Space

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap241104.html

Meghan Everett, NASA’s deputy chief scientist for the International Space Station program, said, “While some of you might think that wood in space seems a little counterintuitive, researchers hope this investigation demonstrates that a wooden satellite can be more sustainable and less polluting for the environment than conventional satellites.”

LignoSat was created by researchers at Kyoto University along with a homebuilding company, according to Reuters.

“With timber, a material we can produce by ourselves, we will be able to build houses, live and work in space forever,” Takao Doi, an astronaut who now studies human space activities at Kyoto University, told Reuters.

The Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Webb on behalf of NASA and its international partners, said last week that it received 2,377 unique proposals from science teams seeking observing time on the observatory. The institute released a call for proposals earlier this year for the so-called "Cycle 4" series of observations with Webb.

This volume of proposals represents around 78,000 hours of observing time with Webb, nine times more than the telescope's available capacity for scientific observations in this cycle. The previous observing cycle had a similar "oversubscription rate" but had less overall observing time available to the science community.

More than 600 scientists will review the proposals and select the most promising ones for time on Webb. The largest share of proposals would involve observing "high-redshift" galaxies among the first generation of galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. Galaxies this old and distant have their light stretched to longer wavelengths due to the expansion of the Universe. Research involving exoplanet atmospheres and stars and stellar populations were the second- and third-most popular science categories in this cycle.

[Image description: Two spiral galaxies take up almost the entire view and appear to be overlapping. They are angled from top left to bottom right. The galaxy at left, IC 2163, is smaller and more compact than the galaxy at right, NGC 2207. The background of space is black, dotted with tiny foreground stars and extremely distant galaxies.]

https://esawebb.org/images/weic2426b/

What is the most spook-tacular nebula in the galaxy? One contender is LDN 43, which bears an astonishing resemblance to a vast cosmic bat flying amongst the stars on a dark Halloween night. Located about 1400 light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, this molecular cloud is dense enough to block light not only from background stars, but from wisps of gas lit up by the nearby reflection nebula LBN 7. Far from being a harbinger of death, this 12-light year-long filament of gas and dust is actually a stellar nursery. Glowing with eerie light, the bat is lit up from inside by dense gaseous knots that have just formed young stars.

[Image description: A star cluster is shown inside a large nebula of many-coloured gas and dust. The material forms dark ridges and peaks of gas and dust surrounding the cluster, lit on the inner side, while layers of diffuse, translucent clouds blanket over them. Around and within the gas, a huge number of distant galaxies can be seen, some quite large, as well as a few stars nearer to us which are very large and bright.]

https://esawebb.org/images/weic2425a/

[Image description: the Aurora borealis painted the night sky with streaks of red, purple, and green all the way down to the 43rd parallel this evening]

[Image Description: A dense cluster of bright stars, each with six large and two small diffraction spikes, due to the telescope’s optics. They have a variety of sizes depending on their brightness and distance from us in the cluster, and different colours reflecting different types of star. Patches of billowing red gas can be seen in and around the cluster, lit up by the stars. Small stars in the cluster blend into a background of distant stars and galaxies on black.]

https://esawebb.org/images/potm2409b/

This long exposure photograph taken by NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick with a camera programmed for high sensitivity shows star trails and streaks of city lights as the International Space Station orbited 258 miles above the South China Sea off the coast of Vietnam near Ho Chi Minh City.

Source

[Image description: A pair of interacting galaxies. The larger of the two galaxies is slightly right of centre, and is composed of a hazy, bright, white centre and a ring of gaseous filaments, which are different shades of red and orange. Toward the bottom left and bottom right of the ring are filaments of gas spiralling inward toward the core. At the top left of the ring is a noticeable gap, bordered by two large, orange pockets of dust and gas. The smaller galaxy is made of hazy and white gas and dust, which become more diffuse further away from its centre. To this galaxy’s bottom left, there is a smaller, more diffuse gas cloud that wafts outward toward the edges of the image. Many red, orange, and white galaxies are spread throughout, with some being hazier in appearance and others having more defined spiral patterns.]

https://esawebb.org/images/weic2423a/

[Image description: At centre is a compact star cluster composed of luminous red, blue, and white points of light. Faint jets with clumpy, diffuse material extend in various directions from the bright cluster. Above and to the right is a smaller cluster of stars. Translucent red wisps of material stretch across the scene, though there are patches and a noticeable gap in the top left corner that reveal the black background of space. Background galaxies are scattered across this swath of space, appearing as small blue-white and orange-white dots or fuzzy, thin discs. There is one noticeably larger blue-white point with diffraction spikes, a foreground star in the upper right.]

https://esawebb.org/images/weic2422a/

[Image Description: A nebula made up of cloudy gas and dust in the form of soft and wispy clouds and, in the centre, thin and highly detailed layers pressed close together. Large, bright stars surrounded by six long points of light are dotted over the image, as well as some small, point-like stars embedded in the clouds. The clouds are lit up in blue close to the stars; orange colours show clouds that glow in infrared light.]

https://esawebb.org/images/potm2408a/

Also here:

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/08/Webb_peeks_into_Perseus

NASA has decided it’s too risky to bring two astronauts back to Earth in Boeing’s troubled new capsule. They’ll have to wait until February for a ride home with SpaceX.