Blast at Tennessee explosives plant leaves multiple dead, others missing
Multiple people are dead and several others are unaccounted for after a blast on Friday morning in Tennessee at a military explosives company, accordi...
NASA is preparing to launch its groundbreaking SPHEREx space telescope on Friday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Designed to shed light on the cosmic dawn and the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, SPHEREx - short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer - will map the cosmos in unprecedented detail.
Over the course of its planned two-year mission, SPHEREx will collect data on more than 450 million galaxies and over 100 million stars within the Milky Way, creating a comprehensive three-dimensional map of the universe in 102 distinct colors. This spectral mapping will allow scientists to study the distribution of galaxies across vast cosmic scales and directly investigate the rapid expansion known as cosmic inflation - a phenomenon believed to have occurred in a fraction of a second after the Big Bang roughly 13.8 billion years ago.
“By mapping the distribution of galaxies over the whole sky, we can directly constrain unique properties of inflation,” said cosmologist Olivier Doré of Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The fact that we can connect these large-scale structures to the physics of inflation is very powerful, almost magical.”
In addition to probing the early universe, SPHEREx will search for reservoirs of water and other key molecules such as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide on the surface of interstellar dust grains. These molecular clouds - dense regions of gas and dust that give rise to new stars and planets - are thought to be the primary sites for water formation in the universe, a crucial ingredient for life.
SPHEREx will employ its innovative spectro-photometry techniques to split the light from billions of cosmic sources into their component wavelengths, determining their composition and distance. The telescope will also measure the collective glow from the vast space between galaxies, offering new insights into the cosmic web that binds the universe.
Jim Fanson, SPHEREx project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, emphasized the mission’s transformative potential: “Cosmic inflation is the consensus framework for explaining the universe’s large-scale structure. SPHEREx will provide an unprecedented dataset to mine, and there is no doubt we will discover new cosmic phenomena.”
Launched alongside a constellation of satellites for NASA’s PUNCH mission - aimed at studying the sun’s corona and solar wind - SPHEREx represents a major step forward in astronomical research. As it prepares to look at the sky in entirely new ways, scientists are optimistic that the mission will uncover hidden chapters of our universe’s history and enhance our understanding of the forces that shaped the cosmos.
With its innovative design and ambitious goals, SPHEREx is poised to open a new window on the early universe, promising discoveries that could reshape our understanding of cosmic origins and the potential for life beyond Earth.
Video from the USGS (United States Geological Survey) showed on Friday (19 September) the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii erupting and spewing lava.
At least eight people have died and more than 90 others were injured following a catastrophic gas tanker explosion on a major highway in Mexico City’s Iztapalapa district on Wednesday, authorities confirmed.
At least 69 people have died and almost 150 injured following a powerful 6.9-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Cebu City in the central Visayas region of the Philippines, officials said, making it one of the country’s deadliest disasters this year.
Authorities in California have identified the dismembered body discovered in a Tesla registered to singer D4vd as 15-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez, who had been missing from Lake Elsinore since April 2024.
A powerful 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula on 13 September with no tsunami threat, coming just weeks after the region endured a devastating 8.8-magnitude quake — the strongest since 1952.
From Sunday, all non-EU citizens, including British visitors, will face new biometric checks when entering and exiting the European Union under its long-delayed Entry/Exit System (EES).
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, and Omar Yaghi of the University of California.
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis for their groundbreaking discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in electric circuits.
United States chipmaker AMD will supply artificial intelligence chips to OpenAI in a multi-year agreement that could generate tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue and give the ChatGPT maker the option to acquire up to 10% of the company.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025 has been awarded jointly to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi for their ground breaking discoveries on peripheral immune tolerance.
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