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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Improved Model for the Mass Distribution of Galaxy Cluster SMACS J0723.3−7327 based on Webb Telescope image

    August 1, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    James Webb Telescope reveals highly distant galaxies
    This JWST image shows the galaxy cluster SMACS J0723.3−7327 with a large number of lensed background galaxies. The white bar at the bottom corresponds to 50 arcsec, which is approximately the maximum size of Jupiter observed from Earth. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI

    Using the first science image released by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) this month, an international team of scientists with significant contribution from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has built an improved model for the mass distribution of the galaxy cluster SMACS J0723.3−7327. Acting as a so-called gravitational lens, the foreground galaxy cluster produces both multiple images of background galaxies and magnifies these images...

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    Space study offers Clearest Understanding yet of the Lifecycle of Supermassive Black Holes

    July 27, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A supermassive black hole
    Supermassive black holes can be obscured by a doughnut-shaped ring of dust and gas, known as a “torus.” (Photo by ESA/NASA, the AVO project and Paolo Padovani)

    Black holes with varying light signatures but that were thought to be the same objects being viewed from different angles are actually in different stages of the life cycle, according to a study led by Dartmouth researchers.

    The research on black holes known as “active galactic nuclei,” or AGNs, says that it definitively shows the need to revise the widely used “unified model of AGN” that characterizes supermassive black holes as all having the same properties.

    The study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, provides answers to a nagging space mystery and should allow researchers to create more pre...

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    Heaviest Neutron Star to date is a ‘Black Widow’ Eating its Mate

    July 27, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    PSR J0952-0607: The Fastest and Heaviest Known Galactic Neutron Star
    A spinning neutron star periodically swings its radio (green) and gamma-ray (magenta) beams past Earth in this artist’s concept of a black widow pulsar. The neutron star/pulsar heats the facing side of its stellar partner (right) to temperatures twice as hot as the sun’s surface and slowly evaporates it. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

    A dense, collapsed star spinning 707 times per second—making it one of the fastest spinning neutron stars in the Milky Way galaxy—has shredded and consumed nearly the entire mass of its stellar companion and, in the process, grown into the heaviest neutron star observed to date.

    Weighing this record-setting neutron star, which tops the charts at 2...

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    Theoretical Model suggests Saltiness of Enceladus’s Oceans may be right to Sustain Life

    July 26, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Considered heat sources/sinks and salinity/temperature forcings in our Enceladus experiments

    A team of researchers at MIT has found via theoretical modeling that the saltiness of the oceans on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, may be the right level to sustain life. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes the factors that went into building their model and the features of Enceladus that were used to measure the saltiness of its oceans.

    The combined data from the Cassini and Galileo missions showed that Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa both hold potential for satisfying three of the main features believed to be necessary for supporting life on other celestial bodies: they have a source of energy, they have liquid water and they have a mi...

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