New observations reveal that – about a billion years ago – the center of our Milky Way galaxy underwent a period of intense star formation, resulting in over 100,000 supernovae. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/milky-way-center-star-formation-burst-100000-supernova…
Tag: Max Planck
Calculating the time it will take spacecraft to find their way to other star systems
A pair of researchers, one with the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, the other with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CIT, has found a way to estimate how long it will take already launched space vehicles to arrive at other star systems. The pair, Coryn Bailer-Jones and Davide Farnocchia have written a paper describing their findings and have uploaded it to…
Hefty black hole holds new record for most mass
Astronomers have discovered a black hole with 40 billion solar masses in the heart of the Abell 85 cluster of galaxies Source: https://earthsky.org/space/astronomers-discover-heaviest-black-hole-abell85-nearby-universe…
Astronomers discover the heaviest black hole in the nearby universe—40 billion solar masses
In space, black holes appear in different sizes and masses. The record is now held by a specimen in the Abell 85 cluster of galaxies, where an ultra-massive black hole with 40 billion times the mass of our sun sits in the middle of the central galaxy Holm 15A. Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and the University…
Physicists Have Finally Seen Traces of the Long-Sought ‘Axion’ Particle
fahrbot-bot shares a report from Live Science: Scientists have finally found traces of the axion, an elusive particle that rarely interacts with normal matter. The axion was first predicted over 40 years ago but has never been seen until now. Scientists have suggested that dark matter, the invisible matter that permeates our universe, may be made of axions. But rather than…
First detection of the cosmic monster explosions with ground-based gamma-ray telescopes
The strongest explosions in the universe produce even more energetic radiation than previously known: Using specialized telescopes, two international teams have registered the highest energy gamma rays ever measured from so-called gamma-ray bursts, reaching about 100 billion times as much energy as visible light. The scientists of the H.E.S.S. and MAGIC telescopes present their observations in independent publications in the journal…
Ancient gas cloud shows that the first stars must have formed very quickly
Astronomers led by Eduardo Bañados of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have discovered a gas cloud that contains information about an early phase of galaxy and star formation, merely 850 million years after the Big Bang. The cloud was found serendipitously during observations of a distant quasar, and it has the properties that astronomers expect from the precursors of modern-day…
New outburst detected from a luminous supersoft source in a nearby galaxy
Astronomers from Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany have observed a new outburst from SSS1, a luminous transient supersoft X-ray source in the nearby galaxy NGC 300. The newly detected event could shed more light on the nature of this mysterious transient. The finding is detailed in a paper published October 18 on arXiv.org. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-10-outburst-luminous-supersoft-source-nearby.html…
For newborn planets, solar systems are naturally baby-proof
Numerical simulations by a group of astronomers, led by Mario Flock from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, have shown that young planetary systems are naturally “baby-proof”: Physical mechanisms combine to keep young planets in the inner regions from taking a fatal plunge into the star. Similar processes also allow planets to be born close to stars—from pebbles trapped in a…
New approach for the simulation of quantum chemistry—modelling the molecular architecture
Searching for new substances and developing new techniques in the chemical industry: tasks that are often accelerated using computer simulations of molecules or reactions. But even supercomputers quickly reach their limits. Now researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching (MPQ) have developed an alternative, analogue approach. An international team around Javier Argüello-Luengo, Ph.D. candidate at the Institute…