Will Russia & China put a nuclear power plant on the moon?

Russia, China, and nuclear power plants on the moon – oh my!

The head of Russia’s space agency dropped an intriguing announcement: Russia and China are considering teaming up to build a nuclear power plant on the moon between 2033 and 2035.

🚀 Why the moon? Electricity will be needed to establish Russia’s goal of lunar settlements, and solar panels won’t capture enough sunlight. 

🚀 The announcement also included talks of Russia’s ‘space tugboat’ project, which would help transport cargo between orbits. 

🚀 Russian officials have spoken before about their dream of mining the moon, but the space program has suffered recent setbacks (like the crash of the Luna-25 spacecraft in 2023).

🚀 China, meanwhile, has been working to put the first Chinese astronaut on the moon before 2030. 

🚀 Russia claims it’s helping China with a joint lunar program and would consider a joint Russia-China crewed mission and shared lunar base.

Cheers to the Space Race, round two 🥂

Small but mighty: mini supermassive black holes are now a thing

The James Webb Space Telescope discovered something special about a sequence of faint red dots in the night sky 🔭 

Although they look like normal galaxies, a new study found that the red dots are actually small versions of supermassive black holes.

What makes these itty bitty SMBHs stand out? They might help researchers solve the puzzle of ‘problematic quasars.’

☄️ Quasars are super luminous SMBHs so bright that they can be observed until the edge of the universe. 

☄️ Quasars are deemed ‘problematic’ when they seem too young to be so bright. “It's like looking at a five-year-old child that is two meters tall. Something doesn't add up,” said the study’s author. 

☄️ We generally don’t have much evidence about how SMBHs form. But now, researchers are wondering: are these mini red SMBHs an earlier phase of problematic quasars?

TLDR; we’re one step closer to understanding the early days of supermassive black holes. 

The ‘dead’ galaxy that lived fast and died young

Astronomers just observed a galaxy that suddenly stopped forming new stars 13 billion years ago 🪦✨🪦

We’ve spotted ‘dead’ galaxies like this before, but this is the oldest one we’ve ever seen. It formed when the universe itself was just 700 million years old – basically the cosmos’ infancy. 

The coolest part? 

Until now, models of the early universe were based on the modern universe. But, with this discovery, researchers can update early universe models with more accurate data. 

Though we haven’t cracked the code on time travel, observing a mummified galaxy is a solid second option 🖖

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