There’s a nice binocular comet – Comet NEOWISE – in the early morning sky now. Some experienced observers are catching it with the eye alone. It’s nice … but not great. When will we see our next Great Comet? Source: https://earthsky.org/space/northern-hemisphere-overdue-for-a-great-comet…
Tag: Max Planck
Giant star spots likely cause of Betelgeuse dimming
Betelgeuse, the bright star in the constellation of Orion, has been fascinating astronomers in the recent months because of its unusually strong decline in brightness. Scientists have been discussing a number of scenarios trying to explain its behavior. Now a team led by Thavisha Dharmawardena of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have shown that most likely unusually large star spots…
Breathtaking New Map of the X-ray Universe
Behold the hot, energetic Universe. A German-Russian space telescope has just acquired a breakthrough map of the sky that traces the heavens in X-rays. From a report: The image records a lot of the violent action in the cosmos – instances where matter is being accelerated, heated and shredded. Feasting black holes, exploding stars, and searingly hot gas. The data comes…
Quasar jets are particle accelerators thousands of light-years long
An international collaboration bringing together over 200 scientists from 13 countries has shown that the very high-energy gamma-ray emissions from quasars, galaxies with a highly energetic nucleus, are not concentrated in the region close to their central black hole, but in fact, extend over several thousand light-years along jets of plasma. This discovery shakes up current scenarios for the behavior of…
Dance of 3 stars confirms Einstein’s ‘most fortunate thought’
Researchers in Europe have now confirmed the universality of free fall – which Einstein called his most fortunate thought – with extremely high precision. To do it, they spent 8 years tracking a triple star system containing a millisecond pulsar. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/pulsar-psr-j03371715-einstein-universality-of-free-fall…
New exoplanet system is ‘mirror image’ of Earth and sun
Researchers from Germany and the US have discovered an exoplanet less than twice the size of Earth orbiting at about the same distance from its star, making it the closest analog to the Earth-sun system known so far. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/exoplanet-kepler-160-mirror-image-earth-sun…
Close-up view reveals binary proto-stars in the process of assemblage
High-resolution observations of a young star forming system clearly unveil a pair of proto-stars at their earliest stages of evolution deeply embedded within the source IRAS 16293-2422 in the Ophiuchus molecular cloud. The team led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics used the ALMA interferometer not only to pin down the source configuration, but also to measure the gas…
First global map of rockfalls on the moon
A research team from ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen counted over 136,000 rockfalls on the moon caused by asteroid impacts. Even billions of years old landscapes are still changing. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-06-global-rockfalls-moon.html…
Researcher discusses discovery of exoplanets and his special method
René Heller from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research already made the scientific community take notice when he and his team discovered no fewer than 18 previously overlooked exoplanets in the data from the Kepler Space Telescope. Now they succeeded again, this time in finding a somewhat Earth-like planet orbiting a sun-like star. What is so special about the…
A mirror image of Earth and sun
Among the more than 4,000 known exoplanets, KOI-456.04 is something special: less than twice the size of Earth, it orbits a sun-like star. And it does so with a star-planet distance that could permit planetary surface temperatures conducive to life. The object was discovered by a team led by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen. Its host…