In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration made history when it released the first-ever image of a black hole. The image captured the glow of the accretion disk surrounding the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of the M87 galaxy, located 54 million light-years away. Because of its appearance, the disk that encircles …
Continue reading "M87 Releases a Rare and Powerful Outburts of Gamma-ray Radiation"
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Almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole churning away at its core. In most cases, these black holes spin in concert with their galaxy, like the central hub of a cosmic wagon wheel. But on December 18, 2024, NASA researchers announced they had discovered a galaxy whose black hole appears to have been …
Continue reading "Astronomers Find a Black Hole Tipped Over on its Side"
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Through the Artemis Program, NASA will send the first astronauts to the Moon since the Apollo Era before 2030. They will be joined by multiple space agencies, like the ESA and China, who plan to send astronauts (and “taikonauts”) there for the first time. Beyond this, all plan to build permanent habitats in the South …
Continue reading "NASA is Developing Solutions for Lunar Housekeeping’s Biggest Problem: Dust!"
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New research suggests that our best hopes for finding existing life on Mars isn’t on the surface, but buried deep within the crust. Several years ago NASA’s Curiosity rover measured traces of methane in the Martian atmosphere at levels several times the background. But a few months later, the methane disappeared, only for it to …
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Entanglement is perhaps one of the most confusing aspects of quantum mechanics. On its surface, entanglement allows particles to communicate over vast distances instantly, apparently violating the speed of light. But while entangled particles are connected, they don’t necessarily share information between them. In quantum mechanics, a particle isn’t really a particle. Instead of being …
Continue reading "Can Entangled Particles Communicate Faster than Light?"
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Neutrinos are tricky little blighters that are hard to observe. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica was built to detect neutrinos from space. It is one of the most sensitive instruments built with the hope it might help uncover evidence for dark matter. Any dark matter trapped inside Earth, would release neutrinos that IceCube could …
Continue reading "IceCube Just Spent 10 Years Searching for Dark Matter"
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A team of astronomers have detected a surprisingly fast and bright burst of energy from a galaxy 500 million light years away. The burst of radiation peaked in brightness just after 4 day and then faded quickly. The team identified the burst, which was using the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey with supporting observations from the …
Continue reading "Star Devouring Black Hole Spotted by Astronomers"
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Meet the brown dwarf: bigger than a planet, and smaller than a star. A category of its own, it’s one of the strangest objects in the universe. Brown dwarfs typically are defined to have masses anywhere from 12 times the mass of Jupiter right up to the lower limit for a star. And despite their …
Continue reading "What Makes Brown Dwarfs So Weird?"
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In 1971, the Soviet Mars 3 lander became the first spacecraft to land on Mars, though it only lasted a couple of minutes before failing. More than 50 years later, it’s still there at Terra Sirenum. The HiRISE camera NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may have imaged some of its hardware, inadvertently taking part in what …
Continue reading "Archaeology On Mars: Preserving Artifacts of Our Expansion Into the Solar System"
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Many of the black holes astronomers observe are the result of mergers from less massive black holes. Using gravitational waves, we can observe two black holes coming together and their combined remnant. But can astronomers observe a black hole and work out the masses of the objects that came together? Can we build a black hole's family tree? In a new paper, researchers propose that the nearby environment puts limits on the kinds of black holes that can merge.
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