Tag: The Universe

Supermassive black holes have masses of more than a million suns – but their growth has slowed as the universe aged

NeRD

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Fan Zou is a graduate student at Penn State University while W. Neil Brandt is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State. Black holes are remarkable astronomical objects with gravity so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape them. The most gigantic ones, known as “supermassive” black holes, can weigh millions to billions times the mass of the Sun. These giants usually live in the centers of galaxies. Our own galaxy, the Milky…

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NASA’s EXCITE Mission Prepared for Scientific Balloon Flight

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5 min read NASA’s EXCITE Mission Prepared for Scientific Balloon Flight Scientists and engineers are ready to fly an infrared mission called EXCITE (EXoplanet Climate Infrared TElescope) to the edge of space.  EXCITE is designed to study atmospheres around exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system, during circumpolar long-duration scientific balloon flights. But first, it must complete a test flight during NASA’s fall 2024 scientific ballooning campaign from Fort Sumner, New Mexico.  “EXCITE can give us a three-dimensional picture of a planet’s atmosphere and temperature by collecting data the whole time the world orbits…

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Will our galaxy really collide with Andromeda? Maybe not

NeRD

Astronomers have long considered it inevitable that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, will merge with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy within the next 5 billion years. However, a new simulation suggests the chance of this clash happening comes down to a coin flip — at least, within the next 10 billion years. “I would say that the popular narrative is diminished, but not eliminated,” Manasvi Lingam, an astrobiologist at Florida Institute of Technology who was not involved with the new study, told Space.com. At about 2.5 million light-years from our…

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What happens if you throw a star at a black hole? Things get messy (video)

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“What happens when you throw a star at a black hole?” It’s not a question we can physically answer here on Earth.  Thankfully, actual black holes and stars can’t be smashed together in the lab! However, scientists can use advanced supercomputer modeling to simulate a black hole ripping apart and devouring a star in a so-called “tidal disruption event” or “TDE.” Doing just that, a team of researchers led by Danel Price from Monash University has discovered that the answer to our opening question is “things get messy.”  “Black holes…

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Scientists collect high-resolution images of the North Star’s surface for 1st time

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In our solar system, scattered across one of Earth’s verdant mountains, six eggshell-white telescopes gaze into the deep universe. As one cohesive hive, the domed structures collect cosmic light to guide modern astronomers exploring space — and it is thanks to this hive that we now have a brilliant new perspective on the light that guided astronomers of the past: the North Star. Our visual knowledge of the current North Star (because of Earth’s axial wobble, the title passes to different stars over the eons) runs deep. Artists, old and…

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Some rocky exoplanets could have huge amounts of water in their molten cores

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As much as 95% of an exoplanet’s water could be trapped forever deep inside its iron core, transforming what we thought we knew about water worlds and potentially rendering them even more habitable than we realized. “Planets are much more water-abundant than previously assumed,” said Caroline Dorn, who is professor of exoplanets at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, in a statement. When planets are born by accreting rubble and enduring collisions with other protoplanets, they become so hot that their entire surface is covered in an ocean of molten rock. This…

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Dinosaur-killing asteroid was a rare rock from beyond Jupiter, new study reveals

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The space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was a rare strike from an asteroid beyond Jupiter, a new study details. The finding pins down the nature of the fateful space rock and its origin within our solar system, and may benefit technology that forecasts asteroid strikes on our planet. Most scientists agree that the Chicxulub impactor — named after the community in modern-day Mexico near the 90-mile-wide (145 kilometers) crater carved by the rock — came from within our solar system. But its precise origins…

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Hubble Rings in a New Galactic View

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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the galaxy LEDA 857074. ESA/Hubble & NASA, I. Chilingari The subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is situated in the Perseus Cluster, also known as Abell 426, 320 million light-years from Earth. It’s a barred spiral galaxy known as MCG+07-07-072, seen here among a number of photobombing stars that are much closer to Earth than it is. MCG+07-07-072 has quite an unusual shape for a spiral galaxy, with thin arms emerging from the ends of its barred core to draw a near-circle around its…

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The sun might’ve just had a record-breaking number of visible sunspots

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On Aug. 8, scientists may have caught hundreds of individual sunspots on images produced by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). To us, sunspots might seem really tiny — but don’t be fooled. They are actually dark areas typically the size of the entire Earth on the sun’s surface. Plus, they exhibit strong magnetic fields that can fire off solar flares, which spew pulses of electromagnetic radiation into space. These are the explosions that lead to coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that can create solar storms on Earth. “The process of the…

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NASA Selects 5 New Roman Technology Fellows in Astrophysics

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9 min read NASA Selects 5 New Roman Technology Fellows in Astrophysics This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image treats viewers to a wonderfully detailed snapshot of the spiral galaxy NGC 3430 that lies 100 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo Minor. Several other galaxies, located relatively nearby to this one, are just beyond the frame of this image; one is close enough that gravitational interaction is driving some star formation in NGC 3430 – visible as bright-blue patches near to but outside of the galaxy’s main spiral structure.…

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