A private company, Intuitive Machines, got their lander onto the Moon today, says APNews. The lander's signal was weaker than expected, so it might not have been a perfect landing, but still it seems to qualify as the first US Moon landing since the Apollo program, over 50 years ago, and the first Moon landing by a private company.
2023 false color JWST image of remnant of SN 1987A - NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Matsuura (Cardiff University), R. Arendt (NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center & University of Maryland, Baltimore County), C. Fransson (Stockholm University), J. Larsson (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), A. Pagan (STScI) (source)
Also from APNews, a new study of data from the NASA's James Webb Space Telescope says that traces of argon and sulfur detected in light from the debris of a star whose supernova explosion was visible to us 30 years ago—SN 1987A—indicate that the star's core has collapsed into a neutron star—an incredibly dense lattice of neutrons formed from protons and electrons combining under extreme temperature and pressure; "the line ratios and velocities can be explained by ionizing radiation from a neutron star illuminating gas from the inner parts of the exploded star."
There are an estimated 1 billion neutron stars in our galaxy, but many of those would be very old and emitting very little energy, making them difficulty to detect—and this would be the first time we've observed one being formed. It is 12 miles (20 km) in diameter, and 1.5 times the mass of the Sun. Sanduleak -16 202, its blue supergiant progenitor, was 20 solar masses.
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