An asteroid discovery algorithm – designed to uncover near-Earth asteroids for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s upcoming 10-year survey of the night sky – has identified its first “potentially hazardous” asteroid, a term for space rocks in Earth’s vicinity that scientists like to keep an eye on. The roughly 600-foot-long asteroid, designated 2022 SF289, was discovered during a test drive of the algorithm with the ATLAS survey in Hawaii...
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August 1, 2023,
Astronomy/Space
They are mysterious, exciting and inescapable—black holes are some of the most exotic objects in the universe. With gravitational-wave detectors, it is possible to detect the chirp sound that two black holes produce when they merge, approximately 70 such chirps have been found so far.
A team of researchers at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) now predicts that in this “ocean of voices” chirps preferentially occur in two universal frequency ranges. The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The discovery of gravitational waves...
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July 31, 2023,
Astronomy/Space
More than 15 years after the discovery of fast radio bursts (FRBs)—millisecond-long, deep-space cosmic explosions of electromagnetic radiation—astronomers worldwide have been combing the universe to uncover clues about how and why they form.
Nearly all FRBs identified have originated in deep space outside our Milky Way galaxy. That is until April 2020, when the first Galactic FRB, named FRB 20200428, was detected. This FRB was produced by a magnetar (SGR J1935+2154), a dense, city-sized neutron star with an incredibly powerful magnetic field.
This groundbreaking discovery led some to believe that FRBs identified at cosmological distances outside our galaxy may also be produced by magnetars...
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A young planet whirling around a petulant red dwarf star is changing in unpredictable ways orbit-by-orbit...
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