Water has been detected in the most massive galaxy in the early Universe, along with its neighbouring companion, according to new observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). In addition to H2O, astronomers found carbon monoxide (CO) in the galaxy pair, which are designated as SPT0311-58 and located 12.88 billion light years from Earth.

Detection of these two molecules in abundance suggests that the molecular Universe was already going strong, only a relatively short time after the forging of elements in early generations of stars. The new research is the most detailed study of molecular gas content of a galaxy in the early Universe to date and the most distant detection of H20 in a regular star-forming galaxy. The research is published this week in The Astrophysical Journal.

Astronomers discovered the two galaxies in 2017. The pair’s location, or time, places them within the Epoch of Reionization. This epoch, as highlighted in the diagram below, occurred when the Universe was only 5% of its current age – and the first stars and galaxies were being born. Scientists believe that the two galaxies may be merging, and that their rapid star formation is not only using up their gas, but may eventually evolve the pair into massive, elliptical galaxies like those seen in the Local Universe.

In 1,977 NASA sent out two Voyager probes to study Jupiter and Saturn. The spacecrafts were designed to last about five years, but they are still, to this day, collecting and sending back data from beyond the solar system. But the Voyager mission is living on borrowed time. Today NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce talks about a proposal for an intentionally long mission — what it would take for NASA to actually plan for an interstellar voyage that would pass research and responsibility down through generations.

What would you put on a spacecraft bound for the stars? Email the show at [email protected]!

A similar protocluster may have created our Milky Way.

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of a massive protocluster 11 billion light-years away that acts as an assembly yard for over 60 emerging galaxies.

Our brain processes faces of close others differently than faces of visually familiar individuals. While both types of faces activate similar visual areas, faces of close others activate areas involved in processing social and semantic information. Here, we used between-subject linear classifiers trained on hyperaligned brain data to investigate the neural code for visual and semantic information about familiar others. The identity of both visually and personally familiar faces could be decoded across participants from brain activity in visual areas. Instead, only the identity of personally familiar faces could be decoded in areas involved in social cognition. Our results suggest that individually distinctive information associated with familiar faces is embedded in a neural code that is shared across brains.

Processes evoked by seeing a personally familiar face encompass recognition of visual appearance and activation of social and person knowledge. Whereas visual appearance is the same for all viewers, social and person knowledge may be more idiosyncratic. Using between-subject multivariate decoding of hyperaligned functional magnetic resonance imaging data, we investigated whether representations of personally familiar faces in different parts of the distributed neural system for face perception are shared across individuals who know the same people. We found that the identities of both personally familiar and merely visually familiar faces were decoded accurately across brains in the core system for visual processing, but only the identities of personally familiar faces could be decoded across brains in the extended system for processing nonvisual information associated with faces.

Engineers have devised a new technique to clear space debris using magnets.

This would allow you to move the debris where you wanted it to go without actually having to touch it. “What we wanted to do was to manipulate the thing, not just shove it but actually manipulate it like you do on Earth,” Abbott said. “That form of dexterous manipulation has never been done before.”

While this is important for clearing out space junk that can’t be repaired, this method could also be … See more.

The James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to head to space on December 18 2021. With it, astronomers hope to find the first galaxies to form in the universe, will search for Earthlike atmospheres around other planets and accomplish many other scientific goals.

I am an astronomer and the principal investigator for the Near Infrared Camera – or NIRCam for short – aboard the Webb telescope. I have participated in the development and testing for both my camera and the telescope as a whole.

To see deep into the universe, the telescope has a very large mirror and must be kept extremely cold. But getting a fragile piece of equipment like this to space is no simple task. There have been many challenges my colleagues and I have had to overcome to design, test and soon launch and align the most powerful space telescope ever built.