Amazing Time Lapse Of Fading Supernova Spied By Hubble
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Associated Press
9 hours ago
- Associated Press
EUMETSAT Takes Control of Europe's First Geostationary Sounder Satellite
DARMSTADT, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 21, 2025-- After more than two weeks of complex manoeuvring, precise positioning and meticulous checks, EUMETSAT assumed control of the Meteosat Third Generation Sounder 1 (MTG-S1) spacecraft on 18 July 2025, the latest addition to its fleet of geostationary meteorological satellites. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: MTG-S1 in orbit Following MTG-S1's successful launch on 1 July 2025, the satellite, which carries the Infrared Sounder (IRS) and the European Union's Copernicus Sentinel-4 mission, has completed its launch and early operations phase (LEOP) and is now in orbit around 36,000km above the Equator at 3.4°W longitude. MTG-S1 will now begin months of intensive testing by experts at EUMETSAT with partners from the European Space Agency (ESA) and in industry to prepare for the delivery of vital data and products to specialists across EUMETSAT member states and beyond. Once fully commissioned, the satellite will deliver entirely new streams of atmospheric sounding data, enabling national meteorological services to deliver earlier and more accurate warnings that will save lives and protect property and infrastructure. 'The successful completion of the LEOP confirms that the MTG-S1 satellite platform is functioning as expected and ready for the next stage,' said Julia Hunter-Anderson, EUMETSAT's Meteosat Third Generation LEOP Manager. 'Taking control of the satellite in a healthy condition marks a major milestone for EUMETSAT and our partners. This achievement is the culmination of the immense dedication and hard work of hundreds of people over many years. 'For EUMETSAT, it is also the beginning of another journey: together with ESA and industry to commission the satellite and prepare its remarkable instruments to deliver critical near-real-time sounding data and products. These observations will inform decision makers, help protect societies, improve lives and livelihoods, and enhance how we monitor the climate and forecast weather across our member states and beyond.' For further updates on MTG-S1, visit EUMETSAT's launch hub, which features news, interviews, and insights into the satellite's journey. Find all relevant information, biographies of speakers, videos and testimonials on our dedicated press page. About EUMETSAT EUMETSAT, Europe's meteorological satellite agency, monitors the weather and climate from space. Based in Darmstadt, Germany, EUMETSAT provides its 30 member states with meteorological imagery and data that are essential for keeping their communities safe and for the benefit of critical sectors of their economies. For more information: EUMETSAT. View source version on CONTACT: Media Relations EUMETSAT: Tel. : +49 6151 807 7320 Email:[email protected] KEYWORD: GERMANY EUROPE INDUSTRY KEYWORD: SATELLITE SCIENCE OTHER SCIENCE RESEARCH TECHNOLOGY SOURCE: EUMETSAT Copyright Business Wire 2025. PUB: 07/21/2025 02:00 AM/DISC: 07/21/2025 02:01 AM
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Europe working to launch 'Invictus' hypersonic space plane by 2031 (video)
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Europe doesn't want to be left out of the space plane party. The European Space Agency (ESA) is funding the development of a hypersonic space plane pathfinder, which will start flying by 2031 if all goes according to plan. The work is being done via a research program called Invictus, which is led by the consulting firm Frazer-Nash. Invictus will leverage technology developed by the English company Reaction Engines Ltd., which aimed to build a huge space plane called Skylon but went bankrupt last year. The key piece of Invictus tech is a "pre-cooler," which Reaction Engines built and tested for its Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE). SABRE combined aspects of jet and rocket propulsion; it was designed to pull oxygen out of the air during flight at lower levels of Earth's atmosphere, reducing the need to carry propellant and therefore increasing efficiency. "Aircraft that fly at hypersonic speeds — more than 5 times the speed of sound — face extremely high temperatures due to shock heating and the friction from the air. Typical aircraft engines cannot operate in these conditions, as the air is too hot to handle," Frazer-Nash representatives said in a statement. This pre-cooler solves this problem, cooling "the air before it reaches the engine, allowing conventional aircraft engines to travel at hypersonic speeds," Frazer-Nash added. Invictus isn't a huge project; its funding is 7 million pounds (about $9.4 million US at current exchange rates), according to the company. But it could have a big impact on European spaceflight, according to ESA. "Hypersonic flight is not just the next frontier of aerospace — it is the gateway to a new paradigm of mobility, defense, and space access," Tommaso Ghidini, head of the Mechanical Department at the agency, said in the same statement. "With Invictus, Europe is seizing the opportunity to lead in technologies that will redefine how we move across the planet and reach beyond it," he added. "By mastering reusable, air-breathing propulsion, we are laying the foundation for aircraft that take off like planes and reach orbit like rockets — revolutionizing both terrestrial and orbital transportation." Related Stories: — US and UK militaries pick Rocket Lab's HASTE launcher to help test hypersonic tech — Facts about Reaction Engines' Skylon space plane — Space Force aims to launch 1st 'Foo Fighter' satellites in 2027 to track hypersonic threats The plan calls for the Invictus team — a consortium led by Frazer-Nash that includes Spirit AeroSystems and Cranfield University, among other partners — to deliver "the concept and elements of preliminary design of the full flight system" 12 months from now. The "full flight system" will be a reusable vehicle that takes off from, and lands on, a runway like an airplane. It will be up and running by early 2031, if all goes to plan, and could have a variety of uses and applications. "We look forward to seeing how the work develops and the opportunity it presents for boosting economic growth and national security," Tony Forsythe, head of space technology at the U.K. Space Agency, said in the same statement. Invictus isn't the only European space plane in development. Last month, for example, the French government and the French company Dassault Aviation announced plans for a demonstrator called VORTEX. Space planes are experiencing something of a resurgence after the retirement of the most famous such vehicle — NASA's space shuttle — in 2011. The U.S. military operates a robotic orbital space plane called the X-37B, for example, and China has a similar vehicle, called Shenlong. Virgin Galactic flies a suborbital space plane for tourism and research purposes. A number of other companies are developing space planes as well, including Sierra Nevada Corp., Dawn Aerospace and Radian Aerospace.
Time Magazine
3 days ago
- Time Magazine
Astronomers Discover Uncommon Way for Black Holes to Form
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope continues to deliver the goods. Launched on Christmas Day, 2021, it has since sent back a storm of dazzling images and a trove of good science. Now Webb has done it again. As NASA reports, two astronomers working with raw Webb data the space agency periodically makes available to researchers, have found evidence of a fast-growing black hole in an unexpected place and formed in an unexpected way. What the two astronomers—Pieter van Dokkumum of Yale University and Gabriel Brammer of the University of Copenhagen—found was a pair of spiral galaxies that collided in space. Each galaxy has a black hole at its center that was already present before the collision and which emit a red glow surrounded by a ring of light and matter, giving the overall formation the shape of the infinity symbol. Van Dokkum and Brammer nicknamed the pair the Infinity Galaxy. What surprised them was that the formation was also home to a third, larger, supermassive black hole—one with the mass of perhaps one million suns. This black hole was not in the center of one or the other galaxy as a supermassive black hole should be, but rather in the mashup of dust and gasses between them. 'Everything is unusual about this galaxy,' said Van Dokkum, in an extensive description he wrote for NASA. 'Not only does it look strange, but it also has this supermassive black hole that's pulling a lot of material in.' Just how the object formed is unknown, but Van Dokkum and Brammer have two theories, called the 'light seeds' and 'heavy seeds' scenarios. In the light seeds version, a star explodes and its core collapses, forming a black hole with a mass of perhaps 1,000 suns. Over time, other nearby stars collapse and form their own black holes and finally all of the bodies merge to form one supermassive black hole. But that theory has a problem. 'The merger process takes time,' Van Dokkum says, 'and Webb has found incredibly massive black holes at incredibly early times in the universe—possibly even too early for the process to explain them.' That doesn't mean the light seeds scenario doesn't ever play out, but it does mean that it's not as common as astronomers may believe. In the heavy seeds scenario a supermassive black hole forms directly from the collapse of a large gas cloud. In the case of the Infinity Galaxy, this occurred during the collision, when the galactic gas was shocked and compressed by the violence of the cosmic crackup. 'This compression might just be enough to form a dense knot, which then compressed into a black hole,' Van Dokkum says. That process is also called a direct collapse black hole. Not only did a supermassive black hole form from this collision, that black hole is still growing. Radio and X-ray emissions confirmed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and by the ground-based Very Large Array, confirm that the black hole is still pulling in prodigious amounts of dust and gas from its surroundings. Van Dokkum and Brammer prefer the heavy seeds scenario to explain what they found since it would be such a natural result of a galactic collision. 'By looking at the Infinity Galaxy, we think we have pieced together a story of how this could have happened here,' says Van Dokkum. But they concede that other, less likely occurrences could explain the supermassive black hole. For one thing, the body between the two galaxies in the Infinity Galaxy might be a runaway black hole that was ejected from its parent galaxy and is now passing through the Infinity Galaxy, and just happened to have been spotted by the Webb telescope during this relatively brief interregnum. Alternatively, the supermassive black hole might be at the center of a third galaxy that happens to be in the foreground of the same area of sky as the Infinity Galaxy. If that third galaxy were a dwarf galaxy, it might be faint enough that only the superheated gas and dust surrounding the black hole would be visible. But the researchers don't expect those theories to be borne out. If the black hole were a runaway, the velocity of the gasses flowing into it would likely be different from the velocity of the gasses in the Infinity Galaxy. While they haven't yet measured the speed of the gasses, they expect them to be similar. The idea that the black hole lies at the center of a dwarf galaxy can be dismissed almost out of hand since dwarf galaxies typically don't form black holes that big. All that is enough for the astronomers to claim at least a cautious victory in their discovery. 'We can't say definitively that we have found a direct collapse black hole,' says Van Dokkum. 'But we can say that these new data strengthen the case that we're seeing a newborn black hole while eliminating some of the competing explanations.'
