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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Astronomers discover Unusual Monster Galaxy in the Very Early Universe

    February 7, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The three panels show, from top to bottom, what XMM-2599’s evolutionary trajectory might be, beginning as a dusty star-forming galaxy, then becoming a dead galaxy, and perhaps ending up as a “brightest cluster galaxy,” or BCG. (NRAO/AUI/NSF/B. Saxton; NASA/ESA/R. Foley; NASA/StScI)

    An international team of astronomers led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside, has found an unusual monster galaxy that existed about 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only 1.8 billion years old.

    Dubbed XMM-2599, the galaxy formed stars at a high rate and then died. Why it suddenly stopped forming stars is unclear.

    “Even before the universe was 2 billion years old, XMM-2599 had already formed a mass of more than 300 billion suns, making it an ultramassive galaxy,” ...

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    Pluto’s Icy Heart Makes Winds Blow

    February 6, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Four images from NASA’s New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with color data from the Ralph instrument to create this global view of Pluto.
    Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.

    A “beating heart” of frozen nitrogen controls Pluto’s winds and may give rise to features on its surface, according to a new study.

    Pluto’s famous heart-shaped structure, named Tombaugh Regio, quickly became famous after NASA’s New Horizons mission captured footage of the dwarf planet in 2015 and revealed it isn’t the barren world scientists thought it was.

    Now, new research shows Pluto’s renowned nitrogen heart rules its atmospheric circulation...

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    Low-Energy Solar Particles from beyond Earth found near the Sun

    February 4, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben Using data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, an SwRI-led team identified low-energy particles, the smoking gun pointing to interactions between slow- and fast-moving regions of the solar wind accelerating high-energy particles from beyond the orbit of Earth. Using Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun (IS☉IS) instrument data, they measured low-energy particles in the near-Sun environment that had likely traveled back toward the Sun, slowing against the tide of the solar wind while still retaining surprising energies.

    Particles are smoking gun for solar wind interactions beyond Earth orbit...

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    Astronomers witness the Dragging of Space-Time in Stellar Cosmic Dance

    February 4, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist’s depiction of ‘frame-dragging’: two spinning stars twisting space and time. Credit: Mark Myers, OzGrav ARC Centre of Excellence.

    An international team of astrophysicists led by Australian Professor Matthew Bailes, from the ARC Centre of Excellence of Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), has shown exciting new evidence for ‘frame-dragging’—how the spinning of a celestial body twists space and time—after tracking the orbit of an exotic stellar pair for almost two decades. The data, which is further evidence for Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, is published today the journal Science.

    More than a century ago, Albert Einstein published his iconic theory of General Relativity—that the force of gravity arises from the curvature of space and time and that objects, su...

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