Space News and Discussions

weatheriscool
Posts: 12946
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 6:16 pm

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by weatheriscool »

Supermassive black hole seen at the center of our galaxy
Source: Washington Post
Astronomers on Thursday unveiled the first image of a supermassive black hole that roils the center of our galaxy, its gravity so powerful that it bends space and time and forms a glowing ring of light with eternal darkness at the core. The black hole, seen from Earth near the constellation Sagittarius, has a mass equal to more than 4 million suns.


An image released by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration on May 12 shows a black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. (AP)

Feryal Ozel, a University of Arizona astronomer, described the achievement as "the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.” “We find a bright ring surrounding the black hole shadow," she said. "It seems that black holes like doughnuts.” The image was captured by a global consortium of astronomical observatories, known as the Event Horizon Telescope. Three years ago the project produced the first image of a black hole, in the galaxy Messier 87.

The black hole at the center of the Milky Way is more than a thousand times smaller than the one in Messier 87. But cosmically speaking, it is the one closest to home. The unveiling of the image at the National Press Club in Washington was part of simultaneous media events on multiple continents. The image was kept under wraps pending an unveiling at precisely 9:07 a.m. Eastern time.

“They are the most mysterious objects in the universe, and they hold the keys to large-scale structure in the observable cosmos,” said Sheperd Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of the Event Horizon Telescope, in an interview in advance of Thursday’s briefing.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/ ... milky-way/
User avatar
Yuli Ban
Posts: 4631
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:44 pm

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by Yuli Ban »

weatheriscool wrote: Thu May 12, 2022 4:32 pm Supermassive black hole seen at the center of our galaxy
Source: Washington Post
Astronomers on Thursday unveiled the first image of a supermassive black hole that roils the center of our galaxy, its gravity so powerful that it bends space and time and forms a glowing ring of light with eternal darkness at the core. The black hole, seen from Earth near the constellation Sagittarius, has a mass equal to more than 4 million suns.


An image released by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration on May 12 shows a black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. (AP)

Feryal Ozel, a University of Arizona astronomer, described the achievement as "the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.” “We find a bright ring surrounding the black hole shadow," she said. "It seems that black holes like doughnuts.” The image was captured by a global consortium of astronomical observatories, known as the Event Horizon Telescope. Three years ago the project produced the first image of a black hole, in the galaxy Messier 87.

The black hole at the center of the Milky Way is more than a thousand times smaller than the one in Messier 87. But cosmically speaking, it is the one closest to home. The unveiling of the image at the National Press Club in Washington was part of simultaneous media events on multiple continents. The image was kept under wraps pending an unveiling at precisely 9:07 a.m. Eastern time.

“They are the most mysterious objects in the universe, and they hold the keys to large-scale structure in the observable cosmos,” said Sheperd Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of the Event Horizon Telescope, in an interview in advance of Thursday’s briefing.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/ ... milky-way/
Wowee wow!!!
Image

Just makes me wish we could visit one to see one up close (safely)
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
User avatar
raklian
Posts: 1747
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:46 pm
Location: North Carolina

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by raklian »

For those of you who are Twitter-inclined, read this excellent thread about this discovery. :)

To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
User avatar
raklian
Posts: 1747
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:46 pm
Location: North Carolina

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by raklian »

Comparison of the sizes of two black holes: M87 and Sagittarius A

Image

https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso2208-eht-mwe/
To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
User avatar
raklian
Posts: 1747
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:46 pm
Location: North Carolina

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by raklian »

Major breakthrough!

Scientists Grow Plants in Lunar Soil

Scientists at the University of Florida have made a breakthrough discovery — decades in the making — that could both enable space exploration and benefit humanity. “Here we are, 50 years later, completing experiments that were started back in the Apollo labs,” said Robert Ferl, a professor in the Horticultural Sciences department at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and a communicating author on a paper published on May 12, 2022, in Communications Biology. “We first asked the question of whether plants can grow in regolith. And second, how might that one day help humans have an extended stay on the Moon.”

The answer to the first question is a resounding yes. Plants can grow in lunar regolith. They were not as robust as plants grown in Earth soil, or even as those in the control group grown in a lunar simulant made from volcanic ash, but they did indeed grow. And by studying how the plants responded in the lunar samples, the team hopes to go on to answer the second question as well, paving the way for future astronauts to someday grow more nutrient-rich plants on the Moon and thrive in deep space.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/biological ... m-the-moon

To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
weatheriscool
Posts: 12946
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 6:16 pm

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by weatheriscool »

Black hole winds are no longer as they used to be
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-black-hole-longer.html
by Italian National Institute for Astrophysics
During the first billion years of the universe, winds blown by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies were much more frequent and more powerful than those observed in today's galaxies, some 13 billion years later. Such winds were so mighty that they slowed down the growth of the supermassive black holes from which they originate. These are the results of a study led by three researchers from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Trieste, published today in the journal Nature.

The work is based on the observations of 30 quasars observed with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile. Quasars are extremely bright, point-like sources at the cores of distant galaxies, whose emission arises from the intense activity of the central supermassive black holes sucking in the surrounding matter. The host galaxies of these quasars were observed around cosmic dawn, when the universe was between 500 million and 1 billion years old.

"For the first time, we measured the fraction of quasars in the young universe exhibiting black hole winds," says Manuela Bischetti, INAF researcher in Trieste and first author of the new study. "Unlike what we observe in the universe closer to us, we discovered that black hole winds in the young universe are very frequent, have high speeds up to 17 percent of the speed of light, and inject large amounts of energy into their host galaxy."

About half of the quasars observed in this research show black hole winds, which are much more frequent and 20 times more powerful than the ones known in the quasars of the more nearby cosmos when the universe was around 4 billion years old.

"Observations of black holes in the young universe show that they grow much faster than their host galaxies, whereas in the local universe, we know that black holes and galaxies co-evolve," adds co-author Chiara Feruglio, INAF researcher in Trieste. "This implies that a mechanism must have acted at some point in the universe, slowing down black hole growth. Our observations enabled us to identify this mechanism in the black hole winds produced when the universe was 0.5 to 1 billion years old."
User avatar
caltrek
Posts: 6509
Joined: Mon May 17, 2021 1:17 pm

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by caltrek »

"Gold Standard" Star Holds Record Number of Elements
by Morgan Sherburne
May 16, 2022
(Futurity) In our sun’s neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy is a relatively bright star, and in it, astronomers have been able to identify the widest range of elements in a star beyond our solar system.

Identifying these elements in a single star will help astronomers understand what’s called the “rapid neutron capture process,” or one of the major ways heavy elements in the universe were created.

“To the best of my knowledge, that’s a record for any object beyond our solar system. And what makes this star so unique is that it has a very high relative proportion of the elements listed along the bottom two-thirds of the periodic table. We even detected gold,” says lead author Ian Roederer, an astronomer at the University of Michigan.

“These elements were made by the rapid neutron capture process. That’s really the thing we’re trying to study: the physics in understanding how, where, and when those elements were made.”
Read more here: https://www.futurity.org/hd-222925-gold ... 2739612-2/

For a more technical discussion, read here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.03426
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
User avatar
caltrek
Posts: 6509
Joined: Mon May 17, 2021 1:17 pm

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by caltrek »

Fascinating Quadruple Star System Might Be Pathway To Rare Supernova
by Dr Alfredo Carpineti
May 16, 2022

Introduction:
(IFL Science) The double-binary star system HD74438 was a peculiar find when it was discovered in 2017. Two pairs of very close-binary stars orbit each other in a rare quadruple system. This is already incredibly cool but astronomers believe there is more. Simulations suggest that these kinds of set-ups might lead to a specific and rare type of supernova.

One binary pair orbits each other every 20 days or so. The other every four days. Each pair orbit each other in about six years, making HD74438 the quadruple system with the shortest period. It's also the youngest, with an estimated age of 43 million years. But simulations published in Nature Astronomy look at the future of the system rather than the past.

The outer binary pair is changing the eccentricity of the inner one, making the orbit less like a circle and more oval. The simulations show that this effect might lead to one or more stellar collisions, and from there to white dwarfs going supernova.

"A star like our Sun will end its life as a small dense dead star known as a white dwarf, and the mass of white dwarfs cannot go above the so-called Chandrasekhar limit (about 1.4 times the mass of the sun)," co-author Associate Professor Karen Pollard from the University of Canterbury said in a statement.

"If it does, because of mass transfer or merger events, it can collapse and produce a thermonuclear supernova. Interestingly, 70% to 85% of all thermonuclear supernovae are now suspected to result from the explosion of white dwarfs with sub-Chandrasekhar masses. As a result of mass transfer or mergers, these white dwarf stars can explode as a thermonuclear supernova explosion."
Read more here: https://www.iflscience.com/space/fascin ... supernova/
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
User avatar
caltrek
Posts: 6509
Joined: Mon May 17, 2021 1:17 pm

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by caltrek »

Merging Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) Gives us a New Way to Measure the Universe
by Matt Williams
May 17, 2022

Extract:
(Universe Today) A pair of researchers from Columbia University (Zoltán Haiman and Jordy Davelaar) announced a new and potentially easier way to study black holes. In particular, their method could enable the study of black holes smaller than M87* in galaxies more distant than the M87 galaxy.

As Haiman and Davelaar explain, viewing a binary black hole system edge-on as one passes in front of the other (aka. transits), astronomers will be able to use the gravitational force of the closest BH to magnify the bright disk of the more distant one. However, these observations will also reveal another interesting feature. As two BHs pass in front of each other, said Haiman and Davelaar, there will be a distinctive dip in brightness corresponding to the “shadow” of the more distant black hole.

The detection of this shadow could have immense implications for astrophysicists and quantum physicists alike. Astrophysicists have been looking for these shadows as part of an ongoing effort to test General Relativity under the most extreme conditions and environments. These tests could lead to a new understanding of how gravity and quantum forces interact, which would allow physicists to finally resolve how the four fundamental forces of nature work together – electromagnetic, weak nuclear forces, strong nuclear forces, and gravity.

Haiman and Davelaar are currently looking for other telescope data to confirm the Kepler observations and verify that “Spikey” (their name given to a suspected pair of SMBHs) really is harboring a pair of merging black holes. If and when their technique is confirmed, it is likely to be applied to the roughy 150 pairs of merging SMBHs that have been observed but are still awaiting confirmation. In the coming years, next-generation telescopes will be coming online that will allow for more opportunities to test this technique.

Examples include the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a massive telescope in Chile scheduled to open later this year. Once operational, Rubin will conduct the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) that will include the observation of more than 100 million SMBHs. By 2030, NASA’s Laser Interferometry Space Antenna, a space-based gravitational wave detector, will also come online and enable even more opportunities to study merging black holes. With so many candidates available for study, scientists shouldn’t have to wait too long for a breakthrough.
Source: https://www.universetoday.com/155907/me ... ore-155907
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
weatheriscool
Posts: 12946
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 6:16 pm

Re: Space News and Discussions

Post by weatheriscool »

New spin on galaxy rotation saves controversial gravity theory
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-galaxy-ro ... heory.html
by University of St Andrews
An international group of astronomers, led by a physicist at the University of St Andrews, has revived an alternative gravity theory.

Headed by Dr. Indranil Banik of the School of Physics and Astronomy at St Andrews, the study revealed a high predicted rotation speed of gas in a dwarf galaxy consistent with the previously debunked theory known as Milgromian Dynamics (MOND).

An earlier study of the rotation speed of gas in the dwarf galaxy AGC 114905 (Mancera Pina et al, 2022) found that the gas rotated very slowly and claimed the MOND theory was dead.

Such theories are essential in understanding our universe because, according to known physics, galaxies rotate so quickly they should fly apart. MOND, a controversial alternative to General Relativity, the prevailing Einstein-inspired understanding of the phenomenon of gravity that requires dark matter to hold galaxies together; does not require dark matter. As dark matter has never been detected despite decades of very sensitive searches, various theories have been put forward to explain what holds galaxies together, and debate rages over which is right. The very low rotation speed reported in the Mancera Pina et al study is inconsistent with predictions in a universe governed by General Relativity with large amounts of dark matter.

Dr. Banik's group argues that the high predicted rotation speed in the MOND gravity theory is consistent with observations if the inclination of the galaxy is overestimated.
Post Reply