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.
Continue reading “A Huge New Gaia Data Release: More Stars, Gravitational Lenses and Asteroids”
Our galaxy’s largest nearby companion is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy visible to the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere. In recent years, new theoretical research and better observational capabilities have taught astronomers a great deal about our (not-so-little) neighbour. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the LMC is helping shape the Milky Way’s evolution.
Continue reading “The Milky Way has Trapped the Large Magellanic Cloud With its Gravity. What Comes Next?”
We’ve reported on Gaia’s incredible data-collection abilities in the past. Recently, it released DR3, its latest data set, with over 1.8 billion objects in it. That’s a lot of data to sift through, and one of the most effective ways to do so is through machine learning. A group of researchers did just that by using a supervised learning algorithm to classify a particular type of object found in the data set. The result is one of the world’s most comprehensive catalogs of the type of astronomical object known as variables.
Continue reading “Not Just Stars. Gaia Mapped a Diverse and Shifting Universe of Variable Objects”
The thing with black holes is they’re hard to see. Typically we can only detect their presence when we can detect their gravitational pull. And if there are rogue black holes simply traveling throughout the galaxy and not tied to another luminous astronomical, it would be fiendishly hard to detect them. But now we have a new potential data set to do so.
Gaia just released its massive 3rd data set that contains astrometry data for over 1.5 billion stars, about 1% of the total number of stars in the galaxy. According to a new paper by Jeff Andrews of the University of Florida and Northwestern University, it might be possible for Gaia to detect perturbances caused by a rogue black hole briefly interacting with one of the 1.5 billion stars in the catalog. Unfortunately, it’s just not very likely that any such interaction actually took place during Gaia’s observing time.
Continue reading “Gaia Could Detect Free-Floating Black Holes Passing Near Stars in the Milky Way”
Oh, hello there new neighbor! In February, the Gaia spacecraft took a picture of its new closest companion in space at the second Lagrangian point, the James Webb Space Telescope.
Gaia is an optical telescope that is mapping out our galaxy by surveying the motions of more than a thousand million stars. Astronomers for the mission realized that once JWST reached L2, it would be in Gaia’s field of view. It spied JWST when the two spacecraft were a million km apart.
Continue reading “ESA’s Gaia Just Took a Picture of L2 Neighbor JWST”
A recent study looked at stellar streams hidden in Gaia data, to uncover evidence of an ancient remnant dubbed Pontus.
Our home galaxy the Milky Way is a monster with a ravenous past. In its estimated 12 billion years of existence, our galaxy has swallowed smaller satellite galaxies whole, with collisions resulting in massive rounds of star formation. We see threads of these remnant mergers as streams of stars and clusters, strung out around the Milky Way.
Continue reading “Gaia Finds Ancient Satellite Galaxy Pontus Embedded in Milky Way”
May the 4th be With You!
Blasting out of Mos Eisley Space Port, the Millennium Falcon carries our adventurers off Tatooine bringing Luke Skywalker across the threshold into space. With Imperial Star Destroyers closing, Luke bemoans Han Solo’s delay in jumping to Hyperspace. It takes time to make these calculations through the Falcon’s “Navicomputer.” Han explains that otherwise they could “fly right through a star” or “bounce too close to a supernova.” (probably the same effect of each – also are supernovas bouncy?)
Celestial calculations are needed to figure out where you’re going. In Star Wars these are done by ship computers, or later by trusty astromech droids like R2-D2. But, for the first time, simulations have been conducted of an uncrewed ship’s ability to autonavigate through interstellar space. While not at Hyperspace speeds, the simulations do account for velocities at up to half the speed of light. Created by Coryn A.L. Bailer-Jones of the Max Plank Institute for Astronomy, these simulations may be our first step to creating our own “Navicomputers” (or R2-D2s if they have a personality).
The outer reaches of the Milky Way galaxy are a different place. Stars are much harder to come by, with most of this “galactic halo” being made up of empty space. But scientists theorize that there is an abundance of one particular thing in this desolate area – dark matter. Now, a team from Harvard and the University of Arizona (UA) spent some time studying and modeling one of the galaxy’s nearest neighbors to try to tease out more information about that dark matter, and as a result came up with an all new way to look at the halo itself.
Continue reading “New All-Sky Map of the Milky Way’s Galactic Halo”
Binary star systems are everywhere. They make up a huge percentage of all known solar systems: from what we can tell, about half of all Sun-like stars have a binary partner. But we haven’t really had a chance to study them in detail yet. That’s about to change. Using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, a research team has just compiled a gigantic new catalog of nearby binary star systems, and it shows that at least 1.3 million of them exist within 3000 light-years of Earth.
Continue reading “Our Part of the Galaxy is Packed with Binary Stars”
The Milky Way has a number of satellite galaxies; nearly 60 of them, depedending on how we define them. One of them, called the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy (Sgr d Sph), may have played a huge role when it comes to humans, our world and our little civilization. A collision between the Milky Way and the Sgr d Sph may have created the Solar System itself.
Continue reading “The Solar System Might Not Exist if There Wasn’t a Huge Galactic Collision with the Milky Way Billions of Years Ago”