Scienceblogtwo

An worldwide team of researchers makes observations that defy our existing understanding, including the location of the source for deep-space rapid radio bursts and a changing, magnetic environment. The energy released by one fast radio burst (FRB), a millisecond-long cosmic explosion, is equal to the sun's annual output. More than 15 years after their initial discovery, deep-space pulses of electromagnetic radio waves still astound scientists with their puzzling nature. Recent research just adds to the enigma surrounding them.                                                                                               Unexpected new findings from a collection of cosmic radio bursts by an international team of researchers cast doubt on the convention...

The majestic Wide Field Camera 3 image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the spiral galaxy NGC 5495's stately, arching spiral arms. NGC 5495 is a Seyfert galaxy, a kind of galaxy with a very brilliant center region, and is around 300 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Hydra. The electromagnetic radiation released by dust and gas sucked into a supermassive black hole dominates the electromagnetic radiation in these extremely bright cores, which astronomers refer to as active galactic nuclei. A series of observations, including this one, were made by astronomers who are investigating supermassive black holes that are hiding in the centers of distant galaxies. It can be particularly difficult to study the central regions of galaxies since they are so brilliant due to a combination of star formation regions, light from existing stars, and light produced by materials falling into supermassive black holes. Astronomers were able to separate the numerous ...

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, astronomers have discovered evidence of a "hot spot" orbiting Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the heart of our galaxy (ALMA). The discovery aids in our understanding of the mysterious and dynamic surroundings of our supermassive black hole. We believe we are seeing a hot gas bubble whirling around Sagittarius A* in an orbit that is roughly the same size as Mercury's but completes one full cycle in only around 70 minutes. This calls for a staggering velocity of roughly 30% of the speed of light! explains Maciek Wielgus of the Bonn, Germany-based Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. He oversaw the research that was reported in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics today, September 22, 2022. This image depicts a still of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* as seen by the Event Horizon Collaboration (EHT), along with an artist's rendering showing the location of the hot spot and its orbit as predicte...

On Monday, September 26, Jupiter will be at opposition, providing viewers with stunning views of Jupiter all night long. Opposition is when an astronomical object rises in the east as the Sun sets in the west, placing the object and the Sun on opposite sides of the Earth from the perspective of the surface. Jupiter is in opposition every 13 months, which makes it appear larger and more brilliant than at any other time of the year. That's not all, though. This time, Jupiter will also approach Earth more closely than it has in the previous 59 years. As a result, Earth and Jupiter pass each other at varying distances throughout the year. This is due to the fact that Earth and Jupiter do not orbit the Sun in perfect circles. Jupiter's closest approach to Earth this year will coincide with opposition, which is extremely rare. At its closest approach, Jupiter will be 367 million miles away from Earth, which is almost the same distance as it was in 1963. At its furthest point, the eno...

The first pictures and spectra of Mars were taken by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope on September 5. The robust telescope complements the information being gathered by orbiters, rovers, and other telescopes by offering a distinctive perspective on our neighboring planet through its infrared sensitivity. Webb is a global partnership between the Canadian Space Agency and the European Space Agency (Canadian Space Agency). Nearly a million miles beyond Earth, at the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, sits Webb's special observation station (L2). Views of Mars' visible disk are provided (the portion of the sunlit side that is facing the telescope). Because of this, Webb is able to take photos and spectra with the spectral resolution required to investigate short-lived phenomena like dust storms, weather patterns, seasonal changes, and, in a single observation, processes that happen at different times of the day (day, sunset, and night) on Mars. The Red Planet is one of the brightest ...

Saturn is a blatant indicator that the planet is rotating tilted. The belted giant rotates with respect to the plane of its orbit around the sun at a 26.7-degree inclination. Since Saturn's tilt precesses, like a spinning top, at almost the same rate as Neptune's orbit, astronomers have long hypothesized that this tilt results from gravitational interactions with its neighbor Neptune. Saturn may have once been in sync with Neptune, but according to a recent modeling research by scientists at MIT and other institutions, Saturn has since eluded Neptune's influence. What was responsible for this planetary realignment? The one carefully examined theory the team has is a missing moon. The team claims in a paper published in Science that Saturn, which currently has 83 moons, originally had at least one additional satellite that they have named Chrysalis. The researchers hypothesize that Chrysalis, together with its siblings, orbited Saturn for several billion years while exerting...

According to astronomers, planets are born in protoplanetary disks, which are the rings of gas and dust that encircle newly formed, young stars. Even though the universe has hundreds of these disks, it has been challenging to observe genuine planetary birth and development in these settings. A new method for finding these elusive young planets has now been devised by astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and with it, "smoking gun" proof of a small Neptune- or Saturn-like planet lurking in a disk. The Astrophysical Journal Letters today published a description of the findings. According to Feng Long, a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Astrophysics and project leader, "directly finding young planets is highly tough and has thus far only been effective in one or two situations." Because they are encased in substantial amounts of gas and dust, planets are always too dim for us to see them. Instead, they must look for signs that a ...

The universe is carved by stars, yet their formation is still largely unknown to science. Researchers looked to the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, to better comprehend the frenetic "baby boom" of star creation that took place early in the history of the universe. This close galaxy resembles galaxies discovered in the earlier cosmos, when heavy metals were more abundant, since it has a simpler chemical makeup than the Milky Way. As a result, it can stand in for the early universe. Recent research using the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope both reached the same conclusion. The diverse teams discovered young stars spiraling into the core of the large star cluster NGC 346 in the Small Magellanic Cloud using various techniques. According to researchers, the migration of gas and stars like a river is an effective technique to promote star formation. The team's findings demonstrate that the Sma...

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the globular cluster Terzan 4 filled with a sparkling sea of stars. Globular clusters, which can have millions of individual stars inside of them, are groups of stars held together by their gravitational pull. The centre of a globular cluster like Terzan 4 is a tightly packed, crowded field of stars, as this image demonstrates, which makes for amazing photos! The investigation of globular clusters underwent a revolution after Hubble's 1990 debut. With ground-based telescopes, it is practically hard to tell the individual stars apart from one another, but with space telescopes, it is conceivable. Hubble's sharp vision has allowed astronomers to analyze the stars that make up globular clusters as well as how these systems evolve over time. This particular observation was made by astronomers using Hubble to study Terzan 4 and other globular clusters to learn more about the structure, age, and density of globular clusters around the ...

This mosaic image, which spans 340 light-years, was captured by Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). Tens of thousands of newly discovered newborn stars that were previously hidden by cosmic dust are shown, together with a new perspective on the star-forming region of the Tarantula Nebula. The most active region is pale blue and seems to be glistening with enormous young stars. Red stars that are still embedded in the nebula's dust and have not yet broken free of its cocoon are strewn among them. Due to its unrivaled resolution at near-infrared wavelengths, NIRCam is able to identify these dust-covered stars. An older star conspicuously exhibits NIRCam's signature eight diffraction spikes, a feature of the telescope's design, towards the top of the nebula's cavity, to the upper left of the cluster of young stars. This star's top central spike almost shoots upward toward a characteristic bubble in the cloud. This bubble is being blown by young stars as they star...

Recently, two "super-Earth" planets orbiting LP 890-9, a dim, cold star around 100 light-years from Earth, were found by an international scientific team. After the well-known TRAPPIST-1, the star is also known as TOI-4306 or SPECULOOS-2 and is the second-coolest star discovered to host planets. An article on this uncommon discovery will soon appear in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. The inner planet of the system, LP 890-9b, is only 2.7 days away from finishing its circle around the star and is roughly 30% larger than Earth. The NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a satellite project looking for exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, first recognized this first exoplanet as a potential planet candidate. The SPECULOOS (Search for livable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) telescopes, one of which is run by the University of Birmingham, confirmed and characterized this candidate. Then, using their telescopes, SPECULOOS researchers looked for more transitin...

This beautiful photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope shows two spiral galaxies that are overlapping one another. The names of the two galaxies, which are more than a billion light-years away from Earth, SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461, are uninteresting. Despite the fact that they appear to collide in this image, the two galaxies' alignment is probably only a result of coincidence; they aren't really colliding. These two galaxies might just be passing ships in the night, but Hubble has previously photographed a stunning array of interacting galaxies. One of many NASA/ESA Hubble observations exploring key aspects of the Galaxy Zoo project is this image. The Galaxy Zoo project, which began in 2007, and its offshoots are enormous citizen science initiatives that crowdsource galaxy classifications from a pool of hundreds of thousands of participants. These volunteers categorize galaxies that robotic telescopes have captured, and they frequently are the first people to ever see a...

After a star exhausts its hydrogen fuel for nuclear fusion and starts to die, a red giant emerges. The delicate interplay between a star's inherent gravitational pull and the pressure from continuing thermonuclear fusion reactions at its core allows stars to remain stable. That balance is destroyed when a star's core runs out of hydrogen, and the core starts to collapse. The plasma shell that surrounds the core heats up enough to start fusing hydrogen as the core collapses. The star's outer layers dramatically expand as fusion in this shell starts, and the surface can grow up to several hundred times larger than the star's original size. The swollen surface of the star cools and changes color from white or yellow to red as the energy at its surface dissipates much more. A red giant develops. It may take hundreds of millions of years for this process to complete. It only applies to stars of intermediate mass (80% to 800% of the mass of the Sun or less), which go on to ge...

The conventional wisdom regarding the genesis of our planet has been turned on its head by new study from Curtin University that suggests the early continents of Earth were formed as a result of comet impacts as our Solar System entered and exited the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy. A new perspective on Earth's early history and our place in the universe is provided by the new research, which was published in Geology and challenges the conventional wisdom that the planet's crust was only created by internal processes. Studying minerals in the Earth's crust revealed a rhythm of crust production every 200 million years or so, Professor Chris Kirkland, the study's principal investigator, from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said. This rhythm matched our Solar System's transit through regions of the galaxy with a higher density of stars. Every 200 million years or so, the Solar System passes between the spiral arms of the Milky Way as it revolv...