Two decades of work with numerous setbacks, a budget of more than 10 billion dollars and a journey of 1.5 million kilometres to provide us with images of the universe in unprecedented detail have led Science magazine to choose the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as the science breakthrough of 2022.
After almost three months of delays caused by various technical problems and two hurricanes, the Artemis I mission was successfully launched this morning, the first of a programme that will take the first woman astronaut to the moon. It has 42 days ahead of it, during which the spacecraft will orbit our satellite and test the stability of this lunar orbit, because in the future a space station will be located there to receive the astronauts on their journey from Earth.
For the first time, the IceCube collaboration team has found evidence for high-energy neutrino emission from NGC 1068, an active galaxy 47 million light-years away with a supermassive black hole. The finding, made with the detector located under the Antarctic ice sheet, is published in the journal Science.
The IceCube collaboration, with its detector located under the Antarctic ice sheet, has used astrophysical neutrinos to search for changes in the structure of space-time. In the research, published in Nature Physics, the team analysed more than seven years of data and found no signs of a modified structure of space-time imprinted in the characteristics of these particles, a further step towards understanding quantum gravity.
As planned, the DART (Double Asteroid Redirect Test) mission has hit the asteroid Dimorphos, which orbits a larger asteroid, Didymos. Neither is a threat to Earth. This is the first planetary defence test mission designed to change the orbit of an asteroid, launched by NASA and the Johns Hopkins APL laboratory, with Spanish participation. Scientific teams will study with ground-based telescopes how much the orbit of Dimorphos will change around Didymos after the collision.
The ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter mission may have made the first direct observation of what are known as magnetic switchbacks on the Sun. The phenomenon, which consists of S-shaped disturbances that cause sudden reversals of its magnetic field, had been identified by different space probes since the 1970s, but its explanation had only been described theoretically. The finding is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Romano Corradi, director of the Gran Telescopio de Canarias, assesses the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, an international collaboration of the space agencies of the United States (NASA), Europe (ESA) and Canada (CSA).
An analysis published in Nature Astronomy quantifies the risk to human life posed by impacts of space rocket fragments on Earth, which are more likely to occur in the southern part of the planet.
The first direct image of the black hole at the centre of our galaxy shows a 'monster' devouring matter at a slow pace. The black hole itself is spinning, and its spin axis is pointing just 30 degrees away from us. The result shows that the size of the black hole is proportional to the mass it contains, confirming the theory of general relativity. Xavier Barcons, ESO's Director General, assesses the new finding.
An international team of researchers has captured the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. The results are published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.