Space & Astronomy

The astronauts that flew to the ISS as part of the SpaceX Crew-3 mission are back on Earth after almost six months on the orbiting lab. They splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico aboard the Crew Dragon Endurance, which made its debut flight with the same astronauts back in November 2021, on May 6th at 12:43am ET — and NASA has captured a pretty spectacular night video of the event.

As you can see, the Endurance capsule looks particularly glowy in infrared, most likely because it reached a temperature of around 3500 degrees Fahrenheit upon entering the atmosphere. The recovery team pulled out NASA astronauts Kayla Barron, Raja Chari and Tom Marshburn, as well as ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer from the capsule shortly after splashdown. Marshburn is the only veteran astronaut out of the four, and he completed his fifth spacewalk during the mission. It was the first ISS mission for the other three, with Maurer being only the second ESA astronaut to fly aboard a Dragon capsule.

The Crew-3 astronauts spent 177 days in orbit and started their stay with a bang. Shortly after they arrived on the station, all the astronauts onboard had to seek safety on their transport craft when the ISS passed dangerously close to a field of orbital debris. The US State Department later said that the debris came from a Russian missile test that destroyed one of the country’s own satellites.

SpaceX’s next manned mission to the ISS is scheduled to launch in September with two NASA astronauts, one JAXA astronaut and one Russian cosmonaut. It will be the fifth crewed NASA Commercial Crew flight so far after Crew-4 launched to the station back in April.

A team of MIT scientists is looking for black hole echoes in an effort to shed some light on the regions of spacetime that largely remain a mystery to us. See, black holes only show any semblance of activity when they feed on gas and dust from one of their orbiting stars. When they do, they give off bursts of X-ray light that echo off the gas being consumed and which illuminate their surroundings. That’s what a black hole echo is. While it’s technically an X-ray echo, the team worked with MIT education and music scholars to turn the emission into audible sound waves you can listen to below.

For their new study, the astronomers developed an automated search tool called “Reverberation Machine” to comb through data gathered by NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, the X-ray telescope aboard the ISS. Their algorithm identified 26 black hole X-ray binary systems, which are systems with a star that’s being consumed by a black hole at times. Ten of them are close enough for the echoes to be observable, and eight were previously not known to emit echoes. 

So what did the team find out by analyzing the echoes? They found that the black holes initially go through a “hard” state upon feeding, wherein it forms a corona of high-energy photons and launches a jet of high-energy particles close to the speed of light. This state lasts for several weeks. After one last high-energy flash when the corona and jet die out, the black hole enters a “soft,” low-energy state. 

The scientists believe that these findings can help explain how supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies can help shape their formation. As Erin Kara, assistant professor of physics at MIT, said:

“The role of black holes in galaxy evolution is an outstanding question in modern astrophysics. Interestingly, these black hole binaries appear to be ‘mini’ supermassive black holes, and so by understanding the outbursts in these small, nearby systems, we can understand how similar outbursts in supermassive black holes affect the galaxies in which they reside.”