Category Astronomy/Space

Elusive, Dusty Inner Region of Distant Galaxy

The long-sought after innermost dusty ring was detected with the highest spatial resolution in the infrared wavelengths ever used. An international team of scientists has achieved the milestone of directly observing the long-sought, innermost dusty ring around a supermassive black hole, at a right angle to its emerging jet. Such a structure was thought to exist in the nucleus of galaxies but had been difficult to observe directly because intervening material obscured our line of sight.

Now the inner disk is detected using the highest spatial resolution in the infrared wavelengths ever done for an extragalactic object. The new discovery was just published in The Astrophysical Journal.

“This is a very exciting step forward to view the inner region of a distant galaxy with such fin...

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NASA’s Webb catches Fiery Hourglass as New Star Forms

The protostar within the dark cloud L1527, shown in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is embedded within a cloud of material feeding its growth. Ejections from the star have cleared out cavities above and below it, whose boundaries glow orange and blue in this infrared view. The upper central region displays bubble-like shapes due to stellar “burps,” or sporadic ejections.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI. Image processing: J. DePasquale, A. Pagan, and A. Koekemoer (STScI)

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has revealed the once-hidden features of the protostar within the dark cloud L1527, providing insight into the beginnings of a new star...

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New Observation Method Helps Unlock Secrets of UK Meteorite

Fragment of Winchcombe meteorite held by researcher. (The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London)

The Winchcombe meteorite, a rare carbonaceous meteorite which crashed onto a driveway in Gloucestershire in 2021, has been found to contain extra-terrestrial water and organic compounds that reveal insights into the origin of Earth’s oceans.

A new study, published today by Science Advances, led by experts from the Natural History Museum and the University of Glasgow reports the orbital history and first laboratory analyses of the Winchcombe meteorite, which was recovered only hours after its spectacular fireball lit up the skies over the U.K. in February 2021.

Denis Vida, a Western physics and astronomy postdoctoral associate, was a key contributor to the study...

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Cosmic Chocolate Pralines: General Neutron Star Structure revealed

The study of the sound speed has revealed that heavy neutron stars have a stiff mantle and a soft core, while light neutron stars have a soft mantle and a stiff core – much like different chocolate pralines (image: P. Kiefer/L. Rezzolla)

Physicists model more than one million equations of state. Through extensive model calculations, physicists have reached general conclusions about the internal structure of neutron stars, where matter reaches enormous densities: depending on their mass, the stars can have a core that is either very stiff or very soft.

So far, little is known about the interior of neutron stars, those extremely compact objects that can form after the death of a star: the mass of our sun or even more is compressed into a sphere with the diameter of a large city...

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