Category Astronomy/Space

After detecting the first exoplanets in the 1990s it has become clear that planets around other stars are the rule rather than the exception and there are likely hundreds of billions of exoplanets in the Milky Way alone. The search for these planets is now a large field of astronomy. Credit: ESA/Hubble/ESO/M. Kornmesser

An international team analyzing the data from the K2 mission from the Kepler satellite has confirmed the existence of 95 new exoplanets. This brings the total for the K2 mission to almost 300 and the total number of exoplanets known to over 3,600. Kepler was launched in 2009 to study planets that transit in front of their parent stars. It has been an extremely successful mission but a failure in 2013 forced the researchers to change how the craft is operated...

ALMA revealed the rotation of the torus very clearly for the first time. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

High resolution observations show a rotating dusty gas torus around an active supermassive black hole. The existence of such rotating donuts-shape structures was first suggested decades ago, but this is the first time one has been confirmed so clearly. This is an important step in understanding the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies.

Researchers have known for a long time that the more massive the galaxy is, the more massive the central black hole is. This sounds reasonable at first, but host galaxies are 10 billion times bigger than the central black holes; it should be difficult for two objects of such vastly different scales to directly affect each other...

Magnetic field lines emanate from a pair of supermassive black holes nearing merger within a large gas disk in a simulation by RIT scientists. Periodic light signals in the gas disk could someday help scientists locate supermassive binary black holes. Credit: RIT Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation

Multimessenger astrophysics. A new simulation of supermassive black holes – the behemoths at the centers of galaxies – uses a realistic scenario to predict the light signals emitted in the surrounding gas before the masses collide, said Rochester Institute of Technology researchers...

Physical picture of the electron gas expanding in the magnetic wall, where Q = 0 for the adiabatic expansion, resulting in a change of the internal energy of the electron gas is equal to the work done on their surroundings. The magnetic field can behave as a flexible wall with no heat transfer, i.e., the perfectly adiabatic wall. Credit: Kazunori Takahashi

Extending thermodynamics to out of equilibrium electron gas in a magnetic nozzle. Thermodynamics provides insight into the internal energy of a system and the energy interaction with its surroundings. This relies on the local thermal equilibrium of a system. A challenging topic of research has been the application of classical thermodynamics to out of equilibrium systems, e.g...