The Crew Dragon Endeavor spacecraft splashing down at the end of the Ax-1 mission (Photo courtesy SpaceX)

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A few hours ago, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft concluded its Ax-1 mission by splashing down without problems. On board were Michael López-Alegría, Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe, and Mark Pathy, who ended this completely private space mission in the Atlantic Ocean after leaving the International Space Station about 16 hours earlier. Shortly after splashing down, the SpaceX ship called the “Megan” went to retrieve the Endeavour and its crew to transport them to the coast.

The galaxies NGC 1385, NGC 1566, NGC 3344, and NGC 6503

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports the results of a study conducted on 108 galaxies containing nuclear star clusters in search of intermediate-mass black holes. A team of researchers used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to look for the traces of this type of black hole that has so far been very elusive. In 29 of these galaxies, they found emissions they believe came from this type of black hole and traces of the destruction of thousands of stars. This suggests that intermediate-mass black holes grow by devouring stars.

Hickson Compact Group 40 (HCG 40)

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April 25, 2022, will mark the 32nd anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s deployment into orbit, and to celebrate it, NASA and ESA have published images of a quintet of galaxies known as Hickson Compact Group 40 (HCG 40). This group of three spiral galaxies, one elliptical galaxy, and one lenticular galaxy is interesting for a number of reasons including the fact that within about a billion years they are predicted to collide and start merging.

GNz7q with the likely supermassive black hole precursor in red

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An article published in the journal “Nature” reports the discovery of a possible precursor of a supermassive black hole in the early universe. A team of researchers discovered the object cataloged as GNz7q in the data of the GOODS survey conducted by combining observations made with different telescopes. From Earth, we see GNz7q as it was about 750 million years after the Big Bang and its emissions can only be partially explained by a remarkable star formation. The conclusion is that there’s probably a supermassive black hole growing within the dust that fills up the primordial galaxy’s nucleus and over time it will become a quasar, a type of extremely bright active galactic nucleus.

Zhai Zhigang, Wang Yaping, and Ye Guangfu after their landing (Photo courtesy Xinhua. All rights reserved)

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A few hours ago, the three Chinese taikonauts of the Shenzhou 13 mission returned to Earth after spending almost exactly six months on the Chinese space station’s Tianhe core module. Zhai Zhigang, Wang Yaping, and Ye Guangfu departed Tianhe about nine hours earlier to land at a site called Dongfeng in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. A procedure that greatly reduces the reentry time to Earth worked perfectly. This was the first Chinese space mission to last six months, roughly twice as much as Shenzhou 12. This is the normal duration for the upcoming missions to the Chinese space station.