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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Hubble sees Evaporating Planet getting the Hiccups

    July 31, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This artist’s illustration shows a planet (dark silhouette) passing in front of the red dwarf star AU Microscopii. The planet is so close to the eruptive star a ferocious blast of stellar wind and blistering ultraviolet radiation is heating the planet’s hydrogen atmosphere, causing it to escape into space. Four times Earth’s diameter, the planet is slowly evaporating its atmosphere, which stretches out linearly along its orbital path. This process may eventually leave behind a rocky core. The illustration is based on measurements made by the Hubble Space Telescope.
    Credits: NASA, ESA, and Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

    A young planet whirling around a petulant red dwarf star is changing in unpredictable ways orbit-by-orbit...

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    Astronomers Reveal New Features of Galactic Black Holes

    July 28, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist’s conception of microquasar event captured by FAST Telescope. (Courtesy of Professor Wei Wang, Wuhan University)

    International team of scientists reports on the first detection of a quasi-periodic oscillation signal in the radio band from a Galactic black hole system.

    Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe, with features that sound like they come straight from a sci-fi movie.

    Stellar-mass black holes with masses of roughly 10 suns, for example, reveal their existence by eating materials from their companion stars. And in some instances, supermassive black holes accumulate at the center of some galaxies to form bright compact regions known as quasars with masses equal to millions to billions of our sun...

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    New Image Reveals Secrets of Planet Birth

    July 28, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The background of this image is dark, but in its centre lurks a swirling ghostly figure, which extends towards the edge of the picture. At the very centre there is a small bright region and erupting out of it there is a poorly defined, fuzzy edged cloud and blobs of material in yellow and blue, respectively. The yellow cloud extends far out in the image, making an elongated spiral shape that gets dimmer and less defined as it reaches the top and bottom of the frame. Meanwhile, the blue blobs only extend downwards from the centre and to a fraction of the distance of the yellow spiral cloud. The blobs twist away from the central bright region, forming a tight U-shape lying on its right side.
    A spectacular new image released today by the European Southern Observatory gives us clues about how planets as massive as Jupiter could form. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), researchers have detected large dusty clumps, close to a young star, that could collapse to create giant planets.

    Astronomers have gained new clues about how planets as massive as Jupiter could form. Researchers have detected large dusty clumps, close to a young star, that could collapse to create giant planets.

    A spectacular new image released today by the European Southern Observatory gives us clues about how planets as massive as Jupiter could form...

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    Webb Detects Water Vapor in Rocky Planet-Forming One

    July 26, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This artist’s concept portrays the star PDS 70 and its inner protoplanetary disk. New measurements by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected water vapor at distances of less than 100 million miles from the star – the region where rocky, terrestrial planets may be forming. This is the first detection of water in the terrestrial region of a disk already known to host two or more protoplanets, one of which is shown at upper right.
    Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI)

    Water is essential for life as we know it. However, scientists debate how it reached the Earth and whether the same processes could seed rocky exoplanets orbiting distant stars. New insights may come from the planetary system PDS 70, located 370 light-years away...

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