Enlarge / The eQuinox 2 is ready for sundown in central Illinois. No eyepiece here, so have your smartphone handy if you want to stargaze. (credit: Eric Bangeman/Ars Technica)

When we reviewed the Unistellar eVscope a couple of years ago, we came away impressed. It offered a communal stargazing experience that takes our ubiquitous smartphones and turns them into a way to view the heavens. Unistellar's newest offering is the eQuinox 2, a lower-cost alternative to eVscope 2, taking all of the features from its original telescope, improving the technology, and dropping the price to $2,499.

Unistellar's smart telescopes are designed to make astronomy more accessible by automating skywatching and using digital sensors to "collect" light from faraway objects, making light pollution a small nuisance instead of a deal-breaker.

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  Unistellar's catalog contains over 5,000 celestial objects. [credit: Eric Bangeman/Ars Technica ]

At a glance, the biggest difference between the eQuinox 2 and its predecessor is the former's lack of an eyepiece. Unistellar got rid of the eyepiece, which isn't much of a loss. Instead of taking turns peering through the eyepiece, up to 10 people can stargaze simultaneously with the Unistellar app. Connect to the telescope's built-in Wi-Fi network, launch the app, and you're ready to scan the skies. One person controls the telescope and everyone else can watch. The operator can give control of the telescope to anyone else easily.

Enlarge / Jezero crater shows clear signs of water-formed deposits, so it's not a surprise to find water-altered material there. (credit: NASA/MSSS/USGS )

Organic chemicals, primarily composed of carbon and hydrogen, underly all of life. They're also widespread in the Universe, so they can't be taken as a clear signature of the presence of life. That creates an annoying situation regarding the search for evidence of life on Mars, which clearly has some organic chemicals despite the harsh environment.

But we don't know whether these are the right kinds of molecules to be indications of life. For the moment, we also lack the ability to tear apart Martian rocks, isolate the molecules, and figure out exactly what they are. In the meantime, our best option is to get some rough information on them and figure out the context of where they're found on Mars. And a big step has been made in that direction with the publication of results from imaging done by the Perseverance rover.

Ask SHERLOC

The instrument that's key to the new work has a name that pretty much tells you it was designed to handle this specific question: Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC). SHERLOC comes with a deep-UV laser to excite molecules into fluorescing, and the wavelengths they fluoresce at can tell us something about the molecules present. It's also got the hardware to do Raman spectroscopy simultaneously.

Enlarge / The first-anniversary image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope displays star birth like it’s never been seen before. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI))

To commemorate the first year of scientific operations by the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA has released a stunning new image of a stellar nursery.

The photo is gorgeous. It could easily hang in a museum, as if it were a large canvas painting produced by a collaboration of impressionistic and modern artists. But it is very real, showcasing the process of stars being born a mere 390 light years from Earth. This is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.

Given the nursery's proximity and Webb's unparalleled scientific instruments, we have never had this kind of crystal-clear view of these processes before. The detail revealed in this image of about 50 stars is truly remarkable, a distillation of all that Webb has delivered over the last 12 months and all that it promises to do over the next 10 or 20 years.

Enlarge / Gravitational lensing has revealed a previously unknown supernova explosion more than 4 billion light-years away. (credit: Joel Johansson, Stockholm University)

Astronomers have detected a previously unknown supernova explosion more than 4 billion light-years away using a rare phenomenon called "gravitational lensing," which serves as a kind of cosmic magnifying glass. They described their discovery and its potential implications in a new paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy. Co-author Ariel Goobar, director of the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, described the find as "a significant step forward in our quest to understand the fundamental forces shaping our universe."

Gravitational lensing is a direct consequence of the general theory of relativity: mass bends and warps spacetime, and light must follow that curvature. The phenomenon can form rare effects like an " Einstein ring " or an " Einstein cross ." Essentially, the distortion in space-time caused by a massive object (like a galaxy) acts as a lens to magnify an object in the background. Since these aren't perfect optical-quality lenses, there are often some distortions and unevenness. This causes the light from the background object to take different paths to Earth, and thus a single object can appear in several different locations distributed around the lens. At cosmological scales, those paths can also require light to travel very different distances to get to Earth.

Gravitational lensing helps astronomers spot celestial objects that might otherwise be too faint or far away to see, like a distant supernova, which can lead to other interesting questions. For example, last year , astronomers analyzed a Hubble image from 2010, where the image happened to also capture a supernova. Because of gravitational lensing, the single event showed up at three different locations within Hubble's field of view. Thanks to the quirks of how this lensing works, and because light travels at a finite speed, all three of the locations captured different times after the star's explosion, allowing researchers to piece together the time course following the supernova, even though it had been observed over a decade earlier.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of a gamma-ray burst. (credit: NASA )

Supernovae are some of the most energetic events in the Universe. And a subset of those involves gamma-ray bursts, where a lot of the energy released comes from extremely high-energy photons. We think we know why that happens in general terms—the black hole left behind the explosion expels jets of material at nearly the speed of light. But the details of how and where these jets produce photons are not at all close to being fully worked out.

Unfortunately, these events happen very quickly and very far away, so it's not easy to get detailed observations of them. However, a recent gamma-ray burst that's been called the BOAT (brightest of all time) may be providing us with new information on the events within a few days of a supernova's explosion. A new paper describes data from a telescope that happened to be both pointing in the right direction and sensitive to the extremely high-energy radiation produced by the event.

I need a shower

The "telescope" mentioned is the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). Based nearly three miles (4,400 meters) above sea level, the observatory is a complex of instruments that aren't a telescope in the traditional sense. Instead, they're meant to capture air showers—the complex cascade of debris and photons that are produced when high-energy particles from outer space slam into the atmosphere.

Enlarge (credit: NASA/SDO )

How, exactly, living things emerged on Earth remains a mystery. Now a new experiment has revealed that blasts of solar particles could have kickstarted the process by creating some of the basic components of life.

Time in the sun

Before so much as the first microbe existed, there had to be amino acids thought to have formed in one of the primordial oozes of early Earth. It was previously thought that lightning might have supercharged the formation of amino acids. However, Kensei Kobayashi of Yokohama National University in Japan, along with astrophysicist Vladimir Airapetian of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a team of researchers from both institutions, have found another possibility: The young Sun’s superflares probably helped give rise to the stuff of life.

“[Galactic cosmic rays] and [solar energetic particle] events from the young Sun represent the most effective energy sources for the prebiotic formation of biologically important organic compounds,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Life .

Enlarge / "Backlit" image of Saturn and its rings, taken by the Cassini spacecraft in 2006. (credit: NASA/Public domain)

Astronomers had long assumed that Saturn's distinctive rings formed around the same time as the planet some 4.5 billion years ago in the earliest days of our Solar System. That assumption received a serious challenge from a 2019 analysis of data collected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, suggesting that the rings were just 10 million to 100 million years ago—a mere blink of an eye on cosmic time scales. Now, a fresh analysis of data on how much dust has accumulated on the rings confirms that controversial finding, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances.

"In a way, we’ve gotten closure on a question that started with James Clerk Maxwell,” said co-author Sascha Kempf , an astronomer at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In 1610, Galileo Galilei was the first to observe the rings, though his telescope was too crude to identify them as actual rings. He described them as "Saturn's ears" since they looked like two smaller planets on either side of Saturn. Galileo was bemused when the "ears" vanished in 1612 as the Earth passed through the ring plane, even more so when they became visible again the following year.

Christopher Wren suspected that Saturn had a ring in 1657, though Christiaan Huygens beat him to publication, suggesting the ring was detached from the planet in his 1659 treatise System Saturnium , which also noted his discovery of Saturn's moon, Titan. Robert Hooke noticed shadows on the rings. By 1675, Giovanni Cassini had figured out that the ring was a series of smaller rings with gaps between them. Over a century later, Pierre-Simon Laplace would mathematically demonstrate that any solid ring would be unstable. Maxwell determined that the "ring" had to be made up of lots of small particles, all independently orbiting Saturn, confirmed by observations in 1859. We now know those particles are almost entirely made up of water ice.

Enlarge / The arc of thin, distorted objects around the center of this image is a clear indication of gravitational lensing. (credit: Patrick Kelly, University of Minnesota )

Anyone who has ever measured something twice, like the width of a doorway, and gotten two different answers knows how annoying it can be. Now imagine you're a physicist, and what you're measuring tells us something fundamental about the Universe. There are a number of examples like this—we can't seem to get measurements to agree on how long neutrons survive outside of atomic nuclei, for example.

But few of these are more fundamental to the Universe's behavior as disagreements over what's called the Hubble Constant , a measure of how quickly the Universe is expanding. We've measured it using information in the cosmic microwave background and gotten one value. And we've measured it using the apparent distance to objects in the present-day Universe and gotten a value that differs by about 10 percent. As far as anyone can tell, there's nothing wrong with either measurement, and there's no obvious way to get them to agree.

Now, researchers have managed to make a third, independent measure of the Universe's expansion by tracking the behavior of a gravitationally lensed supernova. When first discovered, the lens had created four images of the supernova. But sometime later, a fifth appeared, and that time delay is influenced by the Universe's expansion—and thus the Hubble constant.

Enlarge / Orbital image of the Utopia Planitia region of Mars. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona )

Most of Mars appears to be an endless expanse of alien desert, without a river or lake in sight. However, liquid water definitely existed in the planet’s distant past . A new paper has also suggested that it's also possible small quantities of water still might exist in places that otherwise appear barren.

Before China’s Zhurong (also known as Phoenix) rover went into hibernation mode last May, researchers from the National Astronomical Observatories and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered something unexpected. Zhurong was exploring the Utopia Planitia region, which is near the planet’s equator. No liquid water was thought to exist at those latitudes. Yet when the rover beamed back data from its Multispectral Camera (MSCam), Navigation and Terrain Camera (NaTeCam), and Mars Surface Composition Detector (MarSCoDe), there was possible evidence for liquid water having been present less than half a million years ago.

“[Our findings] suggest [features] associated with the activity of saline water, indicating the existence of water process on the low-latitude region of Mars,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Science Advances.