Universe News (miscellaneous articles)

[T3X4S]

Same here - I read that as well.  They person makes a compelling argument - but like Vision mentioned.... who knows ?

If you want to read something with some more compelling evidence - check out Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark - its really interesting.

[BetaguyGZT]

19 hours ago, T3X4S said:

Same here - I read that as well.  They person makes a compelling argument - but like Vision mentioned.... who knows ?

If you want to read something with some more compelling evidence - check out Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark - its really interesting.

OH YEAH. Talk about some hardcore equation-crunching goodness ... yeah.

[Draggendrop Veteran]

Hubble's journey to the center of our galaxy

 

Hubble's infrared vision pierced the dusty heart of our Milky Way galaxy to reveal more than half a million stars at its core. At the very hub of our galaxy, this star cluster surrounds the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, which is about 4 million times the mass of our sun.
CREDIT
Credits: NASA, ESA, and Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA, Acknowledgment: T. Do, A.Ghez (UCLA), V. Bajaj (STScI)

 

Quote

Peering deep into the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals a rich tapestry of more than half a million stars. Except for a few blue foreground stars, the stars are part of the Milky Way's nuclear star cluster, the most massive and densest star cluster in our galaxy. So packed with stars, it is equivalent to having a million suns crammed between us and our closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. At the very hub of our galaxy, this star cluster surrounds the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, which is about 4 million times the mass of our sun.

 

Astronomers used Hubble's infrared vision to pierce through the dust in the disk of our galaxy that obscures the star cluster. In this image, scientists translated the infrared light, which is invisible to human eyes, into colors our eyes can see. The red stars are either embedded or shrouded by intervening dust. Extremely dense clouds of gas and dust are seen in silhouette, appearing dark against the bright background stars. These clouds are so thick that even Hubble's infrared capability could not penetrate them.

 

Hubble's sharp vision allowed astronomers to measure the movements of the stars over four years. Using this information, scientists were able to infer important properties such as the mass and structure of the nuclear star cluster. The motion of the stars may also offer a glimpse into how the star cluster was formed -- whether it was built up over time by globular star clusters that happen to fall into the galaxy's center, or from gas spiraling in from the Milky Way's disk to form stars at the core.

 

This picture, spanning 50 light-years across, is a mosaic stitched from nine separate images from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. The center of the Milky Way is located 27,000 light-years away. The "snowstorm" of stars in the image is just the tip of the iceberg: Astronomers estimate that about 10 million stars in this cluster are too faint to be captured in this image.

 

This annotated, infrared image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the scale of the galactic core. The galaxy's nucleus (marked) is home to a central, supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A-star.
CREDIT
Credits: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Acknowledgment: T. Do, A.Ghez (UCLA),V. Bajaj (STScI)

 

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-03/nsfc-hjt033116.php

 

http://spaceref.com/astronomy/hubble-peers-into-the-heart-of-the-milky-way-galaxy.html

 

[Draggendrop Veteran]

Andromeda's first spinning neutron star

 

Andromeda: ESA/Herschel/PACS/SPIRE/J. Fritz, U. Gent/XMM-Newton/EPIC/W. Pietsch, MPE; data: P. Esposito et al (2016)
Description
Andromeda, or M31, is a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way. For the first time, a spinning neutron star has been inferred in XMM-Newton data.

Inset: Light curve of the source, known as 3XMM J004301.4+413017, as analysed by XMM-Newton’s European Photon Imaging Camera, EPIC. The source has a period of 1.2 seconds, consistent with a spinning neutron star.

 

Quote

Decades of searching in the Milky Way's nearby 'twin' galaxy Andromeda have finally paid off, with the discovery of an elusive breed of stellar corpse, a neutron star, by ESA's XMM-Newton space telescope.

 

Andromeda, or M31, is a popular target among astronomers. Under clear, dark skies it is even visible to the naked eye. Its proximity and similarity in structure to our own spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, make it an important natural laboratory for astronomers. It has been extensively studied for decades by telescopes covering the whole electromagnetic spectrum.

 

Despite being extremely well studied, one particular class of object had never been detected: spinning neutron stars.

 

Neutron stars are the small and extraordinarily dense remains of a once-massive star that exploded as a powerful supernova at the end of its natural life. They often spin very rapidly and can sweep regular pulses of radiation towards Earth, like a lighthouse beacon appearing to flash on and off as it rotates.

 

These 'pulsars' can be found in stellar couples, with the neutron star cannibalising its neighbour. This can lead to the neutron star spinning faster, and to pulses of high-energy X-rays from hot gas being funnelled down magnetic fields on to the neutron star.

 

Binary systems hosting a neutron star like this are quite common in our own Galaxy, but regular signals from such a pairing had never before been seen in Andromeda.

 

Now, astronomers systematically searching through the archives of data from XMM-Newton X-ray telescope have uncovered the signal of an unusual source fitting the bill of a fast-spinning neutron star.

 

It spins every 1.2 seconds, and appears to be feeding on a neighbouring star that orbits it every 1.3 days.

 

"We were expecting to detect periodic signals among the brightest X-ray objects in Andromeda, in line with what we already found during the 1960s and 1970s in our own Galaxy," says Gian Luca Israel, from INAF-Osservatorio Astronomica di Roma, Italy, one of the authors of the paper describing the results, "But persistent, bright X-ray pulsars like this are still somewhat peculiar, so it was not completely a sure thing we would find one in Andromeda.

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Andromedas_first_spinning_neutron_star_999.html

 

Andromeda    infrared: ESA/Herschel/PACS/SPIRE/J. Fritz, U. Gent; X-ray: ESA/XMM-Newton/EPIC/W. Pietsch, MPE; optical: R. Gendler

 

Quote

The Andromeda Galaxy is our nearest large galactic neighbour, containing several hundred billion stars. Combined, these images show all stages of the stellar life cycle. The infrared image from Herschel shows areas of cool dust that trace reservoirs of gas in which forming stars are embedded. The optical image shows adult stars. XMM-Newton’s X-ray image shows the violent endpoints of stellar evolution, in which individual stars explode or pairs of stars pull each other to pieces.

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2011/01/Andromeda_our_nearest_large_galactic_neighbour

 

[Draggendrop Veteran]

Astrophysicists find triple star system with 'hot Jupiter'

 

Artist’s rendition of the view from a hypothetical moon in orbit around a three-star system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

 

Quote

Crisp, clear images of a “hot Jupiter” system captured by a University of Notre Dame physicist were vital in determining that a newly found planet inhabits a three-star system, a phenomenon documented only a few times before.

 

Justin R. Crepp, Freimann Assistant Professor of Physics, was part of the team that discovered KELT-4Ab, a so-called “hot Jupiter” because it is a gas giant that orbits extremely close to one of the stars in its solar system. The discovery was published in The Astronomical Journal.

 

While the KELT, or Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope, detected the likely presence of the planet now called KELT-4Ab about 685 light years from Earth, Crepp was able to capture crisp, clear images of the system, discovering that the planet was in fact a member of a triple star system — one of only a few found to date.

 

The KELT monitors bright stars in large sections of the sky, searching for planets that orbit extremely closely. When the star KELT-A dimmed every few days, scientists believed they were witnessing an orbiting planet. Crepp was then asked to use the Keck Telescope to investigate and capture photos, and he wound up finding two additional stars in the process.

 

“I found that there was a dot nearby, which we believed to be a star, making this a binary system,” Crepp says. “And then upon further review, I found that it was two dots. We wouldn’t have realized that without these photos.”

 

KELT-4Ab, about one and a half times the size of Jupiter, orbits the system’s main star every three days. But the other two stars Crepp helped identify orbit each other once every 30 years while simultaneously orbiting the main star — and the planet — once every 4,000 years.

 

 

KELT-4 system featuring
a “hot Jupiter” planet with three suns

 

Quote

Four planets have been found in systems containing three stars, and Crepp has been involved with three of those discoveries. He and his students discovered the first two.

 

“We are trying to learn how planets get to their final resting places in orbits around stars,” Crepp says. “This discovery has implications for our understanding of planet formation and evolution.”

 

Crepp says that until the mid-1990s, scientists believed that gas giants like Jupiter would be found far from the stars they orbit, much like Jupiter in our solar system. But when the first hot-Jupiter was discovered in 1995, it turned those assumptions on their heads.

 

Since then, Crepp and others have been looking for these “hot Jupiters” to determine how they got there. The researchers believe the presence of multiple stars in a system could be a clue as to how planets finally settle into their orbits.

more at the link...

https://news.nd.edu/news/65993-astrophysicists-find-triple-star-system-with-hot-jupiter/

 

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-04/uond-aft040716.php

 

Paper...

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/45/meta

 

--------------------------------

 

Surprise! Gigantic Black Hole Found in Cosmic Backwater

 

The immense black hole at the center of the galaxy NGC 1600 appears to be 17 billion times the mass of the sun. This computer-simulated view shows a supermassive black hole at a galaxy's core.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Coe, J. Anderson, and R. van der Marel (Space Telescope Science Institute)

 

Quote

One of the biggest black holes ever found sits in a cosmic backwater, like a towering skyscraper in a small town.

 

Astronomers have spotted a supermassive black hole containing 17 billion times the mass of the sun — only slightly smaller than the heftiest known black hole, which weighs in at a maximum of 21 billion solar masses — at the center of the galaxy NGC 1600.

 

That's a surprise, because NGC 1600, which lies 200 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus, belongs to an average-size galaxy group, and the monster black holes discovered to date tend to be found in dense clusters of galaxies. So researchers may have to rethink their ideas about where gigantic black holes reside, and how many of them might populate the universe, study team members said. [The Strangest Black Holes in Space]

 

"The black hole is much bigger than we expected for the size of the galaxy or where this galaxy lives, the environment," said study co-author Chung-Pei Ma, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

"That's the puzzling part — or the intriguing part — of the result," she told Space.com. "There may be more NGC 1600s out there lurking at more ordinary sites, like small towns in the U.S. rather than Manhattan."Ma is head of the MASSIVE Survey, a multitelescope effort that began in 2014 to identify and catalogue the most massive nearby galaxies and black holes. NGC 1600 first showed up in the survey with data from the McDonald Observatory in Texas.

The galaxy NGC 1600 is much larger and brighter than its peers, and harbors a black hole with a mass 17 billion times that of the sun, a new study suggests. NGC 1600 is the large elliptical galaxy at this image's center, also shown in the inset.
Credit: NASA, ESA, Digital Sky Survey 2

 

Quote

Although the initial observations weren't detailed enough to see the spectrum of light from the galaxy's center clearly, Ma and her colleagues could already tell that they were looking at something extraordinary: "It was a little bit like looking at a hurricane from very far away," she said. "We couldn't quite tell how big this hurricane was, this black hole was, but the hurricane was so big that we already started to feel the wind using this coarser data."

 

Suspecting they had spotted a very large black hole, study team members next investigated the elliptical galaxy using the northern half of the Gemini Observatory, twin telescopes situated in Hawaii and Chile. Gemini allowed them to probe the black hole's "sphere of influence," Ma said — the region where the black hole's mass held more sway than the overall galaxy's, where it was whipping the stars into action. They also scoped out the site with data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

 

The stars "were going so fast that the only way they could be travelling at this speed is if you had a 17-billion-solar-mass black hole at the center," she said.

more at the link...

http://www.space.com/32484-gigantic-black-hole-17-billion-suns.html

 

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-04/nsfc-bbh040616.php

 

[FiB3R]

On 04/04/2016 at 6:44 AM, Draggendrop said:

Hubble's journey to the center of our galaxy

 

Hubble's infrared vision pierced the dusty heart of our Milky Way galaxy to reveal more than half a million stars at its core. At the very hub of our galaxy, this star cluster surrounds the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, which is about 4 million times the mass of our sun.
CREDIT
Credits: NASA, ESA, and Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA, Acknowledgment: T. Do, A.Ghez (UCLA), V. Bajaj (STScI)

Quote

Peering deep into the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals a rich tapestry of more than half a million stars. Except for a few blue foreground stars, the stars are part of the Milky Way's nuclear star cluster, the most massive and densest star cluster in our galaxy. So packed with stars, it is equivalent to having a million suns crammed between us and our closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. At the very hub of our galaxy, this star cluster surrounds the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, which is about 4 million times the mass of our sun.

 

Astronomers used Hubble's infrared vision to pierce through the dust in the disk of our galaxy that obscures the star cluster. In this image, scientists translated the infrared light, which is invisible to human eyes, into colors our eyes can see. The red stars are either embedded or shrouded by intervening dust. Extremely dense clouds of gas and dust are seen in silhouette, appearing dark against the bright background stars. These clouds are so thick that even Hubble's infrared capability could not penetrate them.

 

Hubble's sharp vision allowed astronomers to measure the movements of the stars over four years. Using this information, scientists were able to infer important properties such as the mass and structure of the nuclear star cluster. The motion of the stars may also offer a glimpse into how the star cluster was formed -- whether it was built up over time by globular star clusters that happen to fall into the galaxy's center, or from gas spiraling in from the Milky Way's disk to form stars at the core.

 

This picture, spanning 50 light-years across, is a mosaic stitched from nine separate images from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. The center of the Milky Way is located 27,000 light-years away. The "snowstorm" of stars in the image is just the tip of the iceberg: Astronomers estimate that about 10 million stars in this cluster are too faint to be captured in this image.

 

This annotated, infrared image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the scale of the galactic core. The galaxy's nucleus (marked) is home to a central, supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A-star.
CREDIT
Credits: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Acknowledgment: T. Do, A.Ghez (UCLA),V. Bajaj (STScI)

 

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-03/nsfc-hjt033116.php

 

http://spaceref.com/astronomy/hubble-peers-into-the-heart-of-the-milky-way-galaxy.html

 

Can't sleep. Need Morgan Freeman to read this to me.

Or maybe @warwagon

[Draggendrop Veteran]

4 minutes ago, FiB3R said:

Can't sleep. Need Morgan Freeman to read this to me.

Or maybe @warwagon

 

Quick and dirty synopsis...

 

"After many years of motor noise and bad coffee, we discovered a mess of stars in one spot"

 

[FiB3R]

7 minutes ago, Draggendrop said:

 

Quick and dirty synopsis...

 

"After many years of motor noise and bad coffee, we discovered a mess of stars in one spot"

 

I didn't need it explained, I need mesmerizing facts/theories in dulcet tones to help me drift off

[Draggendrop Veteran]

 

22 minutes ago, FiB3R said:

I didn't need it explained, I need mesmerizing facts/theories in dulcet tones to help me drift off

In the 60's, I'd used the late night, off the air test pattern and static.....puts you to sleep fast. Today, any government appropriations channel will do...

[FiB3R]

 

 

Think I like brown noise best

[Draggendrop Veteran]

Just now, FiB3R said:

 

Excellent...2 minutes in and I'm drooling on my keyboard and flinging my mouse on the floor.....

[FiB3R]

Requesting a voice-over by @warwagon

Brown noise with the following text, read like "the movie trailer guy"
 

Quote

Peering deep into the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals a rich tapestry of more than half a million stars. Except for a few blue foreground stars, the stars are part of the Milky Way's nuclear star cluster, the most massive and densest star cluster in our galaxy. So packed with stars, it is equivalent to having a million suns crammed between us and our closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. At the very hub of our galaxy, this star cluster surrounds the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, which is about 4 million times the mass of our sun.

 

Astronomers used Hubble's infrared vision to pierce through the dust in the disk of our galaxy that obscures the star cluster. In this image, scientists translated the infrared light, which is invisible to human eyes, into colors our eyes can see. The red stars are either embedded or shrouded by intervening dust. Extremely dense clouds of gas and dust are seen in silhouette, appearing dark against the bright background stars. These clouds are so thick that even Hubble's infrared capability could not penetrate them.

 

Hubble's sharp vision allowed astronomers to measure the movements of the stars over four years. Using this information, scientists were able to infer important properties such as the mass and structure of the nuclear star cluster. The motion of the stars may also offer a glimpse into how the star cluster was formed -- whether it was built up over time by globular star clusters that happen to fall into the galaxy's center, or from gas spiraling in from the Milky Way's disk to form stars at the core.

 

This picture, spanning 50 light-years across, is a mosaic stitched from nine separate images from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. The center of the Milky Way is located 27,000 light-years away. The "snowstorm" of stars in the image is just the tip of the iceberg: Astronomers estimate that about 10 million stars in this cluster are too faint to be captured in this image.

[+Warwagon MVC]

1 hour ago, FiB3R said:

Can't sleep. Need Morgan Freeman to read this to me.

Or maybe @warwagon

 

Bare with me, I just got home after having 5 Vodka diet cokes and 2 beers!  Be kind!

[FiB3R]

FLOL. Legend

[+Warwagon MVC]

3 minutes ago, FiB3R said:

FLOL. Legend

The unedited version! Using my ###### Mic! 

[FiB3R]

An amazing performance (considering the vodka intake)

 

Looking forward to the edit

[+Warwagon MVC]

3 minutes ago, FiB3R said:

FLOL. Legend

 

3 minutes ago, FiB3R said:

An amazing performance (considering the vodka intake)

 

Looking forward to the edit

Or the sober read in the morning with edits.

[BetaguyGZT]

Morgan Freeman <---------------|---> Warwagon with a fuzzy glow

 

(We could transpose it to G7. Make it all creepy and stalkery-like, like those Barney the Nightmare Dinosaur ####-takes that were popular on uTube a few years ago. )

[+Mirumir Subscriber¹]

What's even funnier is the name of the most recent video he liked on youtube  

 

@warwagon subscribed to your channel, thanks!

 

 

[FiB3R]

3 hours ago, Mirumir said:

What's even funnier is the name of the most recent video hi liked on youtube  

 

@warwagon subscribed to your channel, thanks!

 

 

LOL

[+Warwagon MVC]

11 hours ago, FiB3R said:

An amazing performance (considering the vodka intake)

 

Looking forward to the edit

 

[FiB3R]

Much better  

Playing all 3 the at the same time (with a bit of individual volume adjustment) is enough to gently put anybody to sleep 
 

 

 

 

[Jim K Global Moderator]

Kepler Space Telescope is "broke" again.

 

Quote

Mission Manager Update: Kepler spacecraft in emergency mode

 

During a scheduled contact on Thursday, April 7, mission operations engineers discovered that the Kepler spacecraft was in Emergency Mode (EM). EM is the lowest operational mode and is fuel intensive. Recovering from EM is the team's priority at this time.

 

The mission has declared a spacecraft emergency, which provides priority access to ground-based communications at the agency's Deep Space Network.

 

Initial indications are that Kepler entered EM approximately 36 hours ago, before mission operations began the maneuver to orient the spacecraft to point toward the center of the Milky Way for the K2 mission's microlensing observing campaign.

The spacecraft is nearly 75 million miles from Earth, making the communication slow. Even at the speed of light, it takes 13 minutes for a signal to travel to the spacecraft and back.

 

The last regular contact with the spacecraft was on April. 4.  The spacecraft was in good health and operating as expected.

 

Kepler completed its prime mission in 2012, detecting nearly 5,000 exoplanets, of which, more than 1,000 have been confirmed. In 2014 the Kepler spacecraft began a new mission called K2. In this extended mission, K2 continues the search for exoplanets while introducing new research opportunities to study young stars, supernovae, and many other astronomical objects.

 

Updates will be provided as additional information is available.

Regards,

Charlie Sobeck
Kepler and K2 mission manager
NASA's Ames Research Center

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/mission-manager-update-kepler-spacecraft-in-emergency-mode

[LOC Veteran]

warwagon sounds like he's trying to impersonate Deep Astonomy

[Draggendrop Veteran]

13 hours ago, jjkusaf said:

Kepler Space Telescope is "broke" again.

 

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/mission-manager-update-kepler-spacecraft-in-emergency-mode

Bad luck again, last time reaction wheels (2 out of 4), and now this....

 

I have been checking out the DSN occassionaly, sporadic communications this afternoon, then a good communication stream tonight for a short burst...

http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html