Private Mission Targets Alpha Centauri

🚀 Budget mission to Alpha Centauri planned

🔊 Blue Origin explosion detected via infrasound

🌙 Moon formed in just five hours

🕳️ Black hole X-ray eruption triggers radio jets

💫 JWST spots ancient supernova

Philip Johnston, Starcloud co-founder and physicist, announced the Fermi Explorer mission Tuesday, aiming to send a small spacecraft to Alpha Centauri for just $15 million using existing technology by 2029.

The spacecraft would use solar-electric propulsion with Xenon gas, executing perihelion pump maneuvers at 0.42 AU over twelve years to achieve escape velocity of approximately 25 kilometers per second.

Johnston argues the mission would eliminate two Fermi paradox filters, demonstrating that interstellar transit is achievable and that species can choose to send spacecraft beyond their home star.

Sandia National Laboratories researchers Elizabeth Silber and Logan Scamfer analyzed infrasound signals from Blue Origin's New Glenn static test explosion in May 2026, publishing findings in The Seismic Record.

The team back-projected data from 36 regional broadband microbarometer stations up to 1,700 kilometers away, calculating the explosion yield at 0.131 kilotons TNT-equivalent.

Silber notes this study provides rare real-world data on liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellant explosions, increasingly important as heavy-lift rockets adopt this fuel combination.

Southwest Research Institute's Dr. Adeene Denton led simulations with University of Arizona collaborators, revisiting the giant impact hypothesis using modern computational methods incorporating temperature-dependent geologic strength for the first time.

Simulations revealed that when colliding bodies had surface temperatures around 400 Kelvin with material strength included, an intact moon emerged within five hours rather than forming gradually from debris.

Dr. Robin Canup suggests these results may help constrain when the moon-forming event occurred by connecting the moon's current physical properties to the thermal state during impact.

University of Michigan astronomer Sarah Ketchum and colleagues analyzed nearly twenty years of NASA Swift X-ray Telescope data monitoring the supermassive black hole in NGC 1275.

The team detected the strongest X-ray flare ever recorded from this galaxy starting February 2023, with brightness doubling and a radio counterpart following 296 days later.

Researchers suggest this delay represents propagation time from the X-ray corona to radio-emitting jet regions, offering rare insight into disk-jet coupling that limits galaxy growth.

University of Hawai'i astronomer Valeria Aparicio and colleagues identified supernova SN 2023aeaf in the COSMOS-Web survey, confirming it as a Type II core-collapse explosion with 97.2 percent probability.

JWST spectroscopy confirmed redshift z equals 3.195, placing the explosion when the universe was approximately two billion years old, hosted by a metal-poor dwarf galaxy.

The team modeled a progenitor star roughly twelve solar masses surrounded by circumstellar material, adding to the small sample of supernovae beyond redshift three for cosmic star formation studies.