It's been nearly 30 years in the making, but scientists with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) collaboration in the Atacama Desert in Chile have now measured, for the very first time, the unique orbit of a star orbiting the supermassive black hole believed to lie at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
"General relativity predicts that bound orbits of one object around another are not closed, as in Newtonian gravity, but precess forwards in the plane of motion," said Reinhard Genzel , director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany. "This famous effect—first seen in the orbit of the planet Mercury around the Sun—was the first evidence in favor of general relativity.
This may worth something:
Bad Astronomy | Is this an actual image of a planet orbiting the nearest star? Maaaaaaaybe.
Well cripes, this didn't take long: Just a couple of weeks after astronomers announced that there's evidence of a possible second planet orbiting Proxima Centauri , the closest star to the Sun, another group has announced they may have an actual image of it!
Before we get started I want to be super clear: This is by no means confirmed , and the detection is a little shaky. A lot more work and a lot more observations will be needed to see if this pans out as an actual detection of the planet, as the authors make clear in their journal paper . I'll get into that in a moment.
NASA astronauts return to a drastically changed Earth after months in orbit - CNET
The Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft is seen as it lands with Expedition 62 crew members Jessica Meir and Drew Morgan of NASA, and Oleg Skripochka of Roscosmos, on Friday, April 17.
The trio made a parachute-assisted landing in a Soyuz capsule that touched down in a remote part of Kazakhstan, where they were greeted by crews wearing face masks.
NASA TV broadcast the entire process, and it's bittersweet to see the astronauts welcomed home, sitting and enjoying their first bit of sunshine in 2020 as members of the recovery crew ask all non-medical staff to keep a safe distance while the checks are done.
Virgin Orbit aces final test flight before first launch (photos) | Space
On Sunday (April 12), the company completed the final test of its development program, sending its carrier plane, Cosmic Girl , aloft over the Southern California desert with an orbital rocket beneath its wing.
The captive-carry trial was "a complete, end-to-end launch rehearsal that exercises all of our ground operations; our mission control; all of our communications systems and protocols; all of our range assets; and our carrier aircraft’s takeoff, flyout, pull-up maneuver and return-to-base operations," Virgin Orbit representatives wrote in a blog post Friday (April 10) that described the test.
Quite a lot has been going on:
Virgin Orbit | Virgin's Rocket-Launching 747 Is Ready for Takeoff
Now, Virgin Orbit has tested its entire launch system, including the liquid nitrogen fuel tanks that cool the entire system and require special handling. The company says the test was a success.
So what does it take to launch a payload like a satellite into space from mid air? Somehow, that idea sounds more like science fiction than the already-wild accomplishment of launching a rocket from the ground.
Virgin’s special 747—originally a fleet vehicle, but renamed Cosmic Girl by Virgin Orbit—is fitted with a harness that holds a rocket under one wing. Like a fighter jet, Cosmic Girl will release the rocket into thin air, where the rocket and payload will fall out of the way and then power up.
The Orbit will be a 'next-gen community' in Canada's Ontario
The Orbit is a "vision for a next-generation community" according to Partisans , one that will transform Innisfil, a farming town of 37,00 people in Ontario with a raft of new technologies.
The project was "catalysed" by the decision to start construction of a "next-generation transit hub", GO Metrolinx, which will provide better connections to the likes of Toronto, just 60km away when it opens at some point between 2022 and 2025. The city will be filled with innovations such as a network of fibre-optic cables, capable of creating streets and infrastructure that are plugged into the internet and use sensors for monitoring.
Study Finds Bizarre Exoplanet Orbits for Binary Stars - Universe Today
There's an iconic scene in the original Star Wars movie where Luke Skywalker looks out over the desert landscape of Tatooine at the amazing spectacle of a double sunset. Now, a new study out of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) suggests that such exotic exoplanet worlds orbiting multiple stars may exist in misaligned orbits, far out of the primary orbital plane.
The find has implications for planetary formation in complex multiple star systems. The study used ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) in Chile to look at 19 protoplanetary disks around binary stars with longer period orbits, versus a dozen binary stars known to host exoplanets with periods less than 40 days found in the Kepler space telescope observations.
NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft aces asteroid-sampling dress rehearsal | Space
NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which is getting ready to scoop a sample of asteroid Bennu, has successfully completed a partial dress rehearsal for its historic trip to the asteroid's surface.
OSIRIS-REx, which has been orbiting Bennu since 2018, is scheduled to attempt to swoop down to the surface to retrieve a sample of the asteroid four months from now and bring that sample back to Earth in 2023. On Tuesday (April 14), during what NASA calls a "checkpoint rehearsal," OSIRIS-REx got closer to Bennu's surface than ever before while practicing the sample collection process.
Happening on Twitter
Einstein wins again: star orbits black hole just like GR predicts https://t.co/UezkUP4xq6 by @JenLucPiquant arstechnica (from NYC - Boston - Chicago - SF) Thu Apr 16 21:26:04 +0000 2020
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