#spectrograph

[wayti-blog]

"This stunning new mosaic of images from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope showcases the nearby star-forming cluster, NGC 1333."

"These data constitute the first deep spectroscopic survey of the young cluster, and have identified brown dwarfs down to planetary masses using the observatory’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS). The first results from this survey have been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal."

source

[spacetelescopescience]

The James Webb Space Telescope's Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) has the unique ability to capture images of bright objects at a resolution greater than the other imagers, using a technique known as aperture mask interferometry: https://webbtelescope.pub/3YZBqV6

[curiositylabrador]

I love you so much.

[spacenutspod]

Join us for SpaceTime Series 27 Episode 69, where we uncover the latest cosmic revelations and scientific advancements. First, we delve into a groundbreaking discovery by the Webb Space Telescope, which has identified the most distant galaxy ever observed. Located a staggering 290 million years after the Big Bang, this galaxy offers unprecedented insights into the universe's infancy and the formation of its earliest stars and galaxies. We explore the methods and implications of this discovery, including the galaxy's surprising brightness and the presence of dust and ionized gas. Next, we discuss the announcement of a massive new collection of exoplanet discoveries. NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has confirmed 120 new exoplanets and identified six new candidates, bringing the total number of known exoplanets to over 6000. These findings offer a rich database for studying planetary properties and environments, particularly those that may harbor life. Finally, we highlight new X-ray observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Telescope, revealing dramatic changes in two famous supernova remnants: the Crab Nebula and Cassiopeia A. These observations provide stunning visualizations and valuable data on the dynamic processes occurring in these remnants. Follow our cosmic conversations on X @stuartgary, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. Join us as we unravel the mysteries of the universe, one episode at a time. Sponsor Offer This episode is proudly supported by NordPass. Secure your digital journey across the cosmos with a password manager you can trust. Find your stellar security solution at https://www.bitesz.com/nordpass. Listen to SpaceTime on your favorite podcast app including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Support SpaceTime Become a supporter of SpaceTime: https://www.bitesz.com/show/spacetime/support/ www.bitesz.com

[spacedreamon]

can I have a stimboard for pre portal Fiddleford with old computers, banjos, and some general science related things ( spectrographs if possible )

🪕🪕🪕 🪕🪕🪕 🪕🪕🪕

[horsemage]

Call me an astrophysicist the way I love spectra so much I’m on multiple of them 💪🔥💯

[nasa]

Hubble Space Telescope: Exploring the Cosmos and Making Life Better on Earth

In the 35 years since its launch aboard space shuttle Discovery, the Hubble Space Telescope has provided stunning views of galaxies millions of light years away. But the leaps in technology needed for its look into space has also provided benefits on the ground. Here are some of the technologies developed for Hubble that have improved life on Earth.

Image Sensors Find Cancer

Charge-coupled device (CCD) sensors have been used in digital photography for decades, but Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph required a far more sensitive CCD. This development resulted in improved image sensors for mammogram machines, helping doctors find and treat breast cancer.

Laser Vision Gives Insights

In preparation for a repair mission to fix Hubble’s misshapen mirror, Goddard Space Flight Center required a way to accurately measure replacement parts. This resulted in a tool to detect mirror defects, which has since been used to develop a commercial 3D imaging system and a package detection device now used by all major shipping companies.

Optimized Hospital Scheduling

A computer scientist who helped design software for scheduling Hubble’s observations adapted it to assist with scheduling medical procedures. This software helps hospitals optimize constantly changing schedules for medical imaging and keep the high pace of emergency rooms going.

Optical Filters Match Wavelengths and Paint Swatches

For Hubble’s main cameras to capture high-quality images of stars and galaxies, each of its filters had to block all but a specific range of wavelengths of light. The filters needed to capture the best data possible but also fit on one optical element. A company contracted to construct these filters used its experience on this project to create filters used in paint-matching devices for hardware stores, with multiple wavelengths evaluated by a single lens.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[wonders-of-the-cosmos]

This is the first image of Saturn's ultraviolet aurora taken by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) on board the Hubble Space Telescope in October 1997, when Saturn was a distance of 1.3 billion kilometers from Earth.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/STScI

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

#SomewhereDeepInTheNight "The international #GeminiObservatory composite color image of the planetary nebula CVMP 1 imaged by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph on the Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pachón in Chile." NOIRLab

[planetariumhub]

Webb Telescope Rules Out Thick Carbon Dioxide Atmosphere for TRAPPIST-1 c

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has conducted observations of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 c and made a significant discovery. Despite being similar in size to Venus and receiving comparable levels of radiation from its star, Webb’s findings indicate that TRAPPIST-1 c does not possess Venus’s thick carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. If an atmosphere exists on TRAPPIST-1 c, it is likely to be very…

[cannibalcleaver]

Fun marble hornets facts I learned while watching the S3 DVD w/ creators commentary

-Tim Wright works as a short order cook at 15th Street diner

-Joseph, Tim (S) and Troy have all hit trains with rocks at the train tracks in entry #53

-Tim Wright supposedly was playing the part of a construction worker during Alex Kralie's "Marble Hornets", due to where Tim worked at the time and his access to heavy machinery

-Tim Wright can play Beethoven on Ukulele.

-In the music room flashback, there was a bass guitar that's actually Jay's :3!

-The piano Alex messes around with is Tim Wright's (the piano actually belongs to Tim Sutton, and was given to him by his grandma.)

-The Spectrograph in Decay (TTA) is actually Brian Haight, who portrays Brian Thomas.

-Members of the cast got recognized while filming in entry #55, which is just neat

-Joseph DeLage wears Tim's shirt during entry #53

-In Entry #58, when Hoodie appears, he's played by Joseph DeLage

-Joseph DeLage said himself that Alex Kralie isn't the best director

-Troy Wagner stated that Jay Merrick never got better at lying throughout the series, but that writing Jay's excuses and lies was pretty fun.

[livingforstars]

Signed, "A Black Hole" - May 16th, 1997.

"This artistic image is actually the signature of a supermassive black hole in the center of distant galaxy M84 - based on data recorded by Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). Very near to black holes, the force of gravity is so strong that even light can not escape...but the presence of a black hole can also be revealed by watching matter fall into it. In fact, material spiraling into a black hole would find its speed increasing at a drastic rate. These extreme velocity increases provide a "signature" of the black hole's presence. STIS relies on the Doppler effect to measure gas velocity, rapidly increasing to nearly 240 miles per second within 26 light-years of the center of M84, a galaxy in the Virgo Cluster about 50 million light-years away. The STIS data show that radiation from approaching gas, shifted to blue wavelengths left of the centerline, is suddenly redshifted to the right of center, indicating a rapidly rotating disk of material near the galactic nucleus. The resulting sharp S-shape is effectively the signature of a black hole, estimated to contain at least 300 million solar masses. Do all galaxies have central black holes?"

[mysticstronomy]

WHAT IS THE OLDEST KNOWN GALAXY??

Blog#491

Welcome back,

Wednesday, March 26th, 2025.

Astronomers calculate distances to remote objects by measuring redshifts, a yardstick of how deeply stretched the galaxy’s light is (and redder means farther away). GS-z14-0 was discovered to have a redshift of 14.3, besting the 2022 record of a galaxy found with a redshift of 13.2 that corresponded to a formation age of some 325 million years after the Big Bang.

And GS-z14-0 is some five times more luminous than that prior most-distant galaxy, according to Kevin Hainline, a professor at the University of Arizona, who helped lead the discovery.

“Nobody dreamed that there would be galaxies this bright at this high redshift,” says George Rieke, another University of Arizona astronomer who is the former deputy director of Steward Observatory.

According to NASA, members of the JADES team explained recently that “the light we see is coming mostly from young stars and not from emission near a growing supermassive black hole. This much starlight implies that the galaxy is several hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun! This raises the question: How can nature make such a bright, massive, and large galaxy in less than 300 million years?”

The galaxy is surprising for another reason, too. JADES researcher Jake Helton, also of the University of Arizona, identified an unexpected abundance of dust and emission lines from hydrogen and oxygen in the galaxy’s spectrum. The oxygen suggests that generations of massive stars have come and gone in the galaxy.

And there’s more.

The galaxy’s number of massive stars poses a dark-matter conundrum. Dark matter accumulates as the cosmos expands. Rieke says that “the problem with this galaxy is it’s pushing against what we think is the maximum mass for a dark halo at that time.”

The findings were made with JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph, Near-Infrared Camera, and Mid-Infrared Instrument. In the latter case, researchers noted the irony that during the budget woes of JWST, the Mid-Infrared Instrument was frequently targeted for budget cuts. Now, along with its companion science packages, it’s targeting the earliest galaxies in the cosmos.

The findings from GS-z14-0 did not come easy. The team first observed the object more than a year ago, but its brightness and proximity to another galaxy was puzzling. While they had a preliminary redshift finding, the team later obtained a spectrum that confirmed the galaxy’s distance, along with its other puzzling properties, measurements that push but do not overturn models of stellar and galactic formation. The “naïve assumption,” said Helton, had been that these earlier galaxies would be smaller and fainter.

That’s why Hainline would go on to compare the finding to excavating a cellphone among ancient ruins in Rome because this galaxy is so much brighter than the previous record holder and seems more evolved in terms of composition.

Hainline and his colleagues were initially skeptical of the findings and later threw hands in the air with excitement. Hainline told Astronomy that the finding was “one of the weird great moments of my scientific career.” This is especially so because he recalls sleeping under a table during the Texas landfall of Hurricane Harvey. He was part of a skeleton crew left at NASA facilities to shepherd JWST during the storm. The GS-z14-0 discovery reminds him, he stresses, of the dedication of everyone who made the Webb Telescope and its ongoing findings possible.

Certainly JADES-GS-z14-0 won’t be the record-holder forever. As time rolls on, astronomers are destined to find even more distant, younger galaxies.

Originally published on https://www.astronomy.com

COMING UP!!

(Saturday, March 29th, 2025)

"WHAT IS THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND??"

[scp-l4-clef-alto-001]

In 2007, Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails released a concept album called Year Zero. In collaboration with 42 Entertainment, an Alternative Reality Game, also called Year Zero, was created. NiN fans collaborated online to piece together the clues found online, in USB drive drops, and (in one case) through spectrograph analysis of a NiN track to discover a series of web sites from the dystopian future America of 2022.

The world of Year Zero is a bleak one. Government surveillance is universal. A Christian theocracy rules the country. The Bureau of Morality controls all art and media, black bagging artists who create subversive art. The populace is kept docile by drugs in the water. A deadly disease rips through the population, due to a botched false flag bioterror attack. And all across the world, people are experiencing a terrifying shared hallucination: a gigantic spectral four-fingered hand reaching down from the sky, as if some cosmic entity were preparing to brush humanity off the earth like a fly from rotting fruit.

And the end reward for this ARG was a private NiN concert.

Anyway, if you want to read up on Year Zero, you can find a summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_%28game%29?wprov=sfla1

A campaign timeline here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_timeline_of_Year_Zero?wprov=sfla1

And an archive of the discovered online content here:

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

GHOST spies ultra-hot Jupiter with ultra-fast winds

In the hunt for exoplanets, many seek out habitable worlds. There's comfort in discovering planets that remind us of home—ones at a perfect distance from their host star, with oceans of water covering their surfaces and breathable atmospheres.

Some astrophysicists, however, are curious about an entirely different type of exoplanet: the treacherous hot Jupiter. One such scientist is Emily Deibert, a science fellow at Gemini South in Chile, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, operated by NSF NOIRLab.

An ultra-hot Jupiter named HAT-P-70 b was the focus of a recent study conducted at Gemini South, led by Adam Langeveld, assistant research scientist at Johns Hopkins University, with a team of astronomers including Deibert.

The results of this study are presented in a paper appearing in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The team's investigation utilized a new instrument on the Gemini South telescope called the Gemini High-resolution Optical SpecTrograph (GHOST). GHOST is a powerful instrument that has the ability to observe a wide range of wavelengths simultaneously.

It can also complete observations with high efficiency while achieving world-class resolution. These capabilities allowed the team to peer deep into HAT-P-70 b's atmosphere where they discovered winds blowing at incredible speeds.

Hot Jupiters are gas giants that are similar to our Jupiter in size, but that differ greatly in temperament. They sit much closer to their host stars than our planetary neighbor does, giving them notably different physical properties.

To illustrate their distances, it takes our Jupiter almost 12 years to orbit the sun, while hot Jupiters take 10 days or less. Some have even been observed whipping around their suns in less than a day.

Orbiting at such a close distance gives these planets incredibly high surface temperatures, hence their name. They are oftentimes tidally locked, meaning they have one side constantly facing their star experiencing an extremely hot "day" and one side constantly facing away experiencing a colder "night."

HAT-P-70 b is a very "puffy" planet with a radius almost double that of Jupiter. It sits so close to its host star that its orbit is 2.7 Earth days and it has a temperature of about 2,300° Celsius (around 4,200° Fahrenheit), making it one of the hottest planets known to date. The extreme temperatures give this ultra-hot Jupiter an exotic atmosphere with a diverse array of gaseous metallic atoms and ions.

"These ultra-hot atmospheres are ideal laboratories to study exoplanets on a wider scale due to the fantastic opportunity to detect and study multiple chemical species," Langeveld explains. "By measuring the amounts of different elements—especially comparing 'rocky' elements like calcium and iron to 'icy' elements like water and carbon—we can learn about how they formed and evolved."

To study HAT-P-70 b's atmosphere, the team observed the planet transit, or pass in front of, its host star. As the star's light passes through the planet's atmosphere, the chemicals within the atmosphere act like a filter that absorbs specific wavelengths of light.

Using spectroscopy—a method of observation where an object's light is spread out into a spectrum—the team can determine which chemicals exist in the atmosphere by identifying the fingerprint-like patterns of absorption lines that appear in the spectrum.

In HAT-P-70 b's atmosphere, the team detected signatures of ionized calcium—a gaseous and highly energetic form of calcium that can only exist in environments of incredibly intense heat.

They found that the calcium signal extends tens of thousands of kilometers into the upper atmosphere. But more importantly, GHOST's incredible sensitivity allowed them to "time-resolve" the calcium signal. This means they could track how calcium absorption changes from the planet's day to night side.

Deibert shares her experience probing HAT-P-70 b's atmosphere: "We were surprised by the exceptional sensitivity of GHOST, which allowed us to measure minute variations in the individual absorption lines from the ionized calcium, thereby providing information about different regions of the atmosphere. This level of detail has traditionally been difficult to achieve in exoplanet studies, especially for individual absorption lines in transmission spectra."

From these observations, the team determined that HAT-P-70 b hosts powerful winds that rush from the scorching dayside to the cooler nightside at speeds of up to 18,000 kilometers per hour (11,000 miles per hour). They also used the detected signals to infer the planet's mass, revealing that it is likely much lighter than previously thought—a crucial parameter for future comparisons of ultra-hot Jupiter atmospheres.

"This level of detail is only possible with the most advanced spectrographs," says Langeveld, "making GHOST one of the few instruments in the world capable of such measurements."

Deibert adds, "This study showcases that GHOST has the potential to make major contributions towards advancing our understanding of the 3D nature of exoplanet atmospheres, for which there are still many big unanswered questions."

The time-resolving power of GHOST will continue to push the boundaries of exoplanet studies. In fact, Gemini is changing the game for astronomers like Deibert and Langeveld who are looking to gather spectroscopic data, as well as optical and infrared information through its Large and Long Programs.

Langeveld and Deibert's work is part of an approved Large program that they are co-leading, meaning they and their collaborators have secured observing time with Gemini for multi-year research projects in planetary studies.

Gemini's Large programs will promote collaborations and provide significant impact in all areas of astrophysics, paving the way for the future of the field.

IMAGE: Test spectra viewed through the red camera on the GHOST optical bench while John Pazder (National Research Council of Canada (NRC)) performs the final alignment of spectrograph optics. Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. Bassett

[jameswebb-discoveries]

Is Alien Life Real? JWST’s K2-18b Discovery Might Just Blow Your Mind!

What’s K2-18b, and Why Should You Care?

K2-18b is a super-Earth—think Earth, but bigger, badder, and 8.6 times our planet’s mass. It orbits a cool red dwarf star in the habitable zone, where liquid water (aka life’s BFF) could exist. Discovered in 2015 by NASA’s Kepler mission, this exoplanet is 124 light-years away in the constellation Leo, zipping around its star every ~33 days.

The James Webb Space Telescope, aka the universe’s ultimate peeping Tom, is designed to snoop on distant planets’ atmospheres. Using its fancy spectrographs (NIRISS, NIRSpec, and MIRI), JWST analyzed starlight passing through K2-18b’s atmosphere and found some wild stuff:

The catch? The DMS/DMDS signals are at a three-sigma level (99.7% confidence), not the gold-standard five-sigma (99.99994%). Scientists need more data to be sure, but the levels detected—10 parts per million, thousands of times higher than Earth’s—are making jaws drop. As Professor Nikku Madhusudhan, the lead researcher, said, “This is the strongest evidence yet there is possibly life out there.”

Want the full scoop on how JWST pulled this off? Check out this epic article on James Webb Discovery!

Image: JWST’s spectra of K2-18b, showing peaks for methane, CO₂, and a tentative DMS signal. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford, Joseph Olmsted, Nikku Madhusudhan

But Wait, Is It Really Aliens?

Okay, before we start planning an interstellar road trip, let’s pump the brakes. The science community is super excited but also super cautious. Here’s the tea:

Skepticism Alert: Some researchers, like MIT’s Sara Seager, warn that “enthusiasm is outpacing evidence.” DMS can form without life, like in comets (shoutout to 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko) or through chemical reactions in hazy atmospheres.

Alternative Theories: K2-18b might not be a lush ocean world. It could be a mini gas giant with no surface or a magma ocean planet (aka a lava nightmare). Rude, right?

More Data Needed: The Cambridge team needs 16–24 more hours of JWST time to hit five-sigma certainty, which could happen in 1–2 years.

Why This Matters (Like, A Lot)

Plus, JWST is just getting started. It’s already eyeing other exoplanets like TRAPPIST-1e, and future telescopes (hello, Habitable Worlds Observatory!) will take us even closer to finding E.T. This is the kind of stuff that makes you stare at the stars and wonder, “What’s out there?”