Blazars occupy an intriguing spot in the cosmic zoo. They’re bright active galactic nuclei (AGN) that blast out cosmic rays, are bright in radio emission, and sport huge jets of material traveling in our direction at nearly the speed of light. For some blazars, their jets look curvy and snaky and astronomers have questions. […] Read more about Some Galaxies Contain Double Supermassive Black Holes[…]
A pair of astrophysicists at the Rochester Institute of Technology has found via simulations that some black holes might be traveling through space at nearly one-tenth the speed of light. In their study, reported in Physical Review Letters, James Healy and Carlos Lousto used supercomputer simulations to determine how fast black holes might be moving Read more about Simulations suggest some black holes could be moving at nearly one-tenth the speed of light[…]
Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity, the reusable rocket-powered space plane carrying the company’s first crew of tourists to space, successfully launched and landed on Thursday. The mission, known as Galactic 02, took off shortly after 11am ET from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Aboard the spacecraft were six individuals total – the space plane’s commander and Read more about Virgin Galactic successfully flies tourists to space for first time[…]
Scientists have observed a white dwarf star – a hot stellar remnant that is among the densest objects in the cosmos – that they have nicknamed Janus owing to the fact it has the peculiar distinction of being composed of hydrogen on one side and helium on the other. […] The star is located in Read more about Janus, ‘two-faced’ hydrogen / helium white dwarf star[…]
Virgin Galactic’s first-ever commercial spaceflight will launch this month, if all goes according to plan. The company, part of billionaire Richard Branson‘s Virgin Group, announced Thursday (June 15) that it has set a launch window of June 27 to June 30 for its debut operational flight, which it calls Galactic 01. “Galactic 01, a scientific Read more about Virgin Galactic set to launch 1st commercial spaceflight on June 27[…]
[…] The experiment is a part of Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project, and the institute announced a successful transmission via press release yesterday. The researchers conducted the power transfer experiment using the Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment, or MAPLE, which is a small prototype aboard the in-orbit Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1) that launched Read more about Scientists Beam Space-Based Solar Power to Earth for First Time[…]
At 0915 Mountain Time (1515 UTC), the VMS Eve mothership took off from New Mexico’s Spaceport America, carrying its spacecraft to an altitude of 44,500 feet (over 13.5km). Pilots on VSS Unity, which rides along with VMS Eve, then fired its rockets to take its six passengers even higher – to 54.2 miles (over 87.2km) Read more about Virgin Galactic flies final test before opening for business[…]
Commercial Earth-observation companies collect an unprecedented volume of images and data every single day, but purchasing even a single satellite image can be cumbersome and time-intensive. SkyFi, a two-year-old startup, is looking to change that with an app and API that makes ordering a satellite image as easy as a click of a few buttons Read more about SkyFi lets you order up fresh satellite imagery in real time with a click[…]
The 2019 release of the first image of a black hole was hailed as a significant scientific achievement. But truth be told, it was a bit blurry – or, as one astrophysicist involved in the effort called it, a “fuzzy orange donut.” Scientists on Thursday unveiled a new and improved image of this black hole Read more about Scientists unveil new and improved ‘skinny donut’ black hole image using ML algorithm[…]
On March 23, sky observers marveled at a gorgeous display of northern and southern lights. It was a reminder that when our Sun gets active, it can spark a phenomenon called “space weather.” Aurorae are among the most benign effects of this phenomenon. At the other end of the space weather spectrum are solar storms Read more about NASA Reveals What Made an Entire Starlink Satellite Fleet Go Down – movie included[…]
There’s an invisible monster on the loose, barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long “contrail” of newborn stars, twice the Read more about Blach hole streaking through galaxy leaves wake of new stars[…]
The Bruce Murray Laboratory for Planetary Visualization has completed a 5.7 terapixel mosaic of the surface of Mars rendered at 5.0 m/px. Each pixel in the mosaic is about the size of a typical parking space, providing unprecedented resolution of the martian surface at the global scale. The mosaic covers 99.5% of Mars from 88°S Read more about A super high resolution, Global CTX Mosaic map of Mars[…]
[…] Some of the data was mistaken as noise when first collected up to 40 years ago, and researchers failed to recognize its significance until now. “When everything was calibrated, we saw clearly that the spectra are consistent across all the missions,” announced Lotfi Ben-Jaffel, lead author of the new research published in Planetary Science Journal Read more about Astronomers discover Saturns rings raining down, causing heat in atmosphere. New way to detect ring systems.[…]
Virgin Orbit’s days of slinging satellites into space aboard aircraft-launched rockets have come to an end Thursday. After six years in business, Virgin’s satellite launch subsidiary has announced via SEC filing that it does not have the funding to continue operations and will be shuttering for “the foreseeable future,” per CNBC. Nearly 90 percent of Read more about Virgin Orbit officially shutters its space launch operations[…]
Dawn Aerospace CEO Stefan Powell announced today that the company’s Mk-II Aurora spaceplane has received approval from the Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand for rocket-powered flight. The company is now ready to test the vehicle’s rocket engines with flights beginning next month. The Mk-II Aurora is a remotely piloted spaceplane that could eventually take Read more about New Zealand’s Dawn Aerospace Mk-II Aurora Space drone Approved for Suborbital Test Flights[…]
Think of bringing a pot of water to the boil: As the temperature reaches the boiling point, bubbles form in the water, burst and evaporate as the water boils. This continues until there is no more water changing phase from liquid to steam. This is roughly the idea of what happened in the very early Read more about The bubbling universe: A previously unknown phase transition in the early universe resolves Hubble (constant) tension[…]
[…] The Drag Augmentation Deorbiting System (ADEO) braking sail was developed by High Performance Space Structure Systems as a way to deorbit satellites at the end of their mission. In a space-based test in December 2022 called “Show Me Your Wings,” ADEO was deployed from an ION Satellite Carrier built by private space company D-Orbit. Read more about Space Sail Experiment Pushes Satellite to Deorbit and burn up, cleans space junk[…]
Hundreds of millions of light-years away in a distant galaxy, a star orbiting a supermassive black hole is being violently ripped apart under the black hole’s immense gravitational pull. As the star is shredded, its remnants are transformed into a stream of debris that rains back down onto the black hole to form a very Read more about A team of physicists devise a model that maps a star’s surprising orbit about a supermassive black hole[…]
You may not realize it in your day-to-day life, but we are all enveloped by a giant “superbubble” that was blown into space by the explosive deaths of a dozen-odd stars. Known as the Local Bubble, this structure extends for about 1,000 light years around the solar system, and is one of countless similar bubbles Read more about We Exist Inside a Giant Space Bubble, And Scientists Have Finally Mapped the magnetic field around it[…]
(Andromeda Galaxy) In the quest to find the outer limits of our galaxy, astronomers have discovered over 200 stars that form the Milky Way’s edge, the most distant of which is over one million light-years away—nearly halfway to the Andromeda galaxy. The 208 stars the researchers identified are known as RR Lyrae stars, which are Read more about Astronomers Find the Edge of Our Galaxy, 1.04m light years away[…]
While using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study the masers around oddball star MWC 349A scientists discovered something unexpected: a previously unseen jet of material launching from the star’s gas disk at impossibly high speeds. What’s more, they believe the jet is caused by strong magnetic forces surrounding the star. The discovery could Read more about Hydrogen masers (jets at 500 km/s) reveal new secrets of a massive star[…]
[…] It’s not only star gazing that’s in jeopardy. Culture, wildlife and other scientific advancements are being threatened by mass light infrastructure that is costing cities billions of dollars a year as it expands alongside exponential population growth. Some researchers call light pollution cultural genocide. Generations of complex knowledge systems, built by Indigenous Australians and Read more about Skyglow pollution is separating us from the stars but also killing earth knowledge and species[…]
For years, scientific researchers have warned that Elon Musk’s Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband constellations are harming scientific research. Simply put, the light pollution Musk claimed would never happen in the first place is making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can be mitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated. Musk Read more about Debate Continues Over What To Do About The Fact That Starlink, Other Low-Earth-Orbit Satellite Systems Are Causing Research-Harming Light Pollution[…]
Beams of electrons smash into slower-moving particles causing a shock wave which results in electromagnetic radiation across frequency bands from X-rays to visible light, according to a research paper published in Nature this week. Astronomers first observed quasi-stellar radio sources or quasars in the early 1960s. This new class of astronomical objects was a puzzle. Read more about Bright light from black holes caused by particle shock waves[…]
A team of researchers with members from Universidad Nacional de San Juan, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and Universidad Andres Bello has found evidence of a large extragalactic assembly hiding behind one part of the Milky Way galaxy. The group has published a paper describing their findings on the arXiv preprint server while Read more about Huge extragalactic structure found hiding behind the Milky Way[…]