Gemini Observatory images reveal striking details of comet NEOWISE When Comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3) sped through the inner Solar System during the middle of 2020, astronomers and the general public watched in awe as this “dirty snowball” shed gas and dust into space, producing a striking show visible to the naked eye. Close-up observations, led by Michal Drahus and Piotr Guzik of Jagiellonian University in Krakow, used the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, to observe the materials escaping from the comet over time. One set of observations, obtained on 1 August 2020 from the Gemini North telescope on Hawai’i’s Maunakea, displays aRead More →

Galactic bar paradox resolved in cosmic dance New light has been shed on a mysterious and long-standing conundrum at the very heart of our galaxy. The new work offers a potential solution to the so-called “Galactic bar paradox,” whereby different observations produce contradictory estimates of the motion of the central regions of the Milky Way. The results are published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Four new open clusters detected in the Cygnus Cloud By analyzing the data from ESA’s Gaia satellite, Chinese astronomers have discovered four new open clusters in the Cygnus Nebula Cloud. The newfound clusters, designated QC1 to QC 4, are located between 4,100 and 7,600 light-years away. The finding is reported in a paper published August 17 on arXiv.org. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Completely Harmless Asteroid Almost Certainly Won’t Hit Earth Just Before the US Election In a year of devastating wildfires, destructive derechos, early and active hurricanes, widespread social unrest, contentious politics and more — all amid an unprecedented global pandemic — it might seem fitting that ‘asteroid impact’ would be added to the 2020 bingo card. While weekend headlines buzzed over the prediction of an asteroid hitting Earth on … Continue reading “Completely Harmless Asteroid Almost Certainly Won’t Hit Earth Just Before the US Election” The post Completely Harmless Asteroid Almost Certainly Won’t Hit Earth Just Before the US Election appeared first on Universe Today. UniverseRead More →

Did Jupiter Push Venus Into a Runaway Greenhouse? Venus has been garnering a lot of attention lately, though primarily in the scientific community as the last Hollywood movie about the planet was released in the 1960s.  This is in part due to its dramatic difference from Earth, and what that difference might mean for the study of exoplanets.  If we can better understand … Continue reading “Did Jupiter Push Venus Into a Runaway Greenhouse?” The post Did Jupiter Push Venus Into a Runaway Greenhouse? appeared first on Universe Today. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Lunar Landings Will Make it Harder to Study the Moon’s Ice Deposits A new study led by researchers from the JHUAPL indicates that future missions to the Moon could contaminate the lunar environment with their exhaust. The post Lunar Landings Will Make it Harder to Study the Moon’s Ice Deposits appeared first on Universe Today. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Apertif images yield first scientific results Using Apertif (APERture Tile In Focus), searching at a radio frequency of 1.4 GHz, researchers have found an intra-hour variable (IHV) source, described in the paper “Extreme intra-hour variability of the radio source J1402+5347 discovered with Apertif.” IHVs are very compact radio sources that twinkle on timescales of minutes and are among the rarest objects in the sky. For the past 30 to 40 years only a handful of IHVs have been discovered. However, with Apertif, researchers were able to discover ten more IHVs apart from the one described in the paper. All these IHVs were discovered in aRead More →

Spinning black hole powers jet by magnetic flux Black holes are at the center of almost all galaxies that have been studied so far. They have an unimaginably large mass and therefore attract matter, gas and even light. But they can also emit matter in the form of plasma jets—a kind of plasma beam that is ejected from the center of the galaxy with tremendous energy. A plasma jet can extend several hundred thousand light years far into space. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Rogue planets could outnumber the stars An upcoming NASA mission could find that there are more rogue planets—planets that float in space without orbiting a sun—than there are stars in the Milky Way, a new study theorizes. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Very high energy gamma-ray emission from a radio galaxy Giant elliptical galaxies, the oldest known large galactic structures in the universe, have no spiral arms and little or no current star formation activity, but their central supermassive black holes are often active galactic nuclei (AGN). While nearly all galaxies host a supermassive black hole in their nuclei, most nuclei are not AGN. Astronomers think that giant ellipticals formed in the early universe, less than a billion years after the big bang, after a phase of rapid star-formation, and then evolved to become even larger through galaxy mergers and accretion of gas from the intergalactic medium.Read More →

NASA’s New Video Shows You What it’s Like Traveling Close to the Speed of Light NASA has just released an informative video that lets potential interstellar travellers know what they’re in for! The post NASA’s New Video Shows You What it’s Like Traveling Close to the Speed of Light appeared first on Universe Today. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Microscopic deformation of a neutron star inferred from a distance of 4500 light-years Imagine that the size of a bacterium is measured from a distance of about 4500 light-years. This would be an incredible measurement, considering that a bacterium is so small that a microscope is required to see it, and what an enormous distance light can travel in 4500 years, given that it can round the Earth more than seven times in just one second. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

Could a tabletop experiment detect gravitational waves and determine the quantum nature of gravity? A tabletop gravitational wave detector could take decades to build, but it could answer the most fundamental questions in physics. The post Could a tabletop experiment detect gravitational waves and determine the quantum nature of gravity? appeared first on Universe Today. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →