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    Category Astronomy/Space

    A surprisingly Big Black Hole might have Swallowed a Star from the Inside Out, and scientists are baffled

    December 2, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A recently discovered black hole – found by the way it makes a nearby star wobble – is hard to square with our understanding of how these dark cosmic objects form. Credit: NAOC, Chinese Academy of Sciences

    About 15,000 light years away, in a distant spiral arm of the Milky Way, there is a black hole about 70 times as heavy as the Sun. The black hole seems too big to be the product of a single star collapsing, which poses questions for our theories of how black holes form.

    Our team, led by Professor Jifeng Liu at the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dubbed the mysterious object LB-1.

    Astronomers estimate that our galaxy alone contains about 100 million black holes, created when massive stars have collapsed over the past 13 billion years.

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    A new theory for how Black Holes and Neutron Stars Shine Bright

    December 2, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Here, a massive super-computer simulation shows the strong particle density fluctuations that occur in the extreme turbulent environments that host black holes and neutron stars. Dark blue regions are low particle density regions, while yellow regions are strongly over-dense regions. Particles are accelerated to extremely high speeds due to the interactions with strongly turbulence fluctuations in this environment. Credit: Image from published study

    Astrophysicists employed massive super-computer simulations to calculate the mechanisms that accelerate charged particles in extreme environments. They concluded their energization is powered by the interplay of chaotic motion and reconnection of super-strong magnetic fields.

    For decades, scientists have speculated about the origin of ...

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    Hints of a Volcanically Active Exo-Moon

    August 30, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist’s composition of a volcanic exo-Io undergoing extreme mass loss. The hidden exomoon is enshrouded in an irradiated gas cloud shining in bright orange-yellow, as would be seen with a sodium filter. Patches of sodium clouds are seen to trail the lunar orbit, possibly driven by the gas giant’s magnetosphere.© University of Bern, Illustration: Thibaut Roger

    A rocky extrasolar moon (exomoon) with bubbling lava may orbit a planet 550 light-years away from us. This is suggested by an international team of researchers on the basis of theoretical predictions matching observations. The ‘exo-Io’ would appear to be an extreme version of Jupiter’s moon Io.

    Jupiter’s moon Io is the most volcanically active body in our solar system...

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    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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