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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Birth of a Black Hole or Neutron Star captured for First Time

    January 13, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space


    A look at The Cow (approximately 80 days after explosion) from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Maunakea, Hawaii. The Cow is nestled in the CGCG 137-068 galaxy, 200 million light years from Earth.
    Credit: Raffaella Margutti/Northwestern University

    Mysteriously bright glow of this summer’s ‘Cow’ event gained international interest. A Northwestern University-led international team is getting closer to understanding the mysteriously bright object that burst in the northern sky this summer.

    On June 17, the ATLAS survey’s twin telescopes in Hawaii found a spectacularly bright anomaly 200 million light years away in the Hercules constellation. Dubbed AT2018cow or “The Cow,” the object quickly flared up, then vanished almost as quickly.

    After combining several imaging sources, including ha...

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    X-ray Pulse detected near Event Horizon as Black Hole Devours Star

    January 10, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This artist’s impression shows hot gas orbiting in a disk around a rapidly-spinning black hole. The elongated spot depicts an X-ray-bright region in the disk, which allows the spin of the black hole to be estimated.
    Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss

    Pulse pattern suggests distant black hole must be spinning at least at 50% the speed of light. On Nov. 22, 2014, astronomers spotted a rare event in the night sky: A supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, nearly 300 million light years from Earth, ripping apart a passing star. The event, known as a tidal disruption flare, for the black hole’s massive tidal pull that tears a star apart, created a burst of X-ray activity near the center of the galaxy...

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    TESS discovers its third new planet, with longest orbit yet

    January 9, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space


    • NASA’s TESS mission, which will survey the entire sky over the next two years, has already discovered three new exoplanets around nearby stars.
      Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, edited by MIT News

    Measurements indicate a dense, gaseous, ‘sub-Neptune’ world, three times the size of Earth. NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS, has discovered a third small planet outside our solar system, scientists announced this week at the annual American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

    The new planet, named HD 21749b, orbits a bright, nearby dwarf star about 53 light years away, in the constellation Reticulum, and appears to have the longest orbital period of the three planets so far identified by TESS...

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    Hubble takes Gigantic Image of the Triangulum Galaxy

    January 8, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This gigantic image of the Triangulum Galaxy – also known as Messier 33 – is a composite of about 54 different pointings with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. With a staggering size of 34 372 times 19 345 pixels, it is the second-largest image ever released by Hubble. It is only dwarfed by the image of the Andromeda Galaxy, released in 2016.
    Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Durbin, J. Dalcanton, and B. F. Williams (University of Washington)

    The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the most detailed image yet of a close neighbour of the Milky Way – the Triangulum Galaxy, a spiral galaxy located at a distance of only 3 million light-years...

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