Archive for 2012
X-ray Satellites Monitor the Clashing Winds of a Colossal Binary
The hottest and most massive stars don’t live long enough to disperse throughout the galaxy. Instead, they can be found near the clouds of gas and dust where they formed — and where they will explode as supernovae after a few million years. They huddle in tight clusters with other young stars or in looser [...]
NASA Discovers a New Black Hole in our Galaxy
NASA’s Swift satellite recently detected a rising tide of high-energy X-rays from a source toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The outburst, produced by a rare X-ray nova, announced the presence of a previously unknown stellar-mass black hole. “Bright X-ray novae are so rare that they’re essentially once-a-mission events and this is the [...]
The Webb Telescope’s ‘Golden Spider
What looks like a giant golden spider weaving a web of cables and cords, is actually ground support equipment, including the Optical Telescope Simulator (OSIM), for the James Webb Space Telescope. OSIM’s job is to generate a beam of light just like the one that the real telescope optics will feed into the actual flight [...]
The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Dust
Imagine if the rings of Saturn suddenly disappeared. Astronomers have witnessed the equivalent around a young sun-like star called TYC 8241 2652. Enormous amounts of dust known to circle the star are unexpectedly nowhere to be found. “It’s like the classic magician’s trick: now you see it, now you don’t. Only in this case we’re [...]
Black Hole Growth Found to Be Out of Sync
New evidence from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory challenges prevailing ideas about how black holes grow in the centers of galaxies. Astronomers long have thought that a supermassive black hole and the bulge of stars at the center of its host galaxy grow at the same rate — the bigger the bulge, the bigger the black [...]
Astronomers Discover Planetary Odd Couple
Astronomers have discovered a pair of neighboring planets with dissimilar densities orbiting very close to each other. The planets are too close to their star to be in the so-called “habitable zone,” the region in a system where liquid water might exist on the surface, but they have the closest-spaced orbits everconfirmed. The findings are [...]
Why We Explore
Human Space Exploration Humanity’s interest in the heavens has been universal and enduring. Humans are driven to explore the unknown, discover new worlds, push the boundaries of our scientific and technical limits, and then push further. The intangible desire to explore and challenge the boundaries of what we know and where we have been has [...]
Giant Black Hole Kicked Out of Home Galaxy
Astronomers have found strong evidence that a massive black hole is being ejected from its host galaxy at a speed of several million miles per hour. New observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory suggest that the black hole collided and merged with another black hole and received a powerful recoil kick from gravitational wave radiation. [...]
NASA’s Hubble Shows Milky Way is Destined for Head-On Collision
NASA astronomers announced Thursday they can now predict with certainty the next major cosmic event to affect our galaxy, sun, and solar system: the titanic collision of our Milky Way galaxy with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. The Milky Way is destined to get a major makeover during the encounter, which is predicted to happen four [...]
