Recent Comments

    Category Astronomy/Space

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

    June 23, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    pluto-faults-410.jpg
    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...

    Read More

    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...

    Read More

    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,...
    Read More

    “Unexpected” Events have been Detected at the world’s most Sensitive Dark Matter Experiment.

    June 19, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Unusual behaviour could require new physics to be explained

    Researchers do not claim to have found dark matter, but they say that there is an as yet unexplained and unexpected rate of events found in data from the experiment, and that they do not know the source.

    The new breakthrough could be a sign of an entirely newly discovered kind of particle, or unpredicted behaviour that may require us to fundamentally change our understanding of physics.

    The results come from the XENON collaboration, which brought together researchers from across the world who were attempting to detect dark matter. It did so using an experiment known as XENON1T, which was located deep underground in Italy.

    Seeing evidence of dark matter would be one of the biggest possible breakthroughs in science...

    Read More