Sitting in the centers of all big galaxies, these monsters outweigh our Sun by a factor of millions, even billions. They chow down on stars, gas, dust, whatever unwary material gets too close.
Finding a second supermassive black hole close to the first one is rare. We've seen a few (and they should have been more common when the Universe was young ), but they're not easy to spot.
Still, say they were… and say we could hop aboard the Enterprise and make the entirely questionable decision to warp on over to a binary supermassive black hole system. What would it look like?
NASA Animation Shows Two Supermassive Black Holes Orbiting Each Other
At the heart of every galaxy lies a black hole, where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape its boundary. Sometimes when two galaxies merge, their black holes get caught in lock-step, perpetually circling each other in an interstellar tango.
In the visualization, the black holes are marked by different colors. The orange one is 200 million times more massive than the sun. Its blue companion weighs about half that much. Both are surrounded by glowing rings of hot gas and space debris, known as an accretion disk.
Scientists discover new super-Earth orbiting a distant red dwarf | The Independent
Scientists have discovered a new super-Earth orbiting around a star 36 light years from our home planet.
The newly-discovered world has a mass three times greater than that the Earth, orbiting the GJ 740 star every 2.4 days.
GJ 740 is much cooler than the sun , and has a much smaller mass. Temperatures on its surface reach between 2400 and 3700 Kelvin, which is over 2000 degrees cooler than the Sun, and is between 0.08 and 0.45 of its size.
Mission launches to help combat 9,200 tonnes of space debris orbiting Earth
They will also lead to an increase in the number of objects in key orbits, meaning a likely rise in orbiting debris. This threatens the very services space systems provide, according to Astroscale.
Astroscale is the first private company with a vision to secure the safe and sustainable development of space for the benefit of future generations.
The European Space Agency estimates the 3,600 working satellites share their orbits with 9,200 tonnes of space debris, or an estimated 28,200 debris objects tracked by the Space Surveillance Network.
China Orbiting 400 Satellites, Heading for 1,000 by 2030, US Space Command Chief Says
Watch monster black holes dance in this mesmerizing NASA animation | Space
A stunning new animation from NASA shows the entrancing dance of two monster black holes in orbit around each other.
The black holes — which each contain millions of times the mass of the sun — are shrouded in bright, hot, churning gas called an accretion disk. The new animation shows how the black hole duet distorts and redirects light emanating from each other's accretion disks. As one black hole passes in front of the other, its gravity warps the light of its companion, creating a sequence of entangled arcs of glowing gas as if seen in a funhouse mirror.
Astronomers puzzled by giant planet orbiting mysteriously around a sun-like star | Mirage News
A team of astronomers led by Dutch scientists have directly imaged a giant planet orbiting at a large distance around a sun-like star. Why this planet is so massive, and how it got to be there, is still a mystery. The researchers will publish their findings in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The planet in question is YSES 2b, located 360 light years from Earth in the direction of the southern constellation of Musca (Latin for The Fly). The gaseous planet is six times heavier than Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. The newly discovered planet orbits 110 times more distant from its star than the Earth does from the Sun (or 20 times the distance between the Sun and Jupiter). The accompanying star is only 14 million years old and resembles our Sun in its childhood.
NASA Space Station On-Orbit Status 19 April, 2021 - KERMIT Microscope Upgrade - SpaceRef
The next crew to launch to the International Space Station is counting down to liftoff this Thursday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
They will be greeted less than 24 hours later by the seven Expedition 65 crew members residing aboard the orbiting lab.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour sits atop the Falcon 9 rocket at the launch pad ready to carry four Commercial Crew astronauts to the space station. The SpaceX Crew-2 quartet is comprised of Commander Shane Kimbrough and Pilot Megan McArthur, both NASA astronauts, and Mission Specialists Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency.
NASA's Webb to Study Young Exoplanets on the Edge - Astrobiology
Left: This is an image of the star HR 8799 taken by Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) in 1998. A mask within the camera (coronagraph) blocks most of the light from the star. Astronomers also used software to digitally subtract more starlight. Nevertheless, scattered light from HR 8799 dominates the image, obscuring four faint planets later discovered from ground-based observations.
But even their creative minds could not have conceived of the variety of worlds astronomers have uncovered. Many of these worlds, called exoplanets, are vastly different from our solar system's family of planets. They range from star-hugging "hot Jupiters" to oversized rocky planets dubbed "super Earths." Our universe apparently is stranger than fiction.
NASA just shared new images of what its Gateway will look like
When NASA sent astronauts to the Moon decades ago it did so using a pretty straightforward approach. After being launched into space by a rocket, the astronauts entered orbit around the Moon and then used a lunar lander to travel to the surface and back to the orbiting command module. This design worked well, and helped NASA become the first (and, so far, only) country to put humans on the surface of the Moon.
The lunar Gateway is an orbiting space station that will cruise around the Moon and act as a jumping-off point for missions headed to the surface or leaving it. The idea is that a crewed spacecraft will dock with the Gateway and then travel to the surface in a separate vehicle. When the mission is over, the astronauts will travel back to the gateway, jump in their ship and head back to Earth.
No comments:
Post a Comment