Recent Comments

    Category Astronomy/Space

    Evidence of dynamic Seasonal Activity on a Martian Sand Dune

    February 26, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Ariel image of airborne plumes of dusty material located on the downwind slope of the Martian megadune
    Courtesy of NASA/JPL/University of Arizona The airborne plumes of dusty material located on the downwind slope of this Martian megadune were an important clue, allowing an SwRI scientist to deduce that chunks of frozen CO2, or dry ice, slide down the gullies in the spring, kicking up sand and dust. While actively sliding CO2 ice blocks cannot be observed conclusively in this image, dense clouds of debris likely conceal mobile ice blocks.

    Research finds that airborne dust plumes are produced by sliding blocks of dry ice each spring. A Southwest Research Institute® (SwRI®) scientist examined 11 Mars years of image data to understand the seasonal processes that create linear gullies on the slopes of the megadune in the Russell crater on Mars...

    Read More

    New study suggests Supermassive Black Holes could form from Dark Matter

    February 24, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    New study suggests supermassive black holes could form from dark matter
    Artist’s impression of a spiral galaxy embedded in a larger distribution of invisible dark matter, known as a dark matter halo (colored in blue). Studies looking at the formation of dark matter haloes have suggested that each halo could harbor a very dense nucleus of dark matter, which may potentially mimic the effects of a central black hole, or eventually collapse to form one. Credit ESO/L. Calçada, CC BY 4.0

    A new theoretical study has proposed a novel mechanism for the creation of supermassive black holes from dark matter. The international team find that rather than the conventional formation scenarios involving ‘normal’ matter, supermassive black holes could instead form directly from dark matter in high density regions in the centers of galaxies...

    Read More

    Ultramassive black hole in NGC 1600 investigated in detail

    February 23, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Ultramassive black hole in NGC 1600 investigated in detail
    Smoothed soft band (0.5 – 1.2 keV) Chandra image of NGC 1600. Credit: James Runge and Stephen A. Walker, 2021.

    Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory, astronomers from the University of Alabama in Huntsville have investigated the central region of the galaxy NGC 1600, focusing on its ultramassive black hole (UMBH). Results of the study, presented in a paper published February 11 on the arXiv pre-print server, shed more light on the properties of this UMBH.

    At a distance of about 150,000,000 light years away from the Earth, NGC 1600 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Eridanus...

    Read More

    Cold Dust Cores in the Central Zone of the Milky Way

    February 22, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The Milky Way’s central molecular zone (CMZ) spans the innermost 1600 light-years of the galaxy (for comparison, the Sun is 26,600 light-years away from the galactic center) and includes a vast complex of molecular clouds containing about sixty million solar-masses of molecular gas. The gas in these clouds exists under more extreme physical conditions than elsewhere in the galaxy on average, with higher densities and temperatures, more intense pressures, magnetic fields, and turbulence, and higher cosmic-ray abundances and ultraviolet and X-ray radiation...

    Read More