircraft will complete its full round of testing in the months ahead, marking a successful series of demonstrations that it meets all the requirements for quiet flight under a range of different altitudes and other flight conditions.
Ultimately, the technologies being innovated by this experimental plane will help to enable the first supersonic flight over land in decades, paving the way toward a new future of commercial flight faster than the speed of sound.
Additional details about NASA’s Quesst program can be found on its official site.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
The Interior Department has made another illegal agreement with a gas company to drop development of cheap and clean offshore wind and instead focus on dirty, expensive gas, giving that company the better part of a billion dollars worth of taxpayer money while starving Americans of much-needed electricity.
Original post 6/17, Updated 6/30: Interior announced another deal on Monday, this one with Duke Energy to cancel a project in Carolina Long Bay.
Update 8/6: Interior has bribed German wind company RWE $1.22 billion to give up offshore leases in New York, Louisiana and California.
According to the latest Pew Research poll, 49 percent of Americans report using chatbots at least occasionally, but 63 percent think the tech is advancing too quickly. Overall, use of AI chatbots has increased dramatically since 2024, when only 33 percent reported using them. Specifically, ChatGPT's usage has doubled since 2023, with 44 percent of respondents saying they've used it. But opinions remain negative, with only 16 percent saying that AI will have a positive impact on society.
Interestingly, it's the younger generations who both report using AI more and who are inclined to have a more pessimistic view. 66 percent of Americans betw …
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