FAST’s 500-meter (1,640-foot) dish makes it the world’s largest single-dish radio observatory. It’s expected to open to international observers in 2021. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/worlds-largest-radio-telescope-china-fast…
Tag: universe
Researchers discover the earliest supermassive black hole and quasar in the universe
Nearly every galaxy hosts a monster at its center—a supermassive black hole millions to billions times the size of the Sun. While there’s still much to learn about these objects, many scientists believe they are crucial to the formation and structure of galaxies. What’s more, some of these black holes are particularly active, whipping up stars, dust and gas into glowing…
The magnetic fields swirling within the Whirlpool galaxy
Messier objects are some of the most imaged objects in the universe. In part that’s because many of them are so visibly appealing. A good example of that is the Whirlpool galaxy, M51, which recently received an even more dramatic visual representation with a new photo released by NASA. In it, the magnetic fields that are holding the galaxy together and…
Cosmic beasts and where to find them
Two giant radio galaxies have been discovered with South Africa’s powerful MeerKAT telescope. These galaxies are thought to be amongst the largest single objects in the Universe. The discovery has been published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-cosmic-beasts.html…
6 space missions to look forward to in 2021
Here are some of the space missions to keep an eye out for in 2021. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/6-space-missions-2021-artemis-chandrayaa3-jameswebb…
Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They’re Ultra-Efficient
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes IEEE Spectrum: Computers use a staggering amount of energy today. According to one recent estimate, data centers alone consume two percent of the world’s electricity, a figure that’s expected to climb to eight percent by the end of the decade. To buck that trend, though, perhaps the microprocessor, at the center of the computer universe, could…
Nearby planet is almost as old as the universe
Astronomers have identified a nearby extrasolar world that is not only terrestrial in nature, but also ancient. Situated a mere 280 light years from t… Source: https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/342975/nearby-planet-is-almost-as-old-as-the-universe…
Theia 456 is a stretched-out stream of sibling stars
A close look at the “stellar stream” known as Theia 456 finds it contains contains 468 stars born at the same time. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/theia-456-stellar-stream-468-stars-born-together…
Doubling the number of known gravitational lenses
Data from the DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) Legacy Imaging Surveys have revealed over 1200 new gravitational lenses, approximately doubling the number of known lenses. Discovered using machine learning trained on real data, these warped and stretched images of distant galaxies provide astronomers with a flood of new targets with which to measure fundamental properties of the Universe such as the…
Students discover bright lensed galaxy in the early universe
The night sky is a natural time machine, used by cosmologists to explore the origins and evolution of the universe. Reaching into the depths of the past, a class of undergraduate students at the University of Chicago sought to do the same—and uncovered an extraordinarily distant galaxy in the early cosmos. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-students-bright-lensed-galaxy-early.html…