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Red Dwarf Star, Planet Orbiting at Right Angles. Mayhem. When we think of other planetary systems, we tend to think that they will operate by the same basic rules as our own. In the Solar System, the planets orbit close to the equatorial plane of the Sun – meaning around its equator. The Sun’s rotational axis, the direction of its poles based to its rotation, is also the same as most of the planets’ (the exception being Uranus, which rotates on its side). But if the study of extra-solar planets has taught us anything, it is that the Universe is full of possibilities. Consider theRead More →

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Weekly Space Hangout – Dec 20, 2017: The Year in Review Hosts: Fraser Cain (universetoday.com / @fcain) Dr. Paul M. Sutter (pmsutter.com / @PaulMattSutter) Dr. Kimberly Cartier (KimberlyCartier.org / @AstroKimCartier ) Dr. Morgan Rehnberg (MorganRehnberg.com / @MorganRehnberg & ChartYourWorld.org) Announcements: If you would like to join the Weekly Space Hangout Crew, visit their site here and sign up. They’re a great team who can help you join our online discussions! We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Wednesday at 5:00 pm Pacific / 8:00 pm Eastern. You can watch us live on Universe Today, or the Weekly Space Hangout YouTube page – Please subscribe! TheRead More →

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Giant Bubbles on Red Giant Star’s Surface Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have for the first time directly observed granulation patterns on the surface of a star outside the Solar System — the ageing red giant π1 Gruis. This remarkable new image from the PIONIER instrument reveals the convective cells that make up the surface of this huge star, which has 350 times the diameter of the Sun. Each cell covers more than a quarter of the star’s diameter and measures about 120 million kilometres across. These new results are being published this week in the journal Nature. ESO News Feed Go to SourceRead More →

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Updates on ‘Oumuamau. Maybe it’s a Comet, Actually. Oh, and no Word From Aliens. On October 19th, 2017, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System-1 (Pan-STARRS-1) in Hawaii announced the first-ever detection of an interstellar object, named 1I/2017 U1 (aka. ‘Oumuamua). After originally hypothesizing that it was a comet, observations performed by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and other astronomers indicated that it was likely a strange-looking asteroid measuring about 400 meters (1312 ft) long. Since that time, multiple surveys have been conducted to determine the true nature of this asteroid, which have included studies of its composition to Breakthrough Listen‘s proposal to listenRead More →

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Kilonova Neutron Star Collision Probably Left Behind a Black Hole In February of 2016, scientists from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced the first-ever detection of gravitational waves. A little over a century after they were first predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, we finally had proof that this phenomenon existed. In August of 2017, another major breakthrough occurred when LIGO detected waves that were believed to be caused by a neutron star merger. Shortly thereafter, scientists at LIGO, Advanced Virgo, and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope were able to determine where in the sky the neutron star merger occurred. While many studiesRead More →

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Far from earth, two black holes orbit around each other, propagating waves that bend time and space. The existence of such waves—gravitational waves—was first predicted by Albert Einstein over a century ago on the basis of his Theory of General Relativity. And as always, Einstein was right. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Astronomers Find Another Solar System with 8 Planets. Uh, Pluto, About that Deplaneting… With every passing year, more and more extra-solar planets are discovered. To make matters more interesting, improvements in methodology and technology are allowing for the discovery of more planets within individual systems. Consider the recent announcement of a seven-planet system around the red dwarf star known as TRAPPIST-1. At the time, this discovery established the record for most exoplanets orbiting a single star. Well move over TRAPPIST-1! Thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope and machine learning, a team from Google AI and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics (CfA) recently discovered an eighthRead More →

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Carnival of Space #540 Welcome, come in to the 540th Carnival of Space! The Carnival is a community of space science and astronomy writers and bloggers, who submit their best work each week for your benefit. So now, on to this week’s stories! First up, Chandra Reveals the Elementary Nature of Cassiopeia A over at the Chandra X Ray Observatory Blog. Then, we visit The Venus Transit where we read about the Supermoon rises sunsets and halos. Cold weather and high clouds doing great for the urban stargazer. Next, we return here to Universe Today. Matt Williams shares that a Monster Black Hole Seen ShortlyRead More →

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In the collective imagination, planets of a solar system all circle in the equatorial plane of their star. The star also spins, and its spin axis is aligned with the spin axes of the planetary orbits, giving the impression of a well-ordered system. But nature is capricious, as an international team led by researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, has detected a planetary system turned upside down. This discovery is published this week in the prestigious journal Nature. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Scientists at Queen’s University Belfast have led worldwide investigations into a mysterious object that passed close to Earth after arriving from deep interstellar space.Since the object was spotted in October, Professor Alan Fitzsimmons and Dr Michele Bannister from the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s University have led an international team of astronomers to piece together a profile of the strange visitor, which has been named `Oumuamua. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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(Phys.org)—An international group of astronomers has found a new grazing transiting “hot Jupiter” alien world as part of the Qatar Exoplanet Survey (QES). The newly discovered extrasolar planet, designated Qatar-6b, is about the size of Jupiter, but less massive than our solar system’s gas giant. The finding is reported in a paper published December 8 on arXiv.org. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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Where does gold, the precious metal coveted by mortals through the ages, come from? How, where and when was it produced? Last August, a single astrophysical observation finally gave us the key to answer these questions. The results of this research were published on October 16, 2017. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

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sunspots are regions on the sun’s photosphere that appear darker than surrounding areas because they are cooler, usually by one or two thousand degrees Celsius. These spots are temporary phenomena caused by magnetic activity that results from the sun’s rotation and the complex circulation of hot gas below its surface, and they are accompanied by solar flares, mass ejections and other energetic phenomena. Other stars have similar regions, called starspots, and there have been some suggestions that in comparison the sun is comparatively quiescent. Starspots are interesting to stellar astronomers because they are informed by the star’s rotation and circulation, details that are otherwise difficultRead More →