Hey there, space enthusiast

Here's what happened in space in the last 24 hours.

China's Shenzhou-23 lifted off Sunday aboard a Long March 2-F rocket from Jiuquan, delivering three astronauts to the Tiangong space station. One crew member will spend a full year in orbit, the first time China has attempted a stay that long, to study how extended microgravity affects bone density, muscle mass, and cardiovascular health ahead of planned lunar missions. The mission also marks the first spaceflight by a Hong Kong astronaut, Lai Ka-ying, a former police officer. Tiangong crews have typically rotated every six months, so the year-long experiment pushes both hardware and crew into territory China needs to understand before targeting a crewed lunar landing by 2030. Which crew member will stay the full year has not yet been announced.

↗Source: The Guardian – Science

A study of 98 "Little Red Dots" (LRDs), the compact, unusually red objects JWST has found across cosmic history, finds that their light is dominated not by stars but by black holes wrapped in dense gas cocoons. By stripping out the host galaxy's contribution using oxygen emission lines, researchers isolated a signal with a Balmer break more than twice as strong as any quiescent galaxy and a blackbody-like spectrum consistent with a cool, optically thick gas envelope at roughly 4,050 K. These objects, termed "black hole stars," account for about 90% of the red optical light in a typical LRD while contributing only 20% in the ultraviolet. The short estimated lifetime of around 10 million years and a roughly 1% duty cycle suggest this phase is brief but nearly universal, implying that most massive black holes in the universe passed through a similar gas-enshrouded stage during their early growth.

↗Source: arXiv astro-ph

NASA filed a sole-source procurement notice on May 18 to add six post-certification missions to SpaceX's commercial crew contract, with plans to formally order up to three immediately. The move is a direct hedge against Boeing's Starliner, which remains uncertified for crewed flights and was absent from NASA's latest ISS manifest. NASA also reversed a plan to extend crew rotations from six to eight months, deciding instead to keep the shorter cadence to maximize station utilization in its final years. The current contract runs through Crew-14 in fall 2027; the six added missions would extend coverage through late 2030, aligning with the ISS retirement date. A final year-long crewed stay is expected before deorbit.

↗Source: SpaceNews

SpaceX is targeting 7:48 a.m. EDT Monday for the Starlink 10-47 mission from Space Launch Complex 40, carrying 29 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites to low Earth orbit. The 45th Weather Squadron put favorable weather odds at 85 percent, with cumulus cloud buildup the main concern. Booster B1078, flying for the 28th time after previous missions including NASA Crew-6 and multiple Starlink runs, is set to land on the drone ship 'A Shortfall of Gravitas' in the Atlantic. The flight marks SpaceX's 60th orbital launch of 2026, with satellite deployment scheduled about 61 minutes after liftoff.

↗Source: Spaceflight Now

Combining SDSS-V Milky Way Mapper and Gaia DR3 data, researchers applied unsupervised machine learning to 2,185 stars in the inner Galactic halo and identified five candidate substructures, designated FO1 through FO5, that appear to be debris from galaxies the Milky Way absorbed billions of years ago. The analysis used 12 chemical and orbital dimensions simultaneously, which proved essential: some structures share similar orbits but have distinct elemental compositions, and others show the reverse pattern, making them invisible to traditional stream-finding methods. One candidate, FO2, shows unusually high nitrogen abundance, pointing to tidal debris from a disrupted massive globular cluster rather than a whole galaxy. The result strengthens the case that the densest, most gravitationally bound region of the halo preserves merger history that shallower surveys miss.

↗Source: arXiv astro-ph

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The Telemetry Team

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