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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Hubble finds Hungry Black Hole Twisting captured Star into Donut Shape

    January 17, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This sequence of artist’s illustrations shows how a black hole can devour a bypassing star. 1. A normal star passes near a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy. 2. The star’s outer gasses are pulled into the black hole’s gravitational field. 3. The star is shredded as tidal forces pull it apart. 4. The stellar remnants are pulled into a donut-shaped ring around the black hole, and will eventually fall into the black hole, unleashing a tremendous amount of light and high-energy radiation.
    Credits: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)

    Black holes are gatherers, not hunters. They lie in wait until a hapless star wanders by...

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    How do Rocky Planets really form?

    January 17, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Scientists unveil a unified theory for rocky planet formation. A new theory for how rocky planets form could explain the origin of so-called “super-Earths” – a class of exoplanets a few times more massive than the Earth that are the most abundant type of planet in the galaxy.

    Further, it could explain why super-Earths within a single planetary system often wind up looking strangely similar in size, as though each system were only capable of producing a single kind of planet.

    “As our observations of exoplanets have grown over the past decade, it has become clear that the standard theory of planet formation needs to be revised, starting with the fundamentals...

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    New Webb Image Reveals Dusty Disk Like Never Seen Before

    January 13, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    These two images are of the dusty debris disk around AU Mic, a red dwarf star located 32 light-years away in the southern constellation Microscopium. Scientists used Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to study AU Mic. NIRCam’s coronagraph, which blocked the intense light of the central star, allowed the team to study the region very close to the star. The location of the star, which is masked out, is marked by a white, graphical representation at the center of each image. The region blocked by the coronagraph is shown by a dashed circle.
    Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and K. Lawson (Goddard Space Flight Center). Image processing: A. Pagan (STScI)

    NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has imaged the inner workings of a dusty disk surrounding a nearby red dwarf star...

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    Ultracool Dwarf Binary Stars Break Records

    January 12, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Credit: Adam Burgasser/University of California San Diego

    Northwestern University and the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) astrophysicists have discovered the tightest ultracool dwarf binary system ever observed.

    The two stars are so close that it takes them less than one Earth day to revolve around each other. In other words, each star’s “year” lasts just 20.5 hours.

    The newly discovered system, named LP 413-53AB, is composed of a pair of ultracool dwarfs, a class of very low-mass stars that are so cool that they emit their light primarily in the infrared, making them completely invisible to the human eye. They are nonetheless one of the most common types of stars in the universe.

    Previously, astronomers had only detected three short-period ultracool dwarf bi...

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