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    Category Astronomy/Space

    NASA’s IXPE helps Solve Black Hole Jet mystery

    November 25, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This illustration shows NASA’s IXPE spacecraft, at right, observing blazar Markarian 501, at left. A blazar is a black hole surrounded by a disk of gas and dust with a bright jet of high-energy particles pointed toward Earth. The inset illustration shows high-energy particles in the jet (blue). When the particles hit the shock wave, depicted as a white bar, the particles become energized and emit X-rays as they accelerate. Moving away from the shock, they emit lower-energy light: first visible, then infrared, and radio waves. Farther from the shock, the magnetic field lines are more chaotic, causing more turbulence in the particle stream.
    Credits: NASA/Pablo Garcia

    Some of the brightest objects in the sky are called blazars...

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    Astronomers Observe Intra-Group Light – the elusive glow between distant galaxies

    November 24, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    igl_between_galaxies_400138.jpg
    Light ‘between’ the galaxies – the ‘intra-group light’ – however dim, is radiated from stars stripped from their home galaxy. Image: Supplied.

    Pioneering a new technique, researchers have peered into the extremely faint light that exists between galaxies to describe the history and state of orphan stars. An international team of astronomers have turned a new technique onto a group of galaxies and the faint light between them — known as ‘intra-group light’ — to characterise the stars that dwell there.

    Lead author of the study published in MNRAS, Dr Cristina Martínez-Lombilla from the School of Physics at UNSW Science, said “We know almost nothing about intra-group light.

    “The brightest parts of the intra-group light are ~50 times fainter than the darkest night sky on Earth...

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    International team observes Innermost Structure of Quasar Jet

    November 24, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Radio astronomy images of the 3C 273 jet
    Radio astronomy images of the 3C 273 jet. The close-up view on the left is the deepest look yet into the plasma jet of the quasar 3C 273. The image in the center shows the extended structure of the jet. The image on the right is a visible light image of the quasar taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The radio observations were made by the Global Millimeter VLBI Array (GMVA) joined by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the High Sensitivity Array (HSA). (Credits: Hiroki Okino and Kazunori Akiyama; GMVA+ALMA and HSA images: Okino et al.; HST Image: ESA/Hubble & NASA) Original size (1.1MB)

    An international team of scientists has observed the narrowing of a quasar jet for the first time by using a network of radio telescopes across the world...

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    An Exoplanet Atmosphere as never seen before

    November 23, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Credit: Melissa Weiss/Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

    The JWST just scored another first: a detailed molecular and chemical portrait of a distant world’s skies. New observations of WASP-39 b reveal a never-before-seen molecule in the atmosphere of a planet – sulfur dioxide – among other details.

    The telescope’s array of highly sensitive instruments was trained on the atmosphere of a “hot Saturn” – a planet about as massive as Saturn orbiting a star some 700 light-years away – known as WASP-39 b. While JWST and other space telescopes, including Hubble and Spitzer, previously have revealed isolated ingredients of this broiling planet’s atmosphere, the new readings provide a full menu of atoms, molecules, and even signs of active chemistry and clouds.

    “The clarity of...

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