THEY say the first 100 kilometres are the best. Moments after the door slides
shut with a reassuring “ker-chunk”, the acceleration takes hold, pushing you
gently but firmly into your seat. Terra firma drops precipitously from view, and
your internal organs groan in sympathy. The base tower seems endless as it
slides past the window. Then you’re in open sky, at first a seemingly infinite
expanse of blue, but gradually darkening until the Milky Way appears in all its
glory. And throughout, the shimmering blue pool that is the Earth curves away
beneath you, a sight that was once the preserve of a privileged few.
After what seems like forever—but is actually little more than 10
minutes—the acceleration eases. Now cruising at 2000 kilometres an hour,
at an altitude of 150 kilometres and rising, you begin to feel uncomfortably
buoyant in your seat. Trying to keep calm, you avoid dwelling on the fact that
for the next 18 hours the only thing stopping you from plummeting to Earth is
little more than a glorified piece of rope. A cable some 47,000 kilometres long,
yet no more than a few centimetres wide, stretching from the surface of the
Earth into orbit. You are taking a trip on the space elevator. Get ready for the
ride of your life.
The idea of an elevator to the heavens may sound preposterous, like an
updated version of the Tower of Babel. But it’s a serious proposition. Two
independent NASA teams recently thrashed out the technological requirements for
such a project and found them to be feasible. Extraordinarily demanding, yes,
but feasible.…
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
