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A star that wanders too close to the supermassive black hole in the center of its galaxy will be torn apart by the black hole’s gravity in a violent cataclysm called a tidal disruption event (TDE), producing a bright flare of radiation. A new study led by theoretical astrophysicists at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute and UC Santa Cruz provides a unified model that explains recent observations of these extreme events. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Come Vote and Turn this SpaceX LEGO Set into a Reality Remember the really cool Saturn V rocket set released by LEGO last year? Want to help set the direction for the next space-related LEGO set that should get built? Well then, check out SpaceX: The Ultimate Collection. This is a proposed LEGO set designed by Matthew Nolan and Valerie Roche (co-designer of the Saturn V set), consisting of three separate modules: Block 5 Variant Falcon 9 For starters, you’ll get a Block 5 variant of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with its 9 Merlin engines, black interstage and titanium gridfins. The legs actually moveRead More →

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Spanish astronomer Salvador Barquin has detected a new binary star system in the Draco constellation. The newly found system, registered by the discoverer in the International Variable Star Index (VSX), is an EW-type eclipsing binary. The finding is reported in a paper published May 16 on arXiv.org. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Two Spacecraft Will Get Closer to the Sun Than Ever Before Our understanding of distant stars has increased dramatically in recent decades. Thanks to improved instruments, scientists are able to see farther and clearer, thus learning more about star systems and the planets that orbit them (aka. extra-solar planets). Unfortunately, it will be some time before we develop the necessary technology to explore these stars up close. But in the meantime, NASA and the ESA are developing missions that will allow us to explore our own Sun like never before. These missions, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and the ESA’s (the European Space Agency) Solar Orbiter,Read More →

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Our solar system is a tiny but wonderfully familiar corner of the vast, dark universe – we have even been able to land spacecraft on our celestial neighbours. Yet its outer reaches are still remarkably unmapped. Now we have discovered 840 small worlds in the distant and hard-to-explore region beyond Neptune. This is the largest set of discoveries ever made, increasing the number of distant objects with well known paths around the sun by 50%. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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The presence of microbial life in Earth’s stratosphere is not only opening up a new arena in which to study extremophiles, but is increasing the range of possible environments in which we may find life on other planets. This is the conclusion of a new study that summarizes what we know about stratospheric life so far. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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The 12 m radio telescope APEX in Chile has been outfitted with special equipment including broad bandwidth recorders and a stable hydrogen maser clock for performing joint interferometric observations with other telescopes at wavelengths as short as 1.3 mm and the goal to obtain the ultimate picture of the black hole shadow. The addition of APEX to the so-called Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which until recently consisted of antennas only in the northern hemisphere, reveals new and unprecedented details in the structure of Sgr A* at the centre of the Milky Way. The increased angular resolution provided by the APEX telescope now reveals details inRead More →

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Uh oh, the EMDrive Could be Getting Its “Thrust” From Cables and Earth’s Magnetic Field Ever since NASA announced that they had created a prototype of the controversial Radio Frequency Resonant Cavity Thruster (aka. the EM Drive), any and all reported results have been the subject of controversy. Initially, any reported tests were the stuff of rumors and leaks, the results were treated with understandable skepticism. Even after the paper submitted by the Eagleworks team passed peer review, there have still been unanswered questions. Hoping to address this, a team of physicists from TU Dresden – known as the SpaceDrive Project – recently conducted anRead More →

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NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft began the 18th observing campaign of its extended mission, K2, on May 12. For the next 82 days, Kepler will stare at clusters of stars, faraway galaxies, and a handful of solar system objects, including comets, objects beyond Neptune, and an asteroid. The Kepler spacecraft is expected to run out of fuel within several months. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Every galaxy is thought to harbor a supermassive black hole in the center, or nucleus, of the galaxy, and in active galaxies this black hole is fed by infalling matter. This “central engine” is typically surrounded by dusty molecular gas in a doughnut configuration, which hides the black hole and the infalling material from our view along certain viewing directions. The picture of a central engine plus obscuring doughnut is thought to apply to all accreting supermassive black holes, explaining the apparent variety of active galaxies from the very brightest quasars to the lower-luminosity radio galaxies under a single “unified scheme.” Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Oumuamua was Just the Beginning. Astronomers Find an Interstellar Asteroid Orbiting Retrograde near Jupiter. On October 19th, 2017, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System-1 (Pan-STARRS-1) telescope in Hawaii announced the first-ever detection of an interstellar asteroid – I/2017 U1 (aka. ‘Oumuamua). Originally mistaken for a comet, follow-up observations conducted by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and others confirmed that ‘Oumuamua was actually a rocky body that had originated outside of our Solar System. News of this interstellar asteroids, the first to ever be detected by astronomers, raised a lot of excitement. And according to a new study by an international pair of astronomers,Read More →

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The Ant Nebula Actually has Intense Laser Emissions Coming From its Core When low- to middleweight stars like our Sun approach the end of their life cycles they eventually cast off their outer layers, leaving behind a dense, white dwarf star. These outer layers became a massive cloud of dust and gas, which is characterized by bright colors and intricate patterns, known as a planetary nebula. Someday, our Sun will turn into such a nebula, one which could be viewed from light-years away. This process, where a dying star gives rise to a massive cloud of dust, was already known to be incredibly beautiful andRead More →

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By targeting the most massive galaxies in our universe, astronomers have studied how their stars move. The results are surprising: while half of them spin around their short axis as expected, the other half turn around their long axis. Such kinematics are most likely the result of a special type of galaxy merger, involving already massive, similar-mass galaxies. This would imply that the growth of the most massive and the largest galaxies is governed by these rare events. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →