Category Astronomy/Space

Path to a KBO: Projected route of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft toward 2014 MU69, which orbits in the Kuiper Belt about 1 billion miles beyond Pluto. Planets are shown in their positions on Jan. 1, 2019, when New Horizons is projected to reach the small Kuiper Belt object. NASA must approve an extended mission for New Horizons to study the ancient KBO.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has successfully performed the last in a series of 4 targeting maneuvers that set it on course for a January 2019 encounter with 2014 MU69. This ancient body in the Kuiper Belt is more than a billion miles beyond Pluto; New Horizons will explore it if NASA approves an extended mission.

The 4 propulsive maneuvers were the most distant trajectory corrections ever performed by any spacecraft...

Adaptively smoothed X-ray image of galaxy cluster Zwicky 8338. Credit: Gerrit Schellenberger, Thomas Reiprich.

This galaxy with the enormous X-ray tail is a member of a galaxy cluster known as Zwicky 8338. Gerrit Schellenberger and Thomas Reiprich observed Zwicky 8338 using NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory. They found out that one of the galaxies grouped in this cluster showcases a very long X-ray tail, which is approximately 248,000 light years in length. What is surprising is that the galaxy must have lost all of its X-ray emitting gas very recently.

“It is likely the longest X-ray tail associated with a stripping process from a galaxy with the largest separation from the host galaxy ever detected,” they wrote in the paper...

This illustration of the region surrounding our Solar System shows the estimated location of the two-million-year-old supernova, lying close to the galactic magnetic field, that may have been the source for some high-energy cosmic rays observed today. Credit: Michael Kachelrieß, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

High-energy protons, nuclei, and other particles are constantly showering down on Earth’s atmosphere from space, but the origins of these cosmic rays is unknown. One possibility is that the cosmic rays come from supernovae, although the evidence for this claim is limited...

A comparison of the relative size of planets and brown dwarfs to the size of our sun. Credit: https://student.societyforscience.org/article/failed-%E2%80%98star%E2%80%99-found-sun%E2%80%99s-backyard

Despite being discovered 20 yrs ago, little is known about brown dwarfs – notably why they fail to grow into stars. Part of the answer probably lies in the physics of how dense plasmas merge inside them. Now researchers, led by the York Plasma Institute at the University of York and the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Central Laser
Facility, have created “lumps” of plasma to recreate the conditions similar to those found deep inside brown dwarfs...