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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Mystery Astronomical Object in ‘Mass Gap’: Neutron Star? Black Hole?

    June 24, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

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    In August of 2019, the LIGO-Virgo gravitational-wave network witnessed the merger of a black hole with 23 times the mass of our sun and a mystery object 2.6 times the mass of the sun. Scientists do not know if the mystery object was a neutron star or black hole, but either way it set a record as being either the heaviest known neutron star or the lightest known black hole. Image credit: LIGO/Caltech/MIT/R. Hurt (IPAC)

    Researchers have discovered what is either the heaviest known neutron star, or the lightest black hole. When the most massive stars die, they collapse under their own gravity and leave behind black holes; when stars that are a bit less massive die, they explode in supernovas and leave behind dense, dead remnants of stars called neutron stars...

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    Evidence supports ‘Hot Start’ Scenario and Early Ocean Formation on Pluto

    June 23, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

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    Extensional faults (arrows) on the surface of Pluto indicate expansion of the dwarf planet’s icy crust, attributed to freezing of a subsurface ocean. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Alex Parker)

    A new study suggests that Pluto and other large Kuiper belt objects started out with liquid oceans which have been slowly freezing over time. The accretion of new material during Pluto’s formation may have generated enough heat to create a liquid ocean that has persisted beneath an icy crust to the present day, despite the dwarf planet’s orbit far from the sun in the cold outer reaches of the solar system.

    This “hot start” scenario, presented in a paper published June 22 in Nature Geoscience, contrasts with the traditiona...

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    Hubble provides Holistic View of Stars gone Haywire

    June 21, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    1) The “wings” of NGC 6302 are regions of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit that are tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour. NGC 6302 lies between 2,500 and 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.
    2) Recently, NGC 7027’s central star was identified in a new wavelength of light — near-ultraviolet — for the first time by using Hubble’s unique capabilities
    Credits: NASA, ESA and J. Kastner (RIT)

    As nuclear fusion engines, most stars live placid lives for hundreds of millions to billions of years. But near the end of their lives they can turn into crazy whirligigs, puffing off shells and jets of hot gas...

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    Our Deepest View of the X-ray Sky

    June 21, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The energetic universe: The first eROSITA all-sky survey was conducted over a period of six months by letting the telescope rotate continuously, thus providing a uniform exposure of about 150-200 seconds over most of the sky, with the ecliptic poles being visited more deeply. As eROSITA scans the sky, the energy of the collected photons is measured with an accuracy ranging from 2% – 6%. To generate this image, in which the whole sky is projected onto an ellipse (so-called Aitoff projection) with the centre of the Milky Way in the middle and the body of the Galaxy running horizontally, photons have been colour-coded according to their energy (red for energies 0.3-0.6 keV, green for 0.6-1 keV, blue for 1-2.3 keV). 
    © Jeremy Sanders, Hermann Brunner und das eSASS-Team (MPE); Eugene Churazov,...
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