All Entries in the "Other recent articles" Category
NASA’s NuSTAR Helps Solve Riddle of Black Hole Spin
PASADENA, Calif. — Two X-ray space observatories, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, have teamed up to measure definitively, for the first time, the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our sun. The supermassive black hole lies at the dust- and [...]
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 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 [...]
How old is the Earth?
Scientist do not know the exact age of the earth because all of its oldest rocks have been destroyed by plate tectonics. They estimate the earth is 4.3 – 4.54 Ga ( Ga= gigaannum = billion years ago) But, many religious people say that the earth is only about 6,000 to 44,000 years old. Who [...]
The last space shuttle mission over D.C
These are the pictures of the last space shuttle that is being launched. The Last one ever! It was just flying over Washington D.C this afternoon.
The sight of a cosmic collision
Infrared and X-ray observations from two space telescopes have been combined to create a unique look at violent events within the giant galaxy Centaurus A. The observations strengthen the view that the galaxy may have been created by the cataclysmic collision of two older galaxies. The infrared light was captured by the European Space Agency’s [...]
New galaxy found!
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 4980, a spiral galaxy in the southern constellation of Hydra. The shape of NGC 4980 appears slightly deformed, something which is often a sign of recent tidal interactions with another galaxy. In this galaxy’s case, however, this appears not to be the case as there [...]
