Space

Jan 18th, 2021 - COPYRIGHT © 1998 - 2021 SCITECHDAILY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. All 468 Stars in Milky Way Stellar Stream Theia 456 Are Related – “It’s Like Finding a Needle in a Haystack” Examination of Theia 456 finds its nearly 500 stars were born at same time. The Milky Way A stellar stream is a rare linear pattern — rather than a cluster — of stars. After combining multiple datasets captured by the Gaia space telescope, a team of astrophysicists found that all of Theia 456’s 468 stars were born at the same time and are traveling in the same direction across the sky. “Most stellar clusters ... [Read More]

Jan 18th, 2021 - Two giant radio galaxies have been discovered with South Africa's powerful MeerKAT telescope. These galaxies are thought to be amongst the largest single objects in the Universe. The discovery has been published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . Whereas normal radio galaxies are fairly common, only a few hundred of these have radio jets exceeding 700 kilo-parsecs in size, or around 22 times the size of the Milky Way. These truly enormous systems are dubbed 'giant radio galaxies." Despite the scarcity of giant radio galaxies, the authors found two of these cosmic ... [Read More]

Jan 18th, 2021 - The core mass of the giant exoplanet WASP-107b is much lower than what was thought necessary to build up the immense gas envelope surrounding giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn , astronomers at Université de Montréal have found. This intriguing discovery by Ph.D. student Caroline Piaulet of UdeM’s Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) suggests that gas-giant planets form a lot more easily than previously believed. Piaulet is part of the groundbreaking research team of UdeM astrophysics professor Björn Benneke that in 2019 announced the first detection of water on an exoplanet ... [Read More]

Jan 18th, 2021 - Here are the key take-outs from the 237th’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the "butterfly wing"- shaped nebula, NGC 2346. The nebula is about 2,000 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Monoceros. Credit: NASA/STScI Each January, the American Astronomical Society (AAS) conducts a meeting widely hailed as the “Superbowl of astronomy”, in which astronomers gather from around the world to share their latest results. Last year it was in Honolulu. But this year, thanks to COVID-19, it was ... [Read More]

Jan 17th, 2021 - The most distant quasar known has been discovered. The quasar, observed just 670 million years after the Big Bang , is 1000 times more luminous than the Milky Way . It is powered by the earliest known supermassive black hole , which weighs in at more than 1.6 billion times the mass of the Sun. Seen more than 13 billion years ago, this fully formed distant quasar is also the earliest yet discovered, providing astronomers with insight into the formation of massive galaxies in the early Universe. The result was released at the January 2021 meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Quasars, ... [Read More]

Jan 17th, 2021 - Most stars in the universe today are found in massive galaxies called ellipticals, named for their stretched-out-circle shape. Unlike our own galaxy, which is a spiral with arms extending out from the center, the edges of elliptical galaxies are smooth. At first glance, these galaxies might seem like simple systems. However, they are among the most mysterious objects in the cosmos. Elliptical galaxies host extremely old stars and are not forming new stars. Exactly how these dead galaxies form is a question both observational and theoretical astronomers have tried to answer for a long time . ... [Read More]

Jan 17th, 2021 - Interactions with binary companions shape the stellar winds blowing from elderly stars, generating the dazzling array of complex shapes found in the planetary nebulae they produce, a new study finds. While massive stars explode in brilliant supernovae when they die, those with low and intermediate masses — less than eight times the mass of the Sun — swell and evolve into a type of cool, highly luminous red giant, also known as an asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star. During this short, final stage, as the aging star runs low on fuel, the outer layers of its atmosphere are lost into space as ... [Read More]

Jan 16th, 2021 - An illustrated rendering of 'Oumuamua (Credit: NASA JPL) Nicole Karlis and Salon January 16, 2021 Are we alone in the universe? It's a question humans have been asking for thousands of years—but when a bizarrely fast, cigar-shaped interstellar object jetted past Earth on its trip through our solar system, Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes scientists weren't ready to seriously consider that it was of artificial origin. But Loeb is beyond consideration — he says it's very possible that 'Oumuamua (pronounced "oh moo ah moo ah") was an interstellar spacecraft. Back in October 2017, a ... [Read More]

Jan 15th, 2021 - The Sky This Week: The Moon meets Mars and Uranus Friday, January 15 Comet 88P/Howell is slowly fading, but its 11th- to 12th-magnitude glow is within reach of a 6-inch scope under dark skies. Early this evening, you’ll find it among the stars of Aquarius, less than 7° northwest of globular cluster NGC 7492. The two should be similar in brightness and likely even appearance, although long-exposure images of Howell might still reveal a hint of its green-hued glow. Once you’ve found the comet, look also 8.5° to its east-northeast, where you’ll see the slightly brighter magnitude 10.6 ... [Read More]

Jan 15th, 2021 - The gravitational waves we’ve detected so far have been like tsunamis in the spacetime sea, but it’s believed that gentle ripples should also pervade the universe. Now, a 13-year survey of light from pulsars scattered across the galaxy may have revealed the first hints of these background signals. Gravitational waves are distortions in the very fabric of space and time, usually created in collisions between black holes and/or neutron stars. The waves were first predicted a century ago by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, but weren’t directly detected until 2015 , with dozens ... [Read More]

Jan 15th, 2021 - @SissiCao. " /> NASA’s New Discovery: The Universe Is Emptier And We Are More Alone Than We Thought Remember the stunning close-up photo of Pluto that lit up the internet in 2015? The spacecraft taking that picture, NASA’s New Horizons probe, just made another groundbreaking discovery, this time about the deeper truth of our universe: that there are likely much fewer galaxies in space than we initially thought, meaning that our chance to Earth-like planets and extraterrestrial life, too, has dimmed. Scientists have long believed that there are as many as two trillion galaxies in the ... [Read More]

Jan 15th, 2021 - Astronomers are winding back the clock on the expanding remains of a nearby, exploded star. By using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, they retraced the speedy shrapnel from the blast to calculate a more accurate estimate of the location and time of the stellar detonation. The victim is a star that exploded long ago in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way. The doomed star left behind an expanding, gaseous corpse, a supernova remnant named 1E 0102.2-7219, which NASA's Einstein Observatory first discovered in X-rays. Like detectives, researchers sifted through archival ... [Read More]

Jan 14th, 2021 - CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA declared the Mars digger dead Thursday after failing to burrow deep into the red planet to take its temperature. Scientists in Germany spent two years trying to get their heat probe, dubbed the mole, to drill into the Martian crust. But the 16-inch-long (40-centimeter) device that is part of NASA’s InSight lander couldn’t gain enough friction in the red dirt. It was supposed to bury 16 feet (5 meters) into Mars, but only drilled down a couple of feet (about a half meter). Following one last unsuccessful attempt to hammer itself down over the weekend with ... [Read More]

Jan 14th, 2021 - When talking about planetary ring systems, Saturn and Jupiter likely spring to mind — they are our closest ringed neighbors, after all. But although impressive, their rings aren’t that large, in the grand scheme of things. Jupiter’s aren’t that large even when judging only by our Solar System. Neptune and Uranus also have rings, but they’re tinier. Luckily, the Universe is a huge place, and there’s no shortage of beautiful ring systems to enjoy. There are also plenty of grand, sprawling ones to take your breath away. So, today, let’s take a look at what these ring systems ... [Read More]

Jan 14th, 2021 - When three galaxies collide, what happens to the huge black holes at the centers of each? A new study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and several other telescopes reveals new information about how many black holes are furiously growing after these galactic smash ups. Astronomers want to learn more about galactic collisions because the subsequent mergers are a key way that galaxies and the giant black holes in their cores grow over cosmic time. "There have been many studies of what happens to supermassive black holes when two galaxies merge," said Adi Foord of Stanford University, who ... [Read More]

Jan 14th, 2021 - This might be the fastest magnetar in the whole galaxy It's a terrible infant. A rapidly twirling, ultramagnetic, 500-year-old baby neutron star has been spotted zipping at never-before-seen speeds through the Milky Way. The flickering X-rays and radio waves of this giant baby — adorably named J1818.0-1607 — would likely have first appeared in the sky when Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish scientist who proposed that the sun (and not Earth ) was the center of the universe, first looked up at the heavens. If Copernicus had orbital X-ray telescopes or powerful radio receivers, he would have ... [Read More]