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Category: Astronomy/cosmology

Supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy may have a friend

Supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy may have a friend

An artist’s conception of two black holes entwined in a gravitational tango. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Christopher Go By Smadar Naoz, University of California, Los Angeles Do supermassive black holes have friends? The nature of galaxy formation suggests that the answer is yes, and in fact, pairs of supermassive black holes should be common in the universe. I am an astrophysicist and am interested in a wide range of theoretical problems in astrophysics, from the formation of the very first galaxies to the gravitational…

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NASA’s Voyager 2 sends back its first signal from interstellar space

NASA’s Voyager 2 sends back its first signal from interstellar space

The Guardian reports: Twelve billion miles from Earth, there is an elusive boundary that marks the edge of the sun’s realm and the start of interstellar space. Voyager 2, the longest-running space mission, has finally beamed back a faint signal from the other side of that frontier, 42 years after its launch. The Nasa craft is the second ever to travel beyond the heliosphere, the bubble of supersonic charged particles streaming outwards from the sun. Despite setting off a month…

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The chemistry at the heart of the Universe

The chemistry at the heart of the Universe

Caleb A. Scharf writes: It’s a relatively little-known fact outside of astrophysics that the key to the first stars in the universe, and the earliest structures condensing out of the primordial murk, was chemistry. Specifically, the key was the formation of molecular hydrogen or H2. A pair of atoms bonded together and capable of rotating and vibrating. A few years ago I wrote about some of the details in this column. In brief, without the formation of molecular hydrogen it’s…

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The center of the Milky Way exploded just three million years ago — the recent past in galactic history

The center of the Milky Way exploded just three million years ago — the recent past in galactic history

Cosmos reports: A titanic, expanding beam of energy sprang from close to the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way just 3.5 million years ago, sending a cone-shaped burst of radiation through both poles of the Galaxy and out into deep space. That’s the finding arising from research conducted by a team of scientists led by Professor Joss Bland-Hawthorn from Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D) and soon to…

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Living in space

Living in space

  By Paul Woodward To see things clearly, we often need to break the patterns of habit. The Earth, physically and metaphorically — the ground of human experience — is the stationary foundation that forms the background of movement: our movement across its surface; the terra firma against which the oceans wash and above which birds fly; the horizon that the Sun rises above and then falls beneath. Intellectually, as basic science, most people understand that it is the Earth…

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Giant, active galaxies from the early universe may have finally been found

Giant, active galaxies from the early universe may have finally been found

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Science News reports: Astronomers may finally have laid eyes on a population of enormous but elusive galaxies in the early universe. These hefty, star-forming galaxies are shrouded in dust, which hid them from previous searches that used starlight. Now observations of radiation emitted by that interstellar dust have revealed dozens of massive, active galaxies from when the universe was younger than 2 billion years, researchers report online August 7 in Nature. These galaxies may be the long-sought precursors to heavyweight…

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Most detailed ever 3D map of Milky Way shows ‘warped’ shape

Most detailed ever 3D map of Milky Way shows ‘warped’ shape

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The Guardian reports: The most detailed three-dimensional map yet of the Milky Way has been revealed, showing that our galaxy is not a flat disc but has a “warped” shape like a fascinator hat or a vinyl record that has been left in the sun. “The stars 60,000 light years away from the Milky Way’s centre are as far as 4,500 [light years] above or below the galactic plane – this is a big percentage,” said Dr Dorota Skowron of…

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Scientists stunned by ‘city-killer’ asteroid that just missed Earth

Scientists stunned by ‘city-killer’ asteroid that just missed Earth

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The Washington Post reports: Alan Duffy was confused. On Thursday, the astronomer’s phone was suddenly flooded with calls from reporters wanting to know about a large asteroid that had just whizzed past Earth, and he couldn’t figure out “why everyone was so alarmed.” “I thought everyone was getting worried about something we knew was coming,” Duffy, who is lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia, told The Washington Post. Forecasts had already predicted that a couple of asteroids would…

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Moon landing: What Armstrong and Aldrin saw

Moon landing: What Armstrong and Aldrin saw

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Arizona State University: As the Apollo 11 Lunar Module approached the moon’s surface for the first manned landing, commander Neil Armstrong switched off the auto-targeting feature of the LM’s computer and flew the spacecraft manually to a landing. A new video, created at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, shows what Armstrong saw out his window as the lander descended — and you’ll see for yourself why he took over control.  

The search for extraterrestrial technology finds none

The search for extraterrestrial technology finds none

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The Guardian reports: The close encounter will have to wait. Astronomers have come up empty-handed after scanning the heavens for signs of intelligent life in the most extensive search ever performed. Researchers used ground-based telescopes to eavesdrop on 1,327 stars within 160 light years of Earth. During three years of observations they found no evidence of signals that could plausibly come from an alien civilisation. The only signals picked up by the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia and the…

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Trump: ‘we are going back to the Moon’ but ‘NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon.’ Huh?

Trump: ‘we are going back to the Moon’ but ‘NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon.’ Huh?

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May 13, 2019: Under my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars. I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 13, 2019 June 7, 2019: For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon – We did that 50 years ago….

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A bizarre form of water may exist all over the universe

A bizarre form of water may exist all over the universe

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Joshua Sokol writes: Recently at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics in Brighton, New York, one of the world’s most powerful lasers blasted a droplet of water, creating a shock wave that raised the water’s pressure to millions of atmospheres and its temperature to thousands of degrees. X-rays that beamed through the droplet in the same fraction of a second offered humanity’s first glimpse of water under those extreme conditions. The X-rays revealed that the water inside the shock wave didn’t…

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A new glimpse of the evolving universe

A new glimpse of the evolving universe

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  HubbleSite reports: Astronomers have put together the largest and most comprehensive “history book” of galaxies into one single image, using 16 years’ worth of observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The deep-sky mosaic, created from nearly 7,500 individual exposures, provides a wide portrait of the distant universe, containing 265,000 galaxies that stretch back through 13.3 billion years of time to just 500 million years after the big bang. The faintest and farthest galaxies are just one ten-billionth the brightness…

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Mystery of the universe’s expansion rate widens with new Hubble data

Mystery of the universe’s expansion rate widens with new Hubble data

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NASA reports: Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope say they have crossed an important threshold in revealing a discrepancy between the two key techniques for measuring the universe’s expansion rate. The recent study strengthens the case that new theories may be needed to explain the forces that have shaped the cosmos. A brief recap: The universe is getting bigger every second. The space between galaxies is stretching, like dough rising in the oven. But how fast is the universe expanding?…

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2014 comet may be first known interstellar visitor to have come close to Earth

2014 comet may be first known interstellar visitor to have come close to Earth

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Science News reports: Earth may already have been visited by an object from outside our solar system — a meteor that burned up in the planet’s atmosphere in 2014, astronomers claim. If confirmed, it would be the first known interstellar object to have entered the atmosphere. The first interstellar visitor known to have come close to Earth was the roughly 400-meter-wide asteroid named ‘Oumuamua.’ It swooped within about 24 million kilometers of the planet in October 2017. Its sharp-angled approach…

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