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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Penetrating Radar Aboard the Chang’E-4 Rover Reveals Layers of the Moon’s History

    August 23, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Penetrating radar aboard the Chang'E-4 rover reveals layers of the moon's history
    Image taken by the panoramic camera (PCAM) on board the Chinese Yutu 2 lunar rover as it looked back at the Chang’e 4 lander. Credit: Nature Communications (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-12278-3/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA

    A team of space scientists at the Planetary Science Institute, working with colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen University and the University of Aberdeen, has used data from China’s Chang’E-4 rover to learn more about the history of the moon. In their study, reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, the group analyzed lunar-penetrating radar (LPR) data sent back from the rover.

    China’s Chang’E-4 rover has been wandering around on the far side of the moon since 2018...

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    A Giant Black Hole Destroys a Massive Star

    August 23, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Earlier this year, another team of astronomers reported the “Scary Barbie” event where they estimated a star with about 14 times the mass of the sun was destroyed by a black hole. However, this has not yet been confirmed as a tidal disruption, with the estimate of the star’s mass mainly based on the brightness of the flare, not on a detailed analysis of material around the black hole as with ASASSN-14li.

    Another exciting aspect of the ASASSN-14li result is what it means for future studies. Astronomers have seen moderately massive stars like ASASSN-14li’s in the star cluster that contains the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy...

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    Webb reveals Intricate Details in the Remains of a Dying Star

    August 22, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Side-by-side images of the Ring Nebula where the nebula appears as a distorted doughnut. On the right, the nebula’s inner cavity hosts shades of blue and green, while the detailed ring transitions through shades of orange in the inner regions and pink in the outer region. On the left, the nebula’s inner cavity hosts shades of red and orange, while the detailed ring transitions through shades of yellow in the inner regions and blue/purple in the outer region. The ring’s inner region has distinct filament elements.
    New images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope of the well-known Ring Nebula provide unprecedented spatial resolution and spectral sensitivity. In the NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) image on the left, the intricate details of the filament structure of the inner ring are particularly visible in this dataset. On the right, the MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument) image reveals particular details in the concentric features in the outer regions of the nebulae’s ring. Download the full-resolution NIRCam image and the full-resolution MIRI image from the Image gallery. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Barlow (University College London), N. Cox (ACRI-ST), R. Wesson (Cardiff University).

    NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope obtained images of the Ring Nebula, one of the best-known examples of a pla...

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    Spanish Astronomer discovers New Active Galaxy

    August 21, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Spanish astronomer discovers new active galaxy
    Images of the newfound galaxy. Credit: Elio Quiroga Rodriguez (2023).

    By analyzing the images of the Sombrero Galaxy obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Elio Quiroga Rodriguez of the Mid Atlantic University in Spain, has identified a peculiar object, which turned out to be a galaxy hosting an active galactic nucleus (AGN). The finding was reported in a paper published August 11 on the pre-print server arXiv.

    An AGN is a compact region at the center of a galaxy, more luminous than the surrounding galaxy light. Studies show that AGNs are very energetic due either to the presence of a black hole or star formation activity at the core of the galaxy.

    Astronomers generally divide AGNs into two groups based on emission line features...

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