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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Newly Discovered Giant Planet Slingshots around its Star

    August 29, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Three times the mass of Jupiter, a first-of-its-kind planet swings around its star on bizarre path. Astronomers have discovered a planet three times the mass of Jupiter that travels on a long, egg-shaped path around its star. If this planet were somehow placed into our own solar system, it would swing from within our asteroid belt to out beyond Neptune. Other giant planets with highly elliptical orbits have been found around other stars, but none of those worlds were located at the very outer reaches of their star systems like this one.

    “This planet is unlike the planets in our solar system, but more than that, it is unlike any other exoplanets we have discovered so far,” says Sarah Blunt, a Caltech graduate student and first author on the new study publishing in The Astronomical J...

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    The Dark side of Extrasolar planets share surprisingly Similar Temperatures

    August 29, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Schematic of clouds on the night side of a hot Jupiter exoplanet. The underlying atmosphere is over 800 C, hot enough to vaporize rocks. Atmospheric motion from the deep atmosphere or from the hotter dayside bring the rock vapour to cooler regions, where it condenses into clouds, and possibly rains down into the atmosphere below. These clouds of condensed rock block outgoing thermal radiation, making the planet’s nightside appear relatively cool from space.

    New study suggests that the nightsides of hot Jupiters share clouds made of minerals...

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    Astrophysicists link Brightening of Pulsar Wind Nebula to Pulsar Spin-down Rate Transition

    August 27, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    An illustration of the pulsar and pulsar wind nebula (PWN) system (not to scale). The relativistic wind from the central pulsar is terminated by a shock at a radius of about one light-year and starts to radiate. The typical size of a PWN is a few light-years. The image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy shown in the lower left was taken by YE Ziyi . Credit: Institute of High Energy Physics

    Astrophysicists have discovered that the pulsar wind nebula (PWN) surrounding the famous pulsar B0540-69 brightened gradually after the pulsar experienced a sudden spin-down rate transition (SRT)...

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    HADES Experiment simulates Colliding and Merging Neutron Stars

    August 25, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Illustration of two merging neutron stars. Gravitational waves travel out from the collision, seconds later a burst of gamma rays is shot out. The merging stars eject swirling clouds of material.
    Illustration of two merging neutron stars. Gravitational waves travel out from the collision, seconds later a burst of gamma rays is shot out. The merging stars eject swirling clouds of material.Image: National Science Foundation/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet

    Temperatures of 800 billion degrees in the cosmic kitchen. It is among the most spectacular events in the universe: a merger of neutron stars. An international team of researchers with strong representation from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has completed the first laboratory measurements of thermal electromagnetic radiation arising in such collisions. The resulting data enabled them to calculate the prevailing temperature when such stars merge.

    When two neutron stars collide, the matter at their core en...

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