Category Astronomy/Space

Scientists have detected the first X-rays from what appears to be a type Ia supernova, located inside the spiral-shaped galaxy ESO 336-G009, about 260 million light-years from Earth. Credit: Vikram Dwarkadas/Digitized Sky Survey

Exploding stars carry a cloak of dense material that puzzles astronomers. A team of scientists, including scholars from the University of Chicago, appear to have found the first X-rays coming from type Ia supernovae. Astronomers are fond of type Ia supernovas, created when a white dwarf star in a two-star system undergoes a thermonuclear explosion, because they burn at a specific brightness. This allows scientists to calculate how far away they are from Earth, and thus to map distances in the universe...

Best ever Image of a Star’s Surface, Atmosphere

First map of motion of material on a star other than the sun. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, VLT Interferometer astronomers have constructed the most detailed image ever of a star – the red supergiant star Antares. They have also made the first map of the velocities of material in the atmosphere of a star other than the sun, revealing unexpected turbulence in Antares’s huge extended atmosphere.

To the unaided eye the famous, bright star Antares shines with a strong red tint in the heart of the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion). It is a huge and comparatively cool red supergiant star in the late stages of its life, on the way to becoming a supernova...

The black hole named Cygnus X-1 formed when a large star caved in. This black hole pulls matter from the blue star beside it.
Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

Physicists have described how observations of gravitational waves limit the possible explanations for the formation of black holes outside of our galaxy; either they are spinning more slowly than black holes in our own galaxy or they spin rapidly but are ‘tumbled around’ with spins randomly oriented to their orbit. The paper, published in Nature, is based on data that came about following landmark observations of gravitational waves by the LIGO gravitational wave detector in 2015 and again in 2017.

In our own galaxy we have been able to electromagnetically observe black holes orbited by stars and map their behaviour – notably their rapid spin...

The subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, IC 1727, is currently interacting with its near neighbor, NGC 672 (which is just out of frame). Credit: NASA/Hubble/ESA

Gravity governs the movements of the cosmos. It draws flocks of galaxies together to form small groups and more massive galaxy clusters, and brings duos so close that they begin to tug at one another. This latter scenario can have extreme consequences, with members of interacting pairs of galaxies often being dramatically distorted, torn apart, or driven to smash into one another, abandoning their former identities and merging to form a single accumulation of gas, dust and stars.

The subject of this Hubble Space Telescope image, IC 1727, is currently interacting with its near neighbor, NGC 672 (which is just out o...