NASA Sizes Up the Universe’s Biggest Black Holes to Massive Radio Array to Search for Extraterrestrial Signals

Today’s stories include Rethinking the Shape of the Milky Way Galaxy and an Ominous Heating Event is Unfolding in the Oceans

NASA Animation Sizes Up the Universe’s Biggest Black Holes--A new NASA animation below highlights the “super” in supermassive black holes. These monsters lurk in the centers of most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way, and contain between 100,000 and tens of billions of times more mass than our Sun.

New measurements suggest rethinking the shape of the Milky Way galaxy, reports Bob Yirka for Phys.org. --"A team of Chinese space scientists has found that the traditional view of the Milky Way galaxy as having four arms is not correct. In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, the group describes their analysis of multiple sources of data in an attempt to gain a true shape of the Milky Way."

Massive radio array to search for extraterrestrial signals from other civilizations reports the SETI Institute--"The National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), situated about 50 miles west of Socorro, New Mexico, is collecting data that scientists will analyze for the type of emissions that only artificial transmitters make, signals that would betray the existence of a technically accomplished society."

NASA: Webb finds water vapor, but is it from a rocky planet or its star? —"GJ 486 b is about 30% larger than the Earth and three times as massive, which means it is a rocky world with stronger gravity than Earth. It orbits a red dwarf star in just under 1.5 Earth days. It is too close to its star to be within the habitable zone, with a surface temperature of about 800 degrees Fahrenheit. And yet, Webb observations show hints of water vapor."

An ominous heating event is unfolding in the oceans--Average sea surface temperatures have soared to record highs—and stayed there, reports Matt Simon for ArsTechnica.com. “It’s surprising to me that we’re this far off the trajectory,” says Robert Rohde, lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit that gathers climate data. “Usually when you have a particular warming event, we’re beating the previous record by a little bit. Right now we’re sitting well above the past records for this time of year, for a considerable period of time.”

Elon Musk provides detailed review of Starship’s first launch—and what’s next--"Weirdly, we did not see evidence of the rock tornado actually damaging engines," reports Ars Technica.