Every major galaxy is home to a supermassive black hole, and our own Milky Way is no exception. Astronomers recently found something unexpected near this massive object — 4 mysterious objects, each similar to a pair of bizarre bodies spotted in recent years in this same region of the galaxy.
Our local supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced Sag A star), contains roughly 4 million times as much mass as the Sun. Not far from this black hole, members of a newly-discovered class of objects are caught in a gravitational dance with a massive body.
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Astronomers find an oddball asteroid entirely inside the orbit of Venus | Ars Technica
Astronomers have found nearly 1 million asteroids in our Solar System, with the vast majority located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
It is far rarer to find asteroids with orbits closer to the Sun, and especially inside the orbit of Earth, due to Jupiter's gravitational influence. There are only about 20 known asteroids with orbits entirely inside that of Earth's. They are called Atira asteroids.
Many of these Atira asteroids have orbits that are substantially tilted away from the plane of the Solar System, suggesting past encounters with Mercury or Venus.
Scientists Find A Super-Earth Orbiting The Star Nearest To The Sun
Owing to the research conducted at Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics, the start Proxima Centauri, which is approximately 4.2 light-years away from our sun, has a planet orbiting around it. This has been indicated after observing the star's activity. If you are curious to know all the details, do refer to the journal Science Advances , in which the entire study has been published.
Considering the size of what we are calling a super-Earth, it's size shall be somewhere between ours and that of Neptune. In an interview with Business Insider, Mario Damasso, an astronomer who shares the credit of the research says, “Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to the sun, and this detection would make it the closest planetary system to us.”
High School NASA Intern Discovers a Planet Orbiting Two Stars | Time.com
A high school student made a remarkable discovery just after starting an internship with NASA: a planet orbiting two stars.
Last summer, Wolf Cukier, had just completed his junior year at Scarsdale High School in New York when he joined NASA' s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland for a summer internship. NASA assigned him to look at star brightness variations that had been recorded by the space program's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) , which aims to find planets outside the Earth's solar system.
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A low-mass planet candidate orbiting Proxima Centauri at a distance of 1.5 AU | Science Advances
Our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, hosts a temperate terrestrial planet. We detected in radial velocities evidence of a possible second planet with minimum mass m c sin i c = 5.8 ± 1.9 M ⊕ and orbital period P c = 5.21 − 0.22 + 0.26 years.
In this work, we present the results from the analysis of the extended RV dataset carried out within the framework outlined in ( 11 ) and aimed at searching for additional low-mass planetary companions to Proxima. The conclusions of this study are supported by the analysis of spectroscopic activity diagnostics and of a photometric light curve with a baseline longer than the time span of the RV dataset.
Asteroids: NASA discovers small moon orbiting space rock the agency plans to visit - EconoTimes
It is not every day that asteroids become destinations but rather celestial objects to avoid or study. But Express reports that NASA’s Lucy mission, set for takeoff in 2021, will launch a probe to visit the Trojan asteroids, which are located in Jupiter’s orbit. However, the researchers from the Southwest Research Institute or SwRI, who are also leading the mission, discovered that one of the asteroids has a small natural satellite or moon in its orbit.
The asteroid, known as Eurybates, has an orbital period of 12 years and is one of the bigger Trojan asteroids measuring 63 kilometers in diameter. It makes sense that this particular asteroid would have a satellite orbiting around it due to its size. According to Hal Levison, the principal investigator for SwRI, Eurybates would have been the likely choice in having a satellite compared to the rest of the asteroids under the Trojan cluster.
NASA Space Station On-Orbit Status 16 January 2020 - Two More Spacewalks Scheduled This Month -
NASA astronaut Christina Koch is pictured working in the vacuum of space 265 miles above the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. She and NASA astronaut Jessica Meir (out of frame) conducted a spacewalk to install new lithium-ion batteries that store and distribute power collected from solar arrays on the station's Port-6 truss structure. Credit: NASA.
The third spacewalk is planned for Jan. 25 with astronauts Andrew Morgan and Luca Parmitano. They will finish the complex thermal repair work they began last year on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, an astrophysics device searching for evidence of antimatter and dark matter.
Strange, unknown objects found orbiting Milky Way's black hole - CNET
The unusual orbits of six unknown objects zooming around Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
The nature of these so-called "G sources" is controversial. Some astronomers believe they're gas clouds, others contend they look more like strange stars shrouded in dust. In a new study, astronomers reveal they have detected four more of these mysterious objects which look very similar to G1 and G2 -- and suggest they are members of a new class of cosmic phenomena.
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