Recent Comments

    Category Astronomy/Space

    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

    First Black Hole ever detected is more Massive than we thought

    February 20, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    First black hole ever detected is more massive than we thought
    An artist’s impression of the Cygnus X-1 system. A stellar-mass black hole orbits with a companion star located 7,200 light years from Earth. Credit: International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research.

    New observations of the first black hole ever detected have led astronomers to question what they know about the Universe’s most mysterious objects.

    Published today in the journal Science, the research shows the system known as Cygnus X-1 contains the most massive stellar-mass black hole ever detected without the use of gravitational waves.

    Cygnus X-1 is one of the closest black holes to Earth. It was discovered in 1964 when a pair of Geiger counters were carried on board a sub-orbital rocket launched from New Mexico.

    The object was the focus of a famous scientific wager between ...

    Read More

    Touchdown! NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover Safely Lands on Red Planet

    February 18, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space, Biology/Biotechnology, Environment/Geology

    Members of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover team watch in mission control as the first images arrive moments after the spacecraft successfully touched down on Mars, Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.
    Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls

    The largest, most advanced rover NASA has sent to another world touched down on Mars Thursday, after a 203-day journey traversing 293 million miles (472 million kilometers)...

    Read More

    Supercomputer Turns Back Cosmic Clock

    February 18, 2021, Categories  Technology/Electronics, Astronomy/Space

    Schematic diagram of the evolution of the Universe from the inflation (left) to the present (right). The “reconstruction method” winds back the evolution from right to left on this illustration to reproduce the primordial density fluctuations from the current galaxy distribution. (Credit: The Institute of Statistical Mathematics)

    Astronomers have tested a method for reconstructing the state of the early Universe by applying it to 4000 simulated universes using the ATERUI II supercomputer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). They found that together with new observations the method can set better constraints on inflation, one of the most enigmatic events in the history of the Universe...

    Read More