Science data

One of the largest stars in the Orion constellation, the red supergiant Betelgeuse, just had a gigantic stellar outburst that has never been observed before, according to scientists. Betelgeuse gained notoriety for the first time in late 2019 when the star, which gleams like a crimson diamond in Orion's upper-right shoulder, unexpectedly darkened. In 2020, the supergiant continued to lose brightness. Scientists have been attempting to find out what happened to the star since since some predicted that it would go supernova. Now that data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories have been evaluated, scientists think the star had a gigantic surface mass ejection, shedding a significant portion of its visible surface. "A massive star surface mass ejection has never previously been observed. We are left with a situation that we don't fully comprehend "a remark from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based astronomer Andrea Dupree of the Center for Astrophysics | Harva...

Only so many secrets can be kept in space. A space weapon that is currently in orbit would have been shown this week, if all had gone according to plan for General John Hyten, vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to Breaking Defense, Hyten had wanted to reveal a classified space weapon program during the 2021 Space Symposium meeting. The announcement was apparently initially scheduled for last year's Space Symposium but was postponed due to a pandemic. This time, it was delayed due to the abrupt conclusion of coordinated operations against the Taliban. The declassification of the weapon was initially intended to mark the successful launch of the Space Force, which gave the Pentagon access to weapons in space in addition to a new branch. Three important, scary concerns still need to be answered after the timeframe was once again pushed back: why would the military desire an anti-satellite weapon, why deploy it in space, and what threats would such a weapon pose? Why us...

A new black hole was created when two black holes, located around 7 billion light-years distant, collided violently after spiraling inward for eons. This cosmic disturbance stretched, collapsed, and even jiggled space-time, resulting in gravitational waves that began to travel toward Earth on May 21, 2019. An international team of scientists announced Wednesday that they had discovered this cosmic collision, and it is racking up superlatives: it's the biggest, the farthest, and the most energetic black hole merger observed to date. LIGO (Laser Interferometry Gravitational-wave Observatory), a pair of identical, two and a half-mile-long interferometers in the United States, and Virgo, a roughly two-mile-long detector in Italy. This is also the first confirmed detection of an intermediate-sized black hole that was created by a black hole merger and measures around 142 times as big as the Sun. The results were released on Wednesday in two papers: one in the Physical Review Journals ex...

The quickest star in existence has been found by scientists from Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, and the University of Cologne. This star circumnavigates a black hole in record time. The star S4716 travels at a speed of around 8000 kilometers per second as it circles Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way, every four years. By astronomical standards, S4716 is only 100 AU (astronomical unit) away from the black hole. The distance between one AU and 149,597,870 kilometers. The Astrophysical Journal has published the work. A tightly packed cluster of stars is located close to the black hole that lies at the center of our galaxy. There are considerably over 100 stars in this cluster, known as the S cluster, with varying brightness and masses. S stars move really quickly. According to Dr. Florian Peissker, main author of the current study, "One prominent component, S2, behaves like a big person sitting in front of you at a movie theater: it blocks you...

How frequently do celebs live alone? Astronomers need to locate additional instances of the companions of brown dwarfs, which are objects that lie in between the largest planets and the tiniest stars. Frank Kiwy, an accomplished citizen scientist, has nearly doubled the number of known ultracool dwarf binary systems in the Sun's vicinity by finding 34 new ones utilizing the Astro Data Lab scientific platform at NSF's NOIRLab. A citizen scientist has examined the NOIRLab Source Catalog DR2 of the NSF's NOIRLab, a database of 4 billion celestial objects, to find brown dwarf partners. His thorough research produced 34 ultracool dwarf binary systems, roughly tripling the number of systems previously identified [1]. Between the largest planets and the tiniest stars are brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs, which lack the mass necessary to maintain nuclear reactions in their cores, resemble cooling embers on a far larger scale. They are hard to see due to their obscurity and diminutive siz...

Images shared on social media demonstrate that the Jiaquan Satellite Launch Center's launch of Galactic Energy of China was successful. That makes a Chinese rocket firm perfect thus far. According to posts on social media, Galactic Energy of China launched a Ceres-1 solid rocket into orbit on Tuesday, August 9, from the Jiaquan Satellite Launch Center. The third successful launch for Galactic Energy was verified by Chinese official media at 12:11 a.m. EDT (04:11 GMT or 12:11 p.m. local time). The Global Times reported(opens in new tab) on Twitter that "Galactic Energy launched the Ceres-1 carrier rocket from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on 12:11pm Tue, successfully delivering three commercial satellites into a solar synchronous orbit of 500 km [310 miles]." Two Taijing-1 spacecraft and a Donghai-1 satellite were on board; China has not disclosed information regarding the upcoming missions of these three little satellites. One of the Chinese businesses vying to carry ou...

Both the Soyuz 7 and the Soyuz 16 were commanded by Filipchenko. Anatoly Filipchenko, a cosmonaut from the Soviet period who participated in two docking tests—the first for a potential Russian lunar landing and the second for the first mission in which the United States participated—died at the age of 94. The Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, outside of Moscow, and Roscosmos, the government space enterprise of Russia, both confirmed Filipchenko's passing on Sunday (opens in new tab) (Aug. 7). "Anatoly Vasilievich was a goal-oriented, exacting, industrious, and fair individual who was constantly willing to assist others. His life's work included faithfully serving the Motherland, being innovative, and being committed to the cause of his choice "Officials from the training center released a statement (opens in new tab). "The center's management and personnel, [as well as] the cosmonaut team] offer their genuine deepest sympathies to everyone Anato...

After sunset, variations in air density can lead to the formation of heated pockets of gas known as "plasma bubbles" above the equator of the Earth, which can interfere with satellite-to-earth communication. Scientists are now using new AI algorithms to foresee plasma bubble episodes and predict their occurrence. The project was presented this week at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2022) by University College London PhD candidate Sachin Reddy. Plasma bubbles, pockets of very hot gas that extend into space shortly after sunset and are located up to 900 kilometers above the Earth's surface, develop in the upper atmosphere. These bubbles begin tiny and expand quickly, expanding in only a few hours from the size of a football field to that of a small nation. As the bubbles get bigger, they can obstruct and twist radio signals from satellites, making it impossible for them to communicate with the Earth. A group of scientists has compiled 8 years' worth of data from th...

A problem that has confounded the Mars scientific community since NASA's Curiosity rover found the mineral tridymite in Gale Crater in 2016 has been solved by planetary scientists from Rice University, NASA's Johnson Space Center, and the California Institute of Technology. It wasn't immediately evident how a concentrated piece of tridymite, an exceptionally uncommon high-temperature, low-pressure type of quartz, came up in the crater. Due to the possibility that it formerly housed liquid water, GaleCrater was chosen as Curiosity's landing location. Curiosity discovered evidence that Gale Crater was a lake as recently as 1 billion years ago. As the co-author of a study that was recently published online in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Kirsten Siebach of Rice University said, "The discovery of tridymite in a mudstone in Gale Crater is one of the most surprising observations that the Curiosity rover has made in 10 years of exploring Mars. On Earth, tridymite ...

According to recent study, Jupiter's gaseous envelope is not uniformly distributed, and its metallicity provides information about its origin. The distribution of Jupiter's gaseous atmosphere is not uniform, according to a global team of scientists. The metal content of the inner region is higher than that of the outer regions, totaling between 11 and 30 earth masses, or 3 to 9 percent of Jupiter's overall mass. This level of metallicity leads to the conclusion that planetesimals of kilometer-scale sizes must have been involved in Jupiter's creation. On June 8, 2022, the study, which was directed by Yamila Miguel (SRON/Leiden Observatory), was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. We got a peek of Jupiter's breathtaking magnificence in 2016 when NASA's Juno space probe landed there. Jupiter is the largest planet in our Solar System. Jupiter turns out to be covered in hurricanes in addition to the well-known Great Red Spot, giving it the appearan...

The ten-year-old debate about the composition of our star is been settled by new estimates of the solar spectrum. Our sun still retains secrets, despite being far closer than any other star in the cosmos. Since we only have a limited view, it is still 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away from Earth. Its atmosphere and surface are both very hot, and it continually ejects particles at a speed of around 1 million miles per hour. It makes sense that we're still finding discoveries now. In fact, the conflict between the internal structure of the Sun as determined by solar oscillations (helioseismology) and the structure derived from the basic theory of stellar evolution, which in turn depends on measurements of the current Sun's chemical composition, has just been resolved by astronomers. Updated figures for the abundances of various chemical elements are produced by new simulations of the physics of the Sun's atmosphere, which put an end to the disagreement. Notably, ...