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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Stars Exploding as Supernovae lose their mass to companion stars during their lives

    March 10, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A massive star evolving and becoming a red supergiant, and finally exploding as a supernova. A binary companion may strip the star’s hydrogen away (producing supernova type IIb/Ib), and for a more massive star the stellar wind expels the remaining helium layer (producing supernova type Ic).
    Credit: Keiichi Maeda

    Stars over eight times more massive than the Sun end their lives in supernovae explosions. The composition of the star influences what happens during the explosion.

    A considerable number of massive stars have a close companion star. Led by researchers at Kyoto University, a team of international researchers observed that some stars exploding as supernovae may release part of their hydrogen layers to their companion stars before the explosion.

    “In a binary star system, the star ...

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    New Surprises from Jupiter and Saturn

    March 9, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Jupiter.
    Credit: Caltech

    Latest data on Jupiter and Saturn from Juno and Cassini missions challenge current theories of planetary formation. The latest data sent back by the Juno and Cassini spacecraft from giant gas planets Jupiter and Saturn have challenged a lot of current theories about how planets in our solar system form and behave.

    The detailed magnetic and gravity data have been “invaluable but also confounding,” said David Stevenson from Caltech, who will present an update of both missions this week at the 2019 American Physical Society March Meeting in Boston.

    “Although there are puzzles yet to be explained, this is already clarifying some of our ideas about how planets form, how they make magnetic fields and how the winds blow,” Stevenson said.

    Cassini orbited Satur...

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    What does the Milky Way Weigh? Hubble and Gaia investigate?

    March 7, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This illustration shows the fundamental architecture of our island city of stars, the Milky Way galaxy: a spiral disk, central bulge, and diffuse halo of stars and globular star clusters. Not shown is the vast halo of dark matter surrounding our galaxy.
    Credit: NASA, ESA and A. Feild (STScI)

    We can’t put the whole Milky Way on a scale, but astronomers have been able to come up with one of the most accurate measurements yet of our galaxy’s mass, using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite.

    The Milky Way weighs in at about 1.5 trillion solar masses (one solar mass is the mass of our Sun), according to the latest measurements...

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    Can Entangled qubits be used to Probe Black Holes?

    March 7, 2019, Categories  Physics, Astronomy/Space

    This is a schematic of the black hole information paradox. Alice drops a qubit into a black hole and asks whether Bob can reconstruct the qubit using only the outgoing Hawking radiation.
    Credit: Norman Yao, UC Berkeley

    Demonstration of scrambling in quantum computer shows how to resurrect ‘lost’ information. Physicists have used a seven-qubit quantum computer to simulate the scrambling of information inside a black hole, heralding a future in which entangled quantum bits might be used to probe the mysterious interiors of these bizarre objects.

    Scrambling is what happens when matter disappears inside a black hole...

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