I’ve been rounding up the top stories in space on an annual basis for 25 years now (starting with the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997), and 2022 ranks among the biggest years when it comes to opening up new frontiers on the final frontier. The best thing about these frontier-opening stories — especially the James Webb Space Telescope and the Artemis moon program — is that the best is yet to come.
News Category: Press Release
Earth’s Orbit Is About to Get More Crowded
Sometime this coming March, a network of 10 small satellites winged with solar panels is scheduled to launch into Earth’s low orbit. Though likely invisible to the naked eye, the satellites will be part of a future herd of hundreds that, according to the Space Development Agency, or SDA, will bolster the United States’ defense capabilities.
Ideas for finding ET are getting more inventive
Big Data in the Night Sky
In conversation with James Davenport and 2022 DiRAC Research Prize recipients read more about Vera C. Rubin Observatory and important role of the scientists at the UW’s DiRAC Institute.
NASA’s new telescope shows star death, dancing galaxies
King5 talks with Thomas Quinn, UW Astronomy, about James Webb Space Telescope’s new images released on July 12th by NASA.
How ‘Big Data’ could help SETI researchers intensify the search for alien civilizations
University of Washington astronomer James Davenport and his colleagues lay out the plan in a research paper submitted to the arXiv pre-print server this month. The idea is also the subject of a talk that Davenport’s giving this week at the Breakthrough Discuss conference in California.
Killer Asteroids Are Hiding in Plain Sight. A New Tool Helps Spot Them.
The discovery of 104 asteroids by the Asteroid Institute, using the THOR algorithm running on our Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) cloud-based astrodynamics platform!
Astronomers demonstrate how using the cloud can rev up the rate of discovery for asteroids
The THOR algorithm was created by Joachim Moeyens, an Asteroid Institute Fellow at UW; and Mario Juric, director of UW’s DiRAC Institute.
‘Unsustainable’: how satellite swarms pose a rising threat to astronomy
SpaceX and other companies are still struggling to make their satellites darker in the night sky.
Astronomers discover a rare ’black widow’ binary, with the shortest orbit yet
In partnership with the news team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the UW News office has posted a story about a rare and mysterious star system discovered by a team of astronomers and reported in a paper published this morning in Nature. The researchers report that the system appears to be a “black widow binary” — consisting of a rapidly spinning neutron star, or pulsar, that is circling and slowly consuming a smaller companion star, just as its arachnid namesake does to its mate.