From Nature: The first stars to form generated copious fluxes of ultraviolet radiation that suffused the early Universe — a phenomenon referred to as the cosmic dawn. Many calculations have been performed to estimate when this occurred, but no data-driven constraints on the timing have been available. In a paper...
From the BBC: Scientists say they have observed a signature on the sky from the very first stars to shine in the Universe. They did it with the aid of a small radio telescope in the Australian outback that was tuned to detect the earliest ever evidence for hydrogen. This...
From CU Boulder Today: For the first time, astronomers have detected a signal from stars emerging in the early universe. Using a radio antenna not much larger than a refrigerator, the researchers discovered that ancient suns were active within 180 million years of the Big Bang. The astronomers, from Arizona...
From Popular Mechanics: The Federal Aviation Administration issued a Commercial Space Transportation License on Friday, February 2. It reads: Space Exploration Technologies is authorized to conduct: (i) A flight of the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) transporting the modified Tesla Roadster (mass...
From the Daily Camera: University of Colorado Professor Jack Burns leads a laboratory on campus that he describes as a mash-up between Silicon Valley and the space program with the help of two undergraduate students he deemed "the next space pioneers." Seniors Benjamin Mellinkoff and Matthew Spydell were hunkered down...
From Scientific American: MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.—Earth’s nearest neighbor, the moon, is far from being a “been there, done that” world in space science and exploration. That’s the message from scientists and engineers at NASA’s Lunar Science for Landed Missions Workshop, recently held here at the space agency’s Ames AVĂűĘŞ Center...
From CU Boulder Today: Humans have already been to the moon—and will likely return—but engineering undergraduates Benjamin Mellinkoff and Matthew Spydell have their eyes set on an even bigger challenge: helping humans explore the entire solar system with the aid of robotic partners. Mellinkoff and Spydell work in a NASA-funded...
Bang Nhan, a Ph.D. candidate at CU Boulder was one of 6 students to receive the American Astronomical Society’s Honorable Mention Chambliss Prize. He received this acknowledgement based upon the quality of his dissertation research. Bang’s poster presented new results on the detection of the foreground polarization signal using the...
From Nature: Plans to return to the Moon are getting serious. Last month, US President Donald Trump declared that the next time US astronauts blast off, they will be headed to our rocky satellite. In September, the European Space Agency made its strongest call yet for the installation of a...
From The Guardian: This time next year, there may be a new world leader in lunar exploration. If all goes according to plan, China will have done something no other space-faring superpower has been able to do: land on the far side of the moon. China is rocketing ahead with...