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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Heavy Metal Planet Fragment Survives Destruction from Dead Star

    April 7, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A planetary fragment orbits the star SDSS J122859.93+104032.9, leaving a tail of gas in its wake.
    Credit: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick

    A fragment of a planet that has survived the death of its star has been discovered by University of Warwick astronomers in a disc of debris formed from destroyed planets, which the star ultimately consumes. The iron and nickel rich planetesimal survived a system-wide cataclysm that followed the death of its host star, SDSS J122859.93+104032.9. Believed to have once been part of a larger planet, its survival is all the more astonishing as it orbits closer to its star than previously thought possible, going around it once every two hours.

    The discovery, reported in the journal Science, is the first time that scientists have used spectroscopy to disc...

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    Solar Wind: And the essay 2 Blobs just keep on coming

    April 6, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Engineers inspect the Helios 2 spacecraft.
    Credit: NASA

    Scientists re-inspected 45-year-old Helios data, finding long trains of massive blobs – like lava lamp’s otherworldly bubbles, but 50 to 500 times the size of Earth – that ooze from the sun every 90 minutes or so. When Simone Di Matteo first saw the patterns in his data, it seemed too good to be true. “It’s too perfect!” Di Matteo, a space physics Ph.D. student at the University of L’Aquila in Italy, recalled thinking. “It can’t be real.” And it wasn’t, he’d soon find out.

    Di Matteo was looking for long trains of massive blobs – like a lava lamp’s otherworldly bubbles, but anywhere from 50 to 500 times the size of Earth — in the solar wind...

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    Unexpected Rain on Sun Links two Solar Mysteries

    April 6, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Mason’s article analyzed three observations of Raining Null-Point Topologies, or RNTPs, a previously overlooked magnetic structure shown here in two wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light. The coronal rain observed in these comparatively small magnetic loops suggests that the corona may be heated within a far more restricted region than previously expected.
    Credit: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory/Emily Mason

    Researchers find rain on the sun in an unexpected place. The findings could create a new link between two of the biggest mysteries in solar physics. For five months in mid 2017, Emily Mason did the same thing every day...

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    Dark Matter is Not Made Up of Tiny Black Holes

    April 4, 2019, Categories  Physics, Astronomy/Space

    The Milky Way galaxy (left) and the Andromeda galaxy (right) are separated by 2.6 million light years. Compared with the areas where stars are clustered together, dark matter is believed to be distributed over a much larger volume.
    Credit: Kavli IPMU

    An international team of researchers has put a theory speculated by the late Stephen Hawking to its most rigorous test to date, and their results have ruled out the possibility that primordial black holes smaller than a tenth of a millimeter make up most of dark matter. Details of their study have been published in this week’s Nature Astronomy.

    Scientists know that 85% of the matter in the Universe is made up of dark matter. Its gravitational force prevents stars in our Milky Way from flying apart...

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