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    Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Rocket Moves Closer to Launch

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    Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket rolled to the launchpad for a series of tests in preparation for its maiden flight later this year.There’s an easy knock against the space dreams of Jeff Bezos and his rocket company, Blue Origin: In its 24th year of existence, the company has yet to launch a single thing to orbit.Blue Origin’s accomplishments to date are modest — a small vehicle known as New Shepard that takes space tourists and experiments on brief suborbital jaunts. By contrast, SpaceX, the rocket company started by the other high-profile space billionaire, Elon Musk, today dominates the launch market.On Wednesday, Blue Origin hopes to change the narrative, holding a coming-out party of sorts for its new big rocket.In the morning, at Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the doors to a giant garage opened. The rocket, as tall as a 32-story building, lay horizontally on the trusses of a mobile launch platform.The contraption was sitting on a transport mechanism that resembles several long mechanical centipedes, but with wheels, 288 in all, instead of feet. It began rolling slowly out and up a concrete incline, a quarter-mile trip toward the launchpad.The rocket will undergo at least a week of tests before returning to the garage.“I’m very confident there’s going to be a launch this year,” Dave Limp, the chief executive of Blue Origin, said in an interview. “We’re going to show a lot of progress this year. I think people are going to see how fast we can move.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Is This Black Hole the Hungriest and the Brightest?

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      Scientists debate whether this object is the brightest in the visible universe, as a new study suggests.Astronomers claimed on Monday that they had discovered what might be the hungriest, most luminous object in the visible universe — a supermassive black hole that was swallowing a star a day. That would be the mass equivalent of 370 suns a year disappearing down a cosmic gullet 11 billion years ago at the dawn of time.Burp indeed.In a paper published in Nature Astronomy, Christian Wolf of the Australian National University and his colleagues from Australia and Europe, called the object at the center of a newly discovered quasar known as J0529-4351 “the fastest growing black hole in the universe.”According to their estimates, this black hole tipped the scales as one of the most massive black holes ever found: 17 billion times as massive as the sun.But other astrophysicists cast doubt on the result, questioning the methods by which the mass and luminosity of the new quasar had been estimated. They said the calculations were too uncertain to be conclusive. “They may have the right value, but I don’t think other observers would be shocked if it turned out the true mass was somewhat less,” said Daniel Holz, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Chicago.“It does seem like an extreme object,” he said. But, he added, “I would be shocked if this turned out to be the most luminous quasar on the sky.”Jenny Greene, a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University, called the result “cute.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More