China tests its new capsule and softlands a rocket. SpaceX shifts focus from Mars to the moon. A lava tube found on Venus. And in Space Bites Plus, five galaxies colliding in the early universe. All this and more in this week's Space Bites. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope gave us the first images of the shadow of a supermassive black hole. it was the monster black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87. And then just a couple of years later, we got another image of the shadow of a black hole, this time from the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. That's great. But what is the Event Horizon Telescope done for us lately? Well, the reality is that they're continuing to make observations every single year, building up data on the magnetic fields around the supermassive black holes. And now they've investigated jets that are coming out of M87's black hole. These are monsters. They extend for thousands of light years away from the center of the galaxy. They can be up to 25,000 light years across just in diameter and have a mass of over 6.5 billion times the sun. But the question is, where do they originate? What is the source of these jets? Now, we know that there is probably an accretion disk around the supermassive black hole. You've got the black hole is spinning at the center. It has powerful magnetic fields that are swirling around it. These scoop up material and drive it out on these relativistic jets coming out of the center of the black hole. But where does this originate? And so thanks to the resolution of the Event Horizon Telescope, again, a worldwide network of telescopes that are acting like a radio telescope as big as planet Earth, they were able to zoom in right down to the point where the jet is originating. And they're able to dial it in to detect that it's coming from 0.09 light years away from the supermassive black hole. So not right at the surface of the black hole, not right at the accretion disk, but actually a little less than a tenth of a light year away from the black hole is where this jet's material start to build up and head off into space. I've got more information on this from Matt Williams on universe today. Last week, we talked about potential lava tubes on Venus. I even gave you my hilarious Canadian accent spoiler alert. Well, this week, we're gonna have to do it again. Hilarious Canadian accent spoiler alert, because now it looks like astronomers have actually found a lava tube on Venus. And so once again, the data comes from NASA's Magellan spacecraft, because that's the only one that has been to Venus and captured images of the surface of this planet using its synthetic aperture radar. 1990, no better data since then. But of course, new spacecraft are going to be going to Venus someday, we hope, and we'll get that higher resolution data. But still, planetary scientists used a new technique to examine the synthetic aperture radar data. And they detected what they say is a lava tube on the surface of Venus. And we've seen these on the moon, we've seen them on Mars, you see this giant open skylight, that it's like a hole in the surface of the world. And then you can even see the floor of the lava tube beneath. And so on Venus, they think they've seen one with about a diameter of a kilometer across. And it lies at a depth of about 525 meters down and has a height of 375 meters with a roof that's 150 meters thick. So this is a this a very big lava tube. In fact, this is bigger than any lava tube that they've ever found on Earth bigger than the kinds of lava tubes that are predicted to be on Venus. This is matching the scale of the lava tubes that are predicted on the moon, where you've got one sixth gravity. And so you can have lava tubes get much bigger. And so if there's one, then there must be others. And we talked about this last week that there are these features that are sneaking across the surface of Venus that could indicate lava tubes, but we really need higher resolution images. So if you're hoping for another mission that will go back to Venus to give us those high resolution images, this is what this could give us. So vote early, vote often for Venus missions. Now we've got a story about this on Universe Today from Bruce Dormany. And Bruce used to work for Universe Today several years ago, and then wrote a book, was working for Forbes, and now he's come back to the fold, to Universe Today, to write for us again. and I'm so glad to have him back. He's an absolute incredible science writer and has been a real contribution to the team again. So I'm sure you'll hear me say his name many more times going into the future. Welcome back, Bruce. All eyes are on the Artemis II test, but while we're waiting for the next launch of the space launch system, the Chinese are continuing on with their plans to send a human to the moon by 2030. And so they're in the process of testing all the different parts of their hardware Recently we saw a zero altitude abort flight test of the Mengzhou crewed spacecraft We saw a comprehensive landing and liftoff verification of the Lan Yue lunar lander And now this week, we've heard that they have completed another test, this time with the Long March 10A rocket, which is sort of the variant of their rocket that has enough oomph to carry missions to the moon. They also did a test of their Mengzhou capsule, which is going to be carrying humans to the moon. And they went pretty far with this series of tests. They launched the rocket. And when they were at the maximum dynamic pressure point of their launch, max Q, they did an escape test of the capsule. So it detached from the rocket. And then both the capsule and the first stage of the rocket landed softly in the ocean. And similar to SpaceX, the goal was to try and catch this rocket at sea on a barge. And there was a problem with the rocket. They weren't able to catch it, but was able to do a soft landing close to the barge. So they're getting close to being able to recover first stage boosters of their rockets, in addition to preparing all of this hardware for going to the moon. And this is leading up to China's plans to actually launch the Mengzhou One later on this year on a Long March 10 rocket. So they're getting very close to testing out all of the hardware for their lunar missions. Elon Musk has been obsessed with human exploration of Mars. In fact, it's the reason why he started SpaceX decades ago. He was inspired by Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars. He wanted to build a greenhouse that would go to Mars, that would prove that you could grow plants on Mars and try to inspire other people to begin the exploration of Mars. It was the reason for the development of the interplanetary transport system, or the BFR, the big freaking rocket, eventually named SpaceX Starship. And he has been teasing us with the future plans for sending Starships to Mars. It was supposed to happen in 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026, maybe now 2028. Well, it turns out, if you read a series of tweets that he made on X.com, Plans have changed. They are no longer going to Mars. He is now focused on building a city on the moon. And according to Musk, instead of the 20 years that it's going to take to build a city on Mars, it's going to take merely 10 years to build a city on the moon. And obviously, this has hit the Mars exploration community pretty hard. People were pretty excited about the idea that they could live their days on Mars, and now they're going to have to live their days on the moon. But from a space exploration perspective, this makes a ton of sense. Now, obviously, there are a lot of reasons why SpaceX needs to focus its efforts on the moon. They're under contract to deliver the human landing system for the upcoming Artemis 3 mission. The Chinese are carrying out their plans to send humans to the moon. And Blue Origin has stopped launching with the New Shepard rocket, shifting to emphasize all of their work on the New Glenn and building their lunar lander. So there's a lot of competition. But there's like a larger rationale here, which I actually think makes a lot of sense. And so I'm going to save that as a rant at the end of this episode. So stick around for that. And if you want more information, we've got a story about this from Matt Williams on Universe Today. Little Red Dots are an ongoing mystery discovered by James Webb. You've got this compact object seen very early on in the universe. It is sort of enshrouded by dust, but it's not giving off the kind of x-ray radiation that you normally see associated with a supermassive black hole. So what are they? Well, a new paper suggests a pretty interesting idea and something that we've been seeing more and more hints about, and that's the idea of a direct collapse black hole. So the traditional theory of how you get supermassive black holes is that you have the first generation of stars, the population three stars and made of pure hydrogen and helium left over from the Big Bang. These things would have gotten very massive and would have left behind pretty large black holes. Then these black holes would have found other black holes merged together. These black holes would have accreted material. And that's how you would have gotten the seeds of the first black holes. That's the traditional theory. But the problem is, is that James Webb has found examples of supermassive black holes that are much larger than what you would expect with that traditional theory. So this other idea is that maybe black holes can just form directly out of huge clouds of gas left over from the Big Bang. No star needed. Now, there's a lot of challenges to this idea. And the biggest one is that when material is falling into a black hole, it goes into this accretion disk around the black hole. It heats up and it puts out a tremendous amount of radiation, which limits the amount of material that can then fall into the area. And so black holes and stars would be limited by how big they can get based on the amount of material that they can feed on But if there a way to overcome those limits maybe there ways to channel gas directly into the area then you could theoretically get a black hole forming of almost any mass, whatever material you have in the vicinity, then you could get a black hole of that size. And so a new paper proposes that in fact, little red dots, which are that mystery found by James Webb, they are beautifully explained by direct collapse black holes. They match the evidence that we have seen from these little red dots so far. They lack the X-ray emissions that you would expect to see from an actively feeding supermassive black hole. There's an absence of star formation around them. There's a presence of metal and high ionization lines, and they're surrounded by dense gas clouds. Just what you would expect to see of an object that was recently formed directly into a black hole. So it's sort of an interesting idea, you know, and people have been suggesting this might be what these things are and that these direct collapse black holes would answer a lot of questions about why we see black holes so heavy early on in the universe. So if you're interested in this as an explanation to Little Red Dots, I recommend you read this article by Matt Williams on Universe Today. Every week we do a vote on our channel where you tell us what you thought was the best space news story of the week. And the winner last week is new data on Europa. So thank you everyone who voted last week. Now we're going to put the poll for this week's stories into the post tab in our channel. And then of course you want to subscribe to our channel and click on the notifications bell. But here's something else. I'm not sure if you knew about this on YouTube. When I say that you should press the like button, the like button will highlight on your interface. And when you press it, you will see a really cool animation. What will you see? You're going to have to just press the like button. Okay, it's time to go on a possible comet alert. You have been warned there might be a bright comet in early April. So the comet is called C2026A1MAPS, and the maps part is actually an anagram for the names of the discoverers. And this comet was found about two astronomical units away from the sun, but on a near collision course with the sun. And it's expected that it's going to come within 160,000 kilometers of the surface of the sun. That is less than half the distance from the Earth to the moon. And comets like that, they're called the sun grazers. And when they get that close, you get one of two possibilities. One is they're destroyed. And we see this all the time. The comet gets too close. It gets torn up into a puff of material and it's gone. But the other possibility is that it gets so close, holds together and flares up into this enormous comet. And that should be a spectacular comet that we can see in the night sky in early April. So we're going to have to wait and see and find out if it survives its journey around the sun. And we might get a very bright comet or as usual, no bright comet because the universe sucks. If you want to learn more about this and where to find it, where to look, check out the story from David Dickinson. And speaking of comets, what about Comet 3i Atlas? What have we heard from that lately? Well, we've got some older observations that were done with NASA's SPHER-X mission. If you remember, back in late 2025, the comet made its closest approach to the sun, and then a time when it happened to be on the other side of the sun from our perspective. Now, it was lost in the glare of the sun from all of our regular telescopes, but infrared observatories in space were able to continue to watch it. And NASA's SPHERE-X space telescope, which had just recently launched, was in the perfect position to be able to do this. It's got this really cool infrared camera that allows it to look at 102 different colors of infrared radiation at the same time. Each one of those wavelengths of infrared can be used to detect different features of an object in space. And so in this case, they were able to use this to look at the coma of the comet and be able to observe features like water vapor, carbon dioxide, dust, and organic molecules. So I know you've been waiting a few weeks to hear about Comet 3i Atlas, just another piece of data to throw on the pile. And hopefully we'll get some more observations of it before it's gone forever. Got a story about this from Matt Williams. And here's your bonus story. We see a few examples of colliding galaxies, And they're always so cool. You know, these tidal tales as these galaxies are tearing at each other with their mutual gravity. And occasionally you'll see examples of three galaxies in some kind of cosmic dance. Well, now astronomers have found an example of five galaxies in the process of merging thanks to James Webb. And these galaxies, which have been nicknamed James Webb's quintet, this is a reference to Stefan's quintet, which is a very famous collection of five galaxies. And so these five galaxies are tearing at each other, and they have an enormous amount of star formation They have about 250 solar masses per year Just for comparison the Milky Way makes about one solar mass a year of star formation So they burning through their gas quite quickly And this might explain some of the gas-starved galaxies that we see later on in the universe. And on the one hand, it's very surprising because space is still very big. And so for this many galaxies to find each other at this time together is very rare. but also the early universe is denser than it is today. And so you would expect that you would see more of these larger mergers than we see around us. But it's a really cool picture. Got a story about this from Evan Goff. And this is just a collection of some of the stories that we're covering over on Universe Today this week. I don't have time to get to all of them, although people have been asking me to do all of them. I can't do all of them. But where I am covering all of the stories is in my weekly email newsletter, which I send out every Friday. And about the time that you're watching this episode of Space Bites, you should also see my weekly newsletter. I write every word in it myself. It's completely free. There's no advertisements at all. And you can sign up. Just go to universetaday.com slash newsletter. I'm going to give you more of an opinion, I know super rare, about what seems to be driving this shift in focus from Mars to the moon. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Pedretti, Bear Lake Roofing, Brian Bodie, Caradon, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Bialik, Cy Nielsen, Dark Finger, David Gilton, David Matz, Evan.Pro, Greg Feely, James Clark, Jeremy Madden, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Josh Schultz, Marcel Smits, Michael Purcell, Nordspace, OneStepForAnimals.org, Paul Buck, Renkaidu, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Stephen Fowler-Munley, Team49, Teleslopes Canada, Wolfgang Klotz, and Zeldamore Galactic Defender, who support us at the Master of the Universe level, and all our patrons. All your support means the universe to us. So I'm sure a lot of the Mars exploration Mars first community were kind of stunned that Elon Musk had changed his tune from looking at Mars as the place to send humanity to the moon. And but I mean, I think for the people who've been excited about space exploration for a long time, this is very natural because the moon is very close and space is very difficult. And so there are just an enormous number of challenges that need to be overcome, kind of like bugs in your software code. One after another, you're going to discover these problems and each one needs to be solved. The moon is only a week away. It takes just a couple of days to get to the moon and a couple of days to get back. And so if there's an emergency on the moon, they can bring someone back. If they've run out of toilet paper, they can send more up. And so that is sort of like one of the main reasons why exploring the moon makes sense first. And once you've learned all these lessons, then you can use that as a jumping off point to go further into the solar system. And then of course, SpaceX is getting a little worried by what's happening with the Chinese, what's happening with Blue Origin. And so there's more pressure to focus on the moon and not split their energy between the moon and Mars. But the thing that Elon Musk has been pushing is that they're thinking about putting artificial intelligence satellites into space, that instead of running these on Earth, you launch them into orbit, and then you do the computing on the satellite in space, then you send the results back down to Earth for things like training runs. At the face of it, that sounds pretty out there. Like, why would you do that when you could just build a solar farm and build a computer complex and then you just attach the two together and away you go and Elon Musk is saying no we're gonna probably the next couple of years launch all of these satellites into space using Starship and then to really get rolling we're gonna need to set up a base on the moon to launch these things at scale with a mass driver into space using resources from the moon to be able to build them And like that just sounds like right out of science fiction. But it's not a terrible, crazy idea. A friend of mine, Casey Hanmer, has written a bunch of essays about how asteroid mining is a terrible idea, how space-based solar power is a terrible idea. And I was expecting him to say, and space-based computing is a terrible idea. And he said, no, it's probably a pretty good idea. That when you think about the value of communication, when you have, you can have cell towers down here on Earth. But it looks like it's making a lot of sense to send spacecraft to space that the bits coming from space are more valuable and are paying for sending these satellites into orbit. And that probably the same math is going to hold for space based computing. So it actually could be profitable and economical to send our satellites to space to do the computing there, which I think would get rid of a lot of the problems in low Earth. And if they're all the way out at lunar orbit, maybe they're not going to be that close to Earth, maybe we won't have the same kind of space junk problem. So it sounds science fiction, it sounds like a really far future. And yet, when we're sort of living in this exponential growth of artificial intelligence, all this stuff, I kind of can't rule it out. So we'll see how it all plays out. All right, we'll see you next time.
