Space and astronomy news
The ESA’s Gaia mission is releasing a new tranche of astronomical data. The mission has released three regular, massive hauls of data since it launched in 2013, named Gaia DR1, DR2, and DR3. The ESA is calling this one a ‘focused product release,’ and while it’s smaller than the previous three releases, it’s still impactful.
A new study presents a novel and independent method for measuring cosmic expansion using kilonova
The supermassive black hole at the heart of M87 was the target of the Event Horizon Telescope, revealing the area around its event horizon for the first time. Although an accretion disk surrounded the black hole, astronomers weren’t sure if the black hole itself was rotating. They imaged the region with radio telescopes and discovered the remnants of polar jets, showing that the black hole’s rotation axis had undergone precession over time. This precession indicates that the black hole is rotating; they’re just not sure how quickly yet.
Since the discovery of antimatter decades ago, particle physicists have wondered if these particles were repulsed by gravity. Einstein predicted that despite having opposite charges to its regular matter counterparts, antimatter should still behave like matter does concerning gravity. This has been tricky to confirm experimentally since it’s hard to make enough antimatter to observe its behavior. Particle physicists have finally pulled it off, using the ALPHA-g experiment at CERN, generating antihydrogen atoms and then dropping them in a 3-meter tall vertical shaft.
The Event Horizon Telescope is a collection of radio telescopes across the globe that simultaneously gathered data about the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, acting as a single telescope the size of planet Earth. This revealed the galaxy’s heart in unprecedented detail, helping to confirm the black hole’s event horizon and prove some of Einstein’s predictions about General Relativity. But if those observations happened to contain any signals from pulsars in the area, it would allow for even more precise measurements, as if there were atomic clocks orbiting Sgr A*.
Thanks to data obtained by Webb, astronomers have confirmed that MACS0647-star-1 is the second farthest star observed to date.
The ESA’s Euclid and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman space telescope will work together to resolve the mystery of cosmic expansion!
Thanks to a well-placed gravitational lens, a team of astronomers was able to observe a supernova four times!
A team of researchers with the ESA propose an upgrade for the LISA mission (LISAMax), which could revolutionize gravitational wave astronomy!
Using gravitational lenses, a team of astronomers showed how axions could be the particle that makes up Dark Matter.