Space and Astronomy News for the 31st of May 2025

SpaceX Starship 9 flight

Big space news this week is no doubt the 9th test flight of SpaceX's Starship mega rocket. 

On the plus side, this was the second flight of the massive booster which was flown on flight 7 in January of this year and captured back at the launch pad with its "chopsticks". (Check out more here.)

Starship 9 launch. Image via SpaceX 

While the booster made it to space, it broke apart some 6 minutes and 20 seconds into the flight just as it had started its return burn. It suffered a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" (RUD) as described by SpaceX or as we like to call here at BINTEL a "Ballistic Angular Non-recoverable Gyrations" (BANG).

The Starship spacecraft itself got further into the compared to flights 7 and 8, however its mission objective of releasing dummy Starlink satellites failed when the doors failed to open. It also suffered a breakup during re-entry.

Starship re-entering over Namibia

No firm date for the next Starship launch. SpaceX have indicated an increase in their frequency, aiming to launch every three to four weeks.

Has another cousin for Pluto been found?

One of the reasons Pluto was booted from the line up of Solar System main planets in 2006 was Pluto was simply the first discovered of what was turning out to be a another group of Solar System locals called dwarf planets.

In fact, there's now  general agreement on the largest nine potential dwarf planets :  Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, Quaoar, Sedna, Ceres, and Orcus.  (The IAU has recognised five of these.)

Dwarf planets recognised by the IAU, plus the newly discovered 2017 OF201

There's another few that under investigation, with researchers from Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Natural Sciences lead by Sihao Chen announcing this week the discovery of an extraordinary trans-Neptunian object (TNO), which has been assigned the name  2017 OF201. (This is just a catalogue number for now. No doubt a more prosaic name will be bestowed to it soon.)

This object is the largest new body found in the Solar System for some years, and may be large enough to qualify as a distant dwarf planet. It was found by trawling through large chunks of publicly available data obtained from Victor M. Blanco Telescope and Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).  2017 OF201 was found in 19 different images taken over 17 years. It appears to be around 700km in diameter, although more observations using ground-based radio telescopes will be needed to narrow this figure down.

It has an extreme orbit around the Sun which takes some 25,000 years to complete. 

“The object’s aphelion—the farthest point on the orbit from the Sun—is more than 1600 times that of the Earth’s orbit,” explains Cheng. “Meanwhile, its perihelion—the closest point on its orbit to the Sun—is 44.5 times that of the Earth’s orbit, similar to Pluto's orbit.”

Illustration of where 2017 OF201 is currently located and how its vast orbit compares to the inner Solar System.

Such an orbit might also point to history of interactions with other large planets or it  maybe even ejected to the Oort cloud and then pushed back into the inner Solar System.

The discovery of 2017 OF201 might also pose problems about for existence of "Planet 9" a large body at the edge of the Solar System we talked about last week which has been proposed to explain the movements of groups of TNOs.

Read about this fascinating discovery here.

Yet again, there seems to be much to discover about our home in the Milky Way, the Solar System.

JWST Deep Field peers back in time

A new image released this week from the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) peers back even further than the 2016 image of the same region taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. 

An image of galaxy cluster Abell S1063 taken by Hubble as part of  as part of the Frontier Fields programme.

In this image, the bright central region is the vast galaxy cluster Abell S1063 which is approx. 4.5 billion light years away from Earth. The combined mass of this group of clusters is enough to bend the light of even more distant galaxies through a process called gravitational lensing. 

Much like a telescope's lens, this galactic "lens" brightens these galaxies so they can be observed.

The JWST specialises in deep field images such as this.  It's where the telescope spends large amounts of time observing a single target. In this case, Webb spent over 120 hours peering into this view obtaining images of some the earliest parts of the Universe's history. 

This image was obtained as part of Webb's GLIMPSE program, which aims to observe galaxies that existed when the Universe was only 200 million years old as well as the earliest but as yet unobserved Population I stars.  (We touched on the various populations of stars in an earlier BINTEL blog article.)

You can read ore about this amazing Webb image here

Comet C/2025 K1 (Atlas)

A new comet has been discovered, C/2025 K1 (Atlas). It's still very faint and at this point more than likely visible in binoculars in the Northern Hemisphere in October after possibly a brief stint in our southern sky in September. 

Path of C/2025 K1 (Atlas) via The SkyLive

You can follow this comet here. Like all comets, a lot will depend on how it survives its closest encounter around the Sun.

Cheers,

Earl White

BINTEL 31st May 2025