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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Eccentric Exoplanet discovered

    January 8, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    TESS target pixel files of Sectors 14, 20, 21, and 26 that observed TOI-2257, generated by means of tpfplotter (Aller et al. 2020). The apertures used to extract the photometry by the SPOC pipeline are shown as red shaded regions. The Gaia DR2 catalog (Gaia Collaboration 2018) is over-plotted, with all sources of up to 6 magnitudes in contrast with TOI-2257 shown as red circles. We note that the symbol size scales with the magnitude contrast. While the star is relatively isolated, there is a small amount of contamination from outside sources, ranging from 2–5% of the total flux. Credit: DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202142280

    Eccentric exoplanet discovered Led by the University of Bern, an international research team has discovered a sub-Neptune exoplanet orbiting a red dwarf star...

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    Astronomers capture Red Supergiant’s Death Throes

    January 7, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    ‘For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode,’ researcher says. For the first time ever, astronomers have imaged in real time the dramatic end to a red supergiant’s life – watching the massive star’s rapid self-destruction and final death throes before collapsing into a type II supernova.

    Led by researchers at Northwestern University and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), the team observed the red supergiant during its last 130 days leading up to its deadly detonation.

    The discovery defies previous ideas of how red supergiant stars evolve right before exploding. Earlier observations showed that red supergiants were relatively quiescent before their deaths — with no evidence of violent eruptions or luminous emissions...

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    Earth Isn’t ‘Super’ because the Sun had Rings Before Planets

    January 6, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    An illustration of three distinct, planetesimal-forming rings that could have produced the planets and other features of the solar system, according to a computational model from Rice University. The vaporization of solid silicates, water and carbon monoxide at “sublimation lines” (top) caused “pressure bumps” in the sun’s protoplanetary disk, trapping dust in three distinct rings. As the sun cooled, pressure bumps migrated sunward allowing trapped dust to accumulate into asteroid-sized planetesimals. The chemical composition of objects from the inner ring (NC) differs from the composition of middle- and outer-ring objects (CC)...
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    Resolving the Black Hole ‘Fuzzball or Wormhole’ debate

    January 5, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Study adds more certainty to theory involving information paradox. Black holes really are giant fuzzballs, a new study says.

    The study attempts to put to rest the debate over Stephen Hawking’s famous information paradox, the problem created by Hawking’s conclusion that any data that enters a black hole can never leave. This conclusion accorded with the laws of thermodynamics, but opposed the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics.

    “What we found from string theory is that all the mass of a black hole is not getting sucked in to the center,” said Samir Mathur, lead author of the study and professor of physics at The Ohio State University...

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