. It is November 3, and today we have a treat from NASA. A couple of days ago I wrote about NASA's Lucy mission preparing to fly by its first asteroid target, the small main-belt asteroid Dinkinesh. Now, it is complete.

This flyby was not so much about the science but rather proving the capability of the spacecraft to point its instruments and take data while whizzing by an asteroid. In this case, Lucy zoomed by Dinkinesh at a speed of 10,000 mph (4,470 meters per second). And, as can be seen from the first images returned by Lucy, the spacecraft succeeded.

“We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” said Akos Bogdan of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) who leads a new paper in the journal Nature Astronomy describing these results. “We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected.” This magnifying effect is known as gravitational lensing.

Bogdan and his team found the black hole in a galaxy named UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, located 3.5 billion light-years from Earth. Webb data, however, has revealed the galaxy is much more distant than the cluster, at 13.2 billion light-years from Earth, when the universe was only 3% of its current age.

Then over two weeks of observations with Chandra showed the presence of intense, superheated, X-ray emitting gas in this galaxy – a trademark for a growing supermassive black hole. The light from the galaxy and the X-rays from gas around its supermassive black hole are magnified by about a factor of four by intervening matter in Abell 2744 (due to gravitational lensing), enhancing the infrared signal detected by Webb and allowing Chandra to detect the faint X-ray source.

Given the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that puts the age of this black hole at 13.2 billion years.

Even more astounding to scientists, this black hole is a whopper — 10 times bigger than the black hole in our own Milky Way.

An astounding gamma-ray burst, dubbed GRB 221009A, continues to amaze even though it has been more than a year since it was detected. Scientists from Italy have recently published a study that shows how our planet’s ionosphere was impacted as a result of its high intensity and long duration.

The ionosphere is one of the Earth’s atmospheric layers, stretching from 60 km to more than 950 km in altitude. Containing electrically charged plasma, its lower half, called the bottom-side, extends until 350 km. Beyond 350 km lies the upper half, called the top-side.

With 3 CMEs already inbound, the addition of a 4th, full halo CME has prompted SWPC forecasters to upgrade the G2 Watch on 01 Dec to a G3 Watch. This faster-moving halo CME is progged to merge with 2 of the 3 upstream CMEs, all arriving at Earth on 01 Dec. G3 (Strong) conditions are now likely on 01 Dec. Continue to monitor spaceweather.gov for the latest updates.