Recent Comments

    Category Astronomy/Space

    Crater counts on Pluto, Charon show small Kuiper Belt objects surprisingly rare

    March 3, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    An SwRI-led team studied the craters and geology on Pluto and Charon and found there were fewer small craters than expected. This implies that the Kuiper Belt contains relatively small numbers of objects less than 1 mile in diameter. Imaged by New Horizon’s LORRI camera, the smooth, geologically stable ‘Vulcan Planitia’ on Charon illustrates these findings.
    Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/LORRI/SwRI

    Using New Horizons data from the Pluto-Charon flyby in 2015, a Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists have indirectly discovered a distinct and surprising lack of very small objects in the Kuiper Belt...

    Read More

    Exiled Planet Linked to Stellar Flyby 3 million years ago

    March 3, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The HD 106906 binary star hosts a mysterious, asymmetric disk of cometary dust and a giant exoplanet HD 106906 b that is located very far from both the binary and the disk. Close flybys by other stars could have gravitationally perturbed the planet and researchers discovered that the two bright stars to the upper right passed near HD 106906 roughly 3 Myr years ago.
    Credit: Paul Kalas, UC Berkeley

    Two binary star systems narrowly missed one another, but left behind a smoking gun. Paul Kalas of UC Berkeley was puzzled by the tilted but stable orbit of a planet around a binary star – an orbit like that of our solar system’s proposed Planet Nine. He calculated backwards in time to see if any of the 461 nearby stars ever came close enough to perturb the system. One star fit the bill...

    Read More

    Exiled Planet Linked to Stellar Flyby 3 million years ago

    March 2, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space


    Researchers explored a material that has an internal structure, shown in 3D in left panel, that consists of triangles and hexagons arranged in a pattern similar to that of a Japanese kagome basket.
    Credit: Hasan, et. al, Princeton University

    Two binary star systems narrowly missed one another, but left behind a smoking gun. Paul Kalas of UC Berkeley was puzzled by the tilted but stable orbit of a planet around a binary star – an orbit like that of our solar system’s proposed Planet Nine. He calculated backwards in time to see if any of the 461 nearby stars ever came close enough to perturb the system. One star fit the bill. The stellar flyby 2-3 million years ago likely stabilized the planet’s orbit, keeping it from flying away.

    Some of the peculiar aspects of our solar system – an env...

    Read More

    Hiding Black Hole found

    March 2, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This is an artist’s impression of a gas cloud swirling around a black hole.
    Credit: NAOJ

    Astronomers have detected a stealthy black hole from its effects on an interstellar gas cloud. This intermediate mass black hole is one of over 100 million quiet black holes expected to be lurking in our Galaxy. These results provide a new method to search for other hidden black holes and help us understand the growth and evolution of black holes.

    Black holes range in mass from about 5 times the mass of the Sun to supermassive black holes millions of times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers think that small black holes merge and gradually grow into large ones, but no one had ever found an intermediate mass black hole, hundreds or thousands of times the mass of the Sun.

    A research team led by Shunya T...

    Read More