January 2026 News Roundup
- Leah Grossman
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Artemis II Launch
NASA’s Artemis II mission is the first crewed flight as part of NASA’s Artemis campaign, set to send people back to the moon since 1972. Artemis II will send four astronauts around the Moon in the Orion spacecraft. The mission will last approximately 10 days, and will do a flyby around the moon before using its gravity to enter a free-return trajectory (where no or minimal propulsion is required for the return trip) to Earth, splashing down in the ocean at approximately 40,000 km/h, the fastest rocket reentry ever attempted. The rocket has been rolled out to the launchpad and could launch as soon as February 8th, a few days delayed from the original earliest launch date of February 6th due to weather. The wet dress rehearsal, which takes the rocket through nearly the full launch procedures, stopping shortly before liftoff, is scheduled for February 2nd.
Update: due to a few issues during the wet dress rehearsal, the launch has been postponed until March at the earliest.
Protostar EC 53
On January 21st, an image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was released, showing protostar EC 53. A protostar is a very young star, the first step in stellar formation, and is still gathering mass from its nebula. Additionally, EC 53 is surrounded by a proto-planetary disk, a disk of gas and dust that could eventually form planets. By analysing spectra of EC 53 in the infrared wavelengths, researchers led by Jeong-Eun Lee from the Seoul National University in South Korea discovered crystalline silicates forming throughout the proto-planetary disk. These materials have previously been observed in comets in the extremely cold distant parts of our solar system (such as the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud), but it was previously unknown where these materials came from, because they require intense heat to form. They also detected that approximately every 18 months, EC 53 begins a 100-day phase of absorbing nearby gas and dust and subsequently ejecting some of that material as jets, explaining how these materials may have traveled across space and made it to our solar system.
Little Red Dots
Little red dots (LRDs) are objects first discovered by JWST, and existed approximately 0.6 to 1.6 billion years after the Big Bang. These are believed to be small, early galaxies, and appear bright red, hence the name. The problem: one would assume these bright galaxies are bright because they’re full of stars, but based on our understanding of galactic evolution, galaxies with that many stars shouldn’t have been able to have formed yet based on the timeframes of LRDs. One theory is that the brightness comes from supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centres of these galaxies, since black holes can appear to shine extremely brightly. (More accurately, the gas around the black holes can shine very brightly. Black holes, of course, have such a strong gravitational pull that light cannot escape, so they do not shine at all.) However, LRDs don’t exhibit the same properties as more recent active galactic nuclei (AGNs) from SMBHs; for example, LRDs have minimal X-ray and radio emission. A paper published on January 14th suggests that these are very young and low-mass SMBHs, surrounded by gas that gets extremely hot and bright as it gets sucked into the black hole, bright enough to be visible across the 13 billion years since.
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