Space

There is a black hole in our backyard. Astronomers have found the closest black hole yet at just 1000 light years from Earth, close enough to see the stars that orbit it without a telescope. Marianne Heida at the European Southern Observatory in Germany, and her colleagues spotted this black hole completely by accident. It is part of a system called HR 6819 that also contains two stars. The team was looking for pairs of stars in which one was a type that rotates so quickly it flings off material from its equator, creating a kind of ring from its own plasma. They found HR 6819, which has one of those plus one normal star, but the normal star appeared to be orbiting an empty spot of space once every 40 days. That turned out to be a black hole at least four times as massive as the sun, invisible because it is not actively devouring any material. “There must be a bunch of them closer by that we haven’t found yet, but this is the closest that we know,” says Heida. “Based on the number of st

Black holes are one of the most active areas of cosmological research. We know they’re a big deal, we know their effects reach into the far edges of the universe, and we know they really test the laws of physics from time to time. Interestingly, despite these huge gravity wells continuing to prove somewhat of a mystery, they’ve long been thought pretty easy to describe. Researchers only needed three parameters—their mass, their angular momentum (how fast they’re spinning), and their electric charge. This straightforward-ness has led some physicists to refer to black holes as “ bald .” But there’s a catch, and it’s a pretty big one—the Hawking information paradox. Introduced by Stephen Hawking in 1976, this paradox basically says that black holes are doing something impossible: they’re destroying information. Astronomers, however, think they’ve finally cracked that paradox. According to the laws of quantum physics, information cannot be destroyed. You should be able to analyze an existi

The birth of stars is one of the most fascinating and mysterious phenomena in the universe. How do clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravity and ignite into bright and powerful sources of light and energy? What are the factors that determine how many stars are formed from a single cloud, and how many of them will host planets? These are some of the questions that astronomers have been trying to answer for decades, but the process of star formation is often hidden from our view by thick layers of dust that block visible light. To overcome this challenge, astronomers have used a special telescope that can see through the dust and capture infrared light, which is emitted by warm objects such as young stars. The telescope is called VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy), and it is part of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) located in Chile. VISTA has been observing five nearby star-forming regions for five years, taking more than one million images t

ASTEROID BELT It contains debris and space objects of different sizes and shapes. The biggest of them is series. Its surface is slightly larger than the area of Argentina and its weight is about one percent of the moons. The total weight of the entire asteroid belt is 25 times less than the moons. Next we pass gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. These are the largest planets in the solar system. They’re also the heaviest, even though they don’t have a solid surface. Then we travel by Uranus and Neptune. They’re called ice giants. And at the very edge of the solar system we see Pluto. It was once considered a full-fledged Planet, but now it’s not even on the list. After that, we’re 4.3 billion miles away from our home. It took the New Horizon space probe about nine years to get here. Hold on to your seat. We are speeding up. We’re passing through the Kuiper belt. There are lots of asteroids and blocks of ice here. These are some of the oldest building materials in our solar system. Billions

For centuries, Mercury has held the distinction of being the closest planet to the Sun. However, recent scientific discoveries have dethroned Mercury from its position as the Sun’s closest neighbor. A new astronomical body, an asteroid named 2021 PH27, has been found to be even closer to the Sun than Mercury. Table of Contents The Discovery of Asteroid 2021 PH27 Asteroid 2021 PH27’s Unique Orbit The Composition and Characteristics of Asteroid 2021 PH27 Implications for Our Understanding of the Solar System Potential Future Exploration of Asteroid 2021 PH27 This groundbreaking discovery has significant implications for our understanding of the solar system and the dynamic forces at play within it. In this article, we will explore the discovery of this new celestial object and its potential impact on the field of astronomy. The Discovery of Asteroid 2021 PH27 The discovery of asteroid 2021 PH27 was made by astronomers using the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii. This powerful telescope is d

Mars, the fourth planet from the sun, has always piqued the curiosity of scientists, researchers, and space enthusiasts. With numerous spacecraft and rovers sent to explore its surface, many mysteries are being unraveled. Table of Contents Planetary Protection Policies Special Regions Radiation Hazards Terrain Challenges Technological Limitations Scientific Prioritization However, there are specific regions on Mars that remain off-limits to exploration due to various reasons. This article examines six primary reasons behind these forbidden zones and their implications for future  Mars  missions. Scientists Find Huge Deposits of Water on Mars Planetary Protection Policies The primary reason certain regions on Mars are off-limits is because of planetary protection policies. These policies aim to protect both Earth and other celestial bodies from potential contamination by microorganisms. By restricting access to specific areas, scientists hope to preserve the pristine nature of these reg

Earth is a noisy planet. Not just in a city-center noise pollution kind of way, but in more of a “ we’re sending all kinds of signals out into space every day ” kind of way. The world has gotten especially noisy since we learned how to transmit information over radio waves over 100 years ago. According to a new study, some of the strongest of those radio signals have reached far-off stars. And apparently, if those stars happen to be home to extraterrestrial life that could respond to our ping, we could be hearing back as early as 2029. It’s an incredibly long shot. “Our puny and infrequent transmissions are unlikely to yield a detection of humanity by extraterrestrials,” Jean-Luc Margot, a radio astronomer from UCLA, said in a Popular Science article. “The probability that another civilization resides in this tiny bubble is extraordinarily small unless there are millions of civilizations in the Milky Way.” But it’s not impossible, and for some astronomers, “ not impossible ” is worth i

Uranus blasted a gas bubble 22,000 times bigger than Earth back in 1986 and now researchers believe it will happen again. Two planetary scientists discovered something that prior analysis had missed last year when looking through NASA's archives: a blip in Uranus's magnetic field as the spacecraft traveled through a magnetic bubble of sorts. The new finding, which was published in Geophysical Research Letters last summer, comes as planetary scientists begin to turn their attention to some of the most significant unanswered questions in the field. Voyager 2 spacecraft captured this red handed but at the time it was overlooked by researchers but later on it was confirmed.  Back in 1986 when Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Uranus and observed a large bubble of gas being blasted out from the planet's atmosphere. During the flyby, Voyager 2 detected a bright plume of gas shooting out from Uranus' southern hemisphere. The plume was about 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) wide and e

Jupiter is so big, it doesn't actually orbit the sun. Here's how. Jupiter, our solar system’s fifth planet from the sun, the massive gas giant that protects Earth and the inner planets from potential catastrophic comet and asteroid strikes, is more unique than you’ve ever imagined. The gas giant is so huge, that it doesn’t actually orbit around the sun. Jupiter is 2.5 times the mass of ALL other planets in our solar system combined. This means that it’s so freakishly large, that the center of gravity between the gas giant and the sun does not reside within the sun, but a point in space, located just above our sun’s surface. And there’s a perfectly rational explanation for that. When a smaller object orbits a bigger one, the smaller body does not travel around the larger one in a circle. Instead, both these objects orbit a ‘shared’ center of Gravity; which means they meet somewhere in a perfect center. But Jupiter is special. Due to the fact that the gas giant is so hefty, its c

Scientists suggest that the Big Bang could have been just a special moment in the evolution of this always existing universe and not its beginning. Physicist Bruno Bento and his team have presented new research proving that the universe had no beginning. This work challenges the generally accepted theory that the universe was born in the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. Did our universe have a beginning and was there a Big Bang? The objective of the study Physicist Bruno Bento and his colleagues decided to find out what the birth of the universe would have looked like without the Big Bang singularity. Contradictions Studying this issue, they faced many contradictions that arise when comparing generally accepted theories. It is believed that the nature of the universe is most reliably described by quantum physics and general relativity. At the same time, quantum physics has successfully described three of the four fundamental forces of nature, but the fourth – gravity, from its posi

Our universe is woven together by a massive network of threads, made of a mysterious substance called dark matter, that creates a largely hidden superstructure known as the cosmic web.   Now, scientists have produced the largest-ever maps of these gargantuan filaments, covering about an eighth of the entire night sky from Earth and encompassing more than 200 million galaxies that were observed over 758 nights at NOIRLab's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.   These unprecedented views are the latest effort by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration, an international team made up of hundreds of scientists, which published its new findings on Thursday in a mega-batch of 30 papers.      Among the many revelations from this data dump is a huge map exposing thousands of empty voids in the cosmic web that may challenge longstanding cosmological models, including aspects of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.   The map charts out the distribution of dark matter, an

A spectacular map, produced by the European radio telescope LOFAR, shows a high-resolution image of a part of the universe. It collects more than 4.4 million galaxies, of which a million were completely unknown, which are billions of light years from Earth.   After seven years of observations and data analysis, an international team of scientists has mapped more than a quarter of the northern sky using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a pan-European radio telescope. The map reveals an astonishingly detailed radio image of more than 4.4 million galaxies, about a million of which were previously completely unknown. It offers a very dynamic picture of our Universe which, as has been made public, allows anyone to see the most exotic wonders of our intriguing Universe in a new light. This is what a part of the Universe looks like billions of light years from Earth. LOFAR LOFAR is a large network of radio telescopes located mainly in the Netherlands. It is made up of 50,000 antennas, grouped

Princeton scientists believe they have the tools to peer back into the beginning of time itself. The researchers say they can use ripples in space-time, known as gravitational waves, to basically see the start of everything we know. “We can’t see the early universe directly,” Deepen Garg, graduate student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics, says in a news release, “but maybe we can see it indirectly if we look at how gravitational waves from that time have affected matter and radiation that we can observe today.” By using the same process for researching fusion energy, the scientists studied gravitational waves, which Albert Einstein first predicted in 1916 as a consequence of the theory of relativity. With the disturbances in space-time caused by the movement of dense object, new formulas “could theoretically lead gravitational waves to reveal hidden properties about celestial bodies, like stars that are many lightyears away.” The hope is that physicists can analyze the charac