Controversial Sun Space Mirror Approved

🪞 FCC greenlights controversial space mirror

🕳️ Hubble finds hidden black hole in cluster

🍬 Sweet molecules near Milky Way's center

🌌 Quantum gravity explains cosmic uniformity

⭐ Four white dwarfs found in our backyard

Reflect Orbital secured FCC (Federal Communications Commission) approval to launch Earendil-1, a demonstration satellite designed to reflect sunlight to Earth at night using an adjustable thin-film reflector system.

Earendil-1 features a highly specular thin-film reflector with built-in propulsion for collision avoidance in low-Earth orbit, capable of directing sunlight to power solar panels or illuminate search-and-rescue operations.

American Astronomical Society officials warn the satellite could cause eye damage through telescopes with apertures larger than 12 inches and flash-blind pilots, though FCC declined jurisdiction over health concerns.

University of Utah astronomers led by Matthew Whitaker discovered oMEGACat BH-2, the first stellar-mass black hole detected in Omega Centauri, using over 20 years of archival Hubble Space Telescope astrometric data.

The black hole measures 4.46 solar masses orbiting every 94 years, making it the longest-period black hole binary known, with its companion star measuring 0.78 solar masses at 18,000 light-years distance.

Coauthor Anil Seth notes this unexpectedly low-mass black hole in a metal-poor environment challenges formation models and will help scientists better interpret gravitational wave events from merging binaries.

Spanish National Research Council astrochemist Izaskun Jiménez-Serra led a team that discovered erythrulose, a four-carbon sugar found in raspberries, within molecular cloud G+0.693-0.027 near the galactic center.

Researchers used Spain's Yebes 40-meter and IRAM 30-meter radio telescopes to detect the sugar's unique spectral signature at 26,745 light-years from Earth, identifying molecules vaporized from dust grains by supernova shock waves.

Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer Nick Indriolo states this discovery confirms sugars can form in stellar nurseries, providing crucial evidence that life's complex molecular precursors arise in interstellar space.

Baylor University physicist Anzhong Wang and international collaborators developed a theoretical mechanism explaining how the early universe transitioned from directional irregularities to its current remarkable homogeneity and isotropy.

The team's modified loop quantum cosmology model predicts quantum geometry corrections near Planck scale suppress anisotropies during the cosmic bounce, when a contracting universe reaches minimum nonzero size and begins expanding.

Wang states this self-isotropization mechanism resolves a long-standing vulnerability in bouncing cosmologies and may produce testable signatures in cosmic microwave background radiation or primordial gravitational waves.

University of Warwick researcher Mairi O'Brien led a team that directly observed four white dwarfs hidden in binary systems with red dwarf companions, all located within 65 light-years of Earth.

Using Hubble Space Telescope's ultraviolet spectrograph with custom calibration, astronomers confirmed G 203-47 as the ninth closest white dwarf to our Sun, orbiting its red dwarf companion every 14.9 days.

Professor Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay estimates 9 to 10 additional hidden white dwarf binaries may exist locally, since only 30 percent of nearby red dwarfs have been systematically surveyed for companions.