For years the scientific consensus was that a supermassive black hole (SMBH) resides in the center of the Milky Way. There's plenty of evidence that the SMBH, named Sagittarius A-star, sits in the Galactic Center (GC). But there were still lingering doubts.
The Aurora Borealis and Australis have dazzled and inspired all those who have beheld them since time immemorial. Much like the Moon, stars, constellations, and planets, they are considered a permanent part of our shared cultural heritage. These awe-inspiring displays of light are the result of charged particles from our Sun interacting with Earth's magnetic field. However, there remain unanswered questions about the mechanisms that power aurorae that scientists have been hoping to resolve for decades. For example, there's the question of what powers the electrical fields that accelerate these particles.
This is Part 1 of a series on large extra dimensions.
With the astronauts of the SpaceX Crew-12 mission safely home, NASA is moving ahead with preparations for the launch of the Crew-12 mission. The crew will launch for the International Space Station (ISS) no sooner than Wednesday, Feb. 11th. It will consist of NASA astronauts Jessica Meir (commander) and Jack Hathaway (pilot), ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot (mission specialist), and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev (mission specialist). Once they reach the ISS, select crew members will participate in human health studies designed to assess how astronauts' bodies adapt to long periods spent in space.
According to Einstein's Theory of General Relativity and the Standard Model of Cosmology, galaxies like the Milky Way are bound together by gravity and the mysterious mass known as Dark Matter. However, magnetic fields are also vital for maintaining galactic balance through a process known as Faraday rotation. This phenomenon, discovered by Michael Faraday in 1845, describes the magneto-optical effect in which polarized light rotates as it passes through a medium subjected to magnetic fields parallel to its path.
The combustible sedimentary rock, better known as coal, was not only crucial to the onset of advanced technology here on earth, but it should also be key to the development of advanced E.T.s residing on any given exoearth. Or so say the authors of a new paper just published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.
In 2019, the international collaboration known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) made history by producing the first-ever image of a black hole. The object in question was the supermassive black hole (SMBH) residing at the center of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, located about 55 million light-years away. The SMBH, designated M87*, is also noted for the powerful streams of charged particles emanating from its poles that travel close to the speed of light. This "relativistic jet," as they are known, is powered by the SMBH's powerful gravity and rapid rotation.
Sometimes humans get ahead of ourselves. We embark on grand engineering experiments without really understanding what the long-term implications of such projects are. Climate change itself it a perfect example of that - no one in the early industrial revolution realized that, more than 100 years later, the emissions from their combustion engines would increase the overall global temperature and risk millions of people's lives and livelihoods, let alone the impact it would have on the species we share the world with. According to a new release from the Salata Institute at Harvard, we seem to be going down the same blind path with a different engineering challenge in this century - satellite megaconstellations.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST ) was designed to look back in time and study galaxies that existed shortly after the Big Bang. In so doing, scientists hoped to gain a better understanding of how the Universe has evolved from the earliest cosmological epoch to the present. When Webb first trained its advanced optics and instruments on the early Universe, it discovered a new class of astrophysical objects: bright red sources that were dubbed "Little Red Dots" (LRDs). Initially, astronomers hypothesized that they could be massive star-forming regions, but this was inconsistent with established cosmological models.
Humanity has worked itself into a position where we can detect a single high-energy particle from space and wonder where in Nature it came from. Billions of people likely don't care at all about such matters, but for those that are naturally curious and are fortunate enough to have the time to indulge their curiosity, an extremely energetic neutrino detected in 2023 was a remarkable event, and may even turn out to be an historic one.
Astronomers have been collecting data for generations, and the sad fact is that not all of it has yet been fully analyzed. There are still discoveries hiding in the dark recesses of data archives strewn throughout the astronomical world. Some of them are harder to access than others, such as actual physical plates containing star positions from more than a hundred years ago. But as more and more of this data is archived, astronomers also keep coming up with ever more impressive tools to analyze it. A recent paper from Cyril Tasse of the Paris Observatory and his co-authors, published recently in Nature Astronomy describes an algorithm that analyzes hundreds of thousands of previously unknown data points in radio telescope archives - and they found some interesting features in it.
In this photo, the Artemis II mission's Orion spacecraft is shown positioned on Launch Pad 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The image shows the second stage, comprising the Orion Crew Module, the European Service Module, the Launch Abort System, and the spacecraft adapter, all enclosed by the second-stage panels. Just visible beneath is the upper section of the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA's next-generation super-heavy launch vehicle that will send crewed spacecraft and payloads beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) in the near future.
The JWST has spotted a system of five merging, interacting galaxies only about 800 million years post Big-Bang. This is sooner than astronomers thought, and is another example of the powerful space telescope forcing us to reconsider our understanding of the early Universe.
New tools unlock new discoveries in science. So when a new type of non-destructive technology becomes widely available, it's inevitable that planetary scientists will get their hands on it to test it on some meteorites. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, by Estrid Naver of the Technical University of Denmark and her co-authors, describes the use of two of those (relatively) new tools to one of the most famous meteorites in the world - NWA 7034 - also known as Black Beauty.
In the early 1960s, Dutch astronomer Adriaan Blaauw observed stars moving at unusually high speeds moving through the Milky Way. These stars, as it turned out, were unbound objects that had been kicked out of the Milky Way and periodically looped back and forth through the disk. Blaauw proposed that these stars originated in binary systems and were ejected when the companion star collapsed and exploded off its outer layers in a supernova. By 2005, even faster runaway stars were observed, leading to the designation "hypervelocity stars."
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