Tag: michele ferrara

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Free Astronomy Magazine – January-February 2026 Issue Available For Reading And Download

Above: An artistic rendering of a dust and gas disk encircling the young exoplanet CT Cha b, 625 light-years from Earth. Spectroscopic data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope suggests the disk contains the raw materials for moon formation: diacetylene, hydrogen cyanide, propyne, acetylene, ethane, carbon dioxide, and benzene. The planet appears at lower right, while its host star and surrounding circumstellar disk are visible in the background. [NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Gabriele Cugno (University of Zürich, NCCR PlanetS), Sierra Grant (Carnegie Institution for Science), Joseph Olmsted (STScI), Leah Hustak (STScI)]

And a slightly delayed announcement, but at least I got to share more molecules – the most recent issue of Free Astronomy Magazine (January-February 2026) is available for your reading and downloading pleasure in English, Italian, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Chinese at www.astropublishing.com (and facebook).

Work has also been light (no pun intended) on the editorial front with the articles being in English to start. A few folks on the Bluesky side have mentioned in past posts about the benefit for those trying to learn another language to have something (a) correct and (b) highly interesting to practice with, for which having six languages now represented covers quite a bit of territory. Not that the wait for the Universal Translator is going to be all that long at this point…

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Free Astronomy Magazine – November-December 2025 Issue Available For Reading And Download

Above: The Butterfly Nebula, located about 3400 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius, is one of the best-studied planetary nebulas in our galaxy. This stunning nebula was previously imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Now, Webb has captured a new view of this nebula. Text from www.esa.int. Image available at www.almaobservatory.org.

The most recent issue of Free Astronomy Magazine (November-December 2025) is available for your reading and downloading pleasure in English, Italian, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Chinese at www.astropublishing.com (and facebook).

Closing out 2025 with "The Planet Issue," including the +6,000 now-confirmed extra-solar planets and two deep dives into TRAPPIST-1 (d and e).

Somewhere in my astronomy book collection is my first-print edition of the Peterson Field Guide to Star and Planets (right), containing an actual paper clipping from the Syracuse Herald-Journal (that old) about the discovery of the first exo-planet to be somewhat confidently detected – 51 Pegasi b – back in 1995.

My, how the times have changed.

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Free Astronomy Magazine – July-August 2025 Issue Available For Reading And Download

Above: Combined MeerKAT and James Webb Space Telescope images. The star-forming region Sagittarius C, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, is about 200 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. Huge vertical filamentary structures in the MeerKAT radio data echo those Webb captured on a smaller scale, in infrared, in a blue-green hydrogen cloud. Astronomers think the strong magnetic fields in the heart of the galaxy are shaping the filaments. For Webb, color is assigned by shifting the infrared spectrum to visible light colors. The shortest infrared wavelengths are bluer, and the longer wavelengths appear more red. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crow

The most recent issue of Free Astronomy Magazine (July-August 2025) is available for your reading and downloading pleasure in English, Italian, Spanish, French, and Arabic at www.astropublishing.com (and facebook).

Back with a cover story by our fearless leader Michele Ferrara concerning the ever-present desire by some scientists (OK, effectively all scientists) to be the very first to the gate in making a major discovery. In this case, Nikku Madhusudhan of Cambridge, with his group's publication at https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.05566, followed soon-ish after by https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13407, a follow-up to be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12267, and more digestible variations of recent re-assessments at such places as https://www.straitstimes.com/world/doubt-cast-on-claim-of-hints-of-life-on-faraway-planet.

That said, given how long it takes to get time on major facilities to obtain this data, how well the astronomical community (but certainly not the twitter/X-verse) is at tempering such studies with significant follow-up assessments of the same data, and the fact that such a somewhat early claim and the associated press are among the few reasons why the community outside of the astronomical community are aware of the amazing work done by, for instance, the JWST teams, we will all likely continue to let such cycles cycle until someone lands on that particular gold mine.