Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to us, at 4.37 light-years (about 25 trillion miles) away. In 2016, astronomers discovered an exoplanet orbiting one of the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system. Spurred on by that discovery, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has developed a new instrument to find any other planets that might be in the Alpha Centauri system, and it’s busy looking right now.
Continue reading “New Instrument is Searching for Planets Around Alpha Centauri”That Explains a Lot. The Moon’s Largest Crater has a Chunk of Metal Embedded in it That’s 5 Times Bigger than the Big Island of Hawaii
One of the largest craters in the Solar System is on our Moon. It’s called the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin and it’s 2,500 km (1,600 mi) in diameter and 13 km (8.1 mi) deep. A new study says that the basin may contain an enormous chunk of metal that’s larger than Hawaii’s Big Island.
Continue reading “That Explains a Lot. The Moon’s Largest Crater has a Chunk of Metal Embedded in it That’s 5 Times Bigger than the Big Island of Hawaii”Ep. 533: Indigenous South African Astronomy
Let’s move to another continent this week, and look at the astronomy that was going on in southern Africa in ancient times.
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Perfect Example of a Barred Spiral Galaxy, Seen Face On. This is What Our Milky Way Might Look Like
The Hubble Space Telescope has given us a beautiful image of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 7773. This is a classic galaxy of this type, and highlights the bright bar of concentrated stars that anchors the galaxy’s stately spiral arms. It was captured with the Hubble’s workhorse Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3.)
Continue reading “Perfect Example of a Barred Spiral Galaxy, Seen Face On. This is What Our Milky Way Might Look Like”Messier 87 – the Virgo A Supergiant Galaxy
Welcome back to Messier Monday! Today, we continue in our tribute to our dear friend, Tammy Plotner, by looking at the supergiant elliptical galaxy known as Messier 87 (aka. Virgo A)!
During the 18th century, famed French astronomer Charles Messier noticed the presence of several “nebulous objects” while surveying the night sky. Originally mistaking these objects for comets, he began to catalog them so that others would not make the same mistake. Today, the resulting list (known as the Messier Catalog) includes over 100 objects and is one of the most influential catalogs of Deep Space Objects.
One of these objects is the supergiant galaxy Messier 87, also known as the Virgo A (or the Smoking Gun) galaxies. Located at a distance of about 53.5 million light years from Earth, this galaxy is home to several trillion stars, 15,000 globular clusters, and a supermassive black hole. It is one of the brightest galaxies in the northern part of the Virgo Cluster, second only to Messier 49, and the dominant member of that group.
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New observations from the Planck mission don’t resolve anomalies like the CMB “cold spot”
Back in 2013, the European Space Agency released its first analysis of the data gathered by the Planck observatory. Between 2009 and 2013, this spacecraft observed the remnants of the radiation that filled the Universe immediately after the Big Bang – the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) – with the highest sensitivity of any mission to date and in multiple wavelengths.
In addition to largely confirming current theories on how the Universe evolved, Planck’s first map also revealed a number of temperature anomalies – like the CMB “Cold Spot” – that are difficult to explain. Unfortunately, with the latest analysis of the mission data, the Planck Collaboration team has found no new evidence for these anomalies, which means that astrophysicists are still short of an explanation.
Continue reading “New observations from the Planck mission don’t resolve anomalies like the CMB “cold spot””Carnival of Space #615
This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Allen Versfeld at his Urban Astronomer blog.
Click here to read Carnival of Space #615.
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Black Hole Simulation Solves a Mystery About Their Accretion Disks
Black holes are one of the most awesome and mysterious forces in the Universe. Originally predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, these points in spacetime are formed when massive stars undergo gravitational collapse at the end of their lives. Despite decades of study and observation, there is still much we don’t know about this phenomenon.
For example, scientists are still largely in the dark about how the matter that falls into orbit around a black hole and is gradually fed onto it (accretion disks) behave. Thanks to a recent study, where an international team of researchers conducted the most detailed simulations of a black hole to date, a number of theoretical predictions regarding accretion disks have finally been validated.
Continue reading “Black Hole Simulation Solves a Mystery About Their Accretion Disks”You Can Use a Live Webcam to Watch NASA Build the Mars 2020 Rover
NASA’s next mission to the surface of Mars is called the 2020 rover (in case you didn’t know already.) It’s planned launch date is July 17th, 2020, and it should land at Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18th 2021. The rover is still under construction at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California.
Continue reading “You Can Use a Live Webcam to Watch NASA Build the Mars 2020 Rover”The Japanese asteroid-hunter had another photo opportunity when it dropped a target marker on asteroid Ryugu
The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency‘s (JAXA) has made some impressive feats in recent years. Roughly one year ago, and following in the footsteps of its predecessor, their Hayabusa2 spacecraft successfully rendezvoused with a Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) – 162173 Ryugu. Since then, it has been collecting samples from the surface in the hopes of learning more about the formation and evolution of the Solar System.
Just a few months after the spacecraft created an artificial crater with an anti-tank warhead, the spacecraft has once again descended close to the asteroid to drop another target marker. This maker, a reflective sphere that contains the names of people who’ve supported the mission, will provide a visual guide as the spacecraft attempts to collect its second sample of material from the asteroid’s surface.
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