discoveries

The Beating Heart of the Milky Way

Say hello to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the beating heart of our very own galaxy!

For a long time, we've *assumed* there must be a SMBH at the center of the Milky Way, collecting a plethora of evidence that supported this theory. But we've never been able to see it, BECAUSE it's at the center of the galaxy, which is obviously a very, very busy, noisy place.

After the Event Horizon Telescope revealed the first ever direct imaging of a black hole in 2019, it turned its attention inward, and has been working diligently ever since to finally snap this picture. And it got it done.

Learn more about the image and all the science it has revealed here: https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=305148

Originally posted on Facebook.

Galactic Core As We've Never Seen It

The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) has released new MeerKAT radio telescope images of the radio emissions at the center of our galaxy, and they are INCREDIBLE! I am once again in awe of our universe. Who wishes they could see radio waves now? Me, that’s who.

The primary image (first below) show nearly 1,000 strands of magnetic filaments, measuring up to 150 light-years in length. "It's unclear what they are, or how they came into existence. What we do know is that they contain cosmic-ray electrons, spinning around in filaments of magnetic fields at close to light-speeds."

"The image captures radio emission from numerous phenomena, including outbursting stars, stellar nurseries, and the chaotic region around the 4 million solar mass supermassive black hole that lurks in the centre of our Galaxy."

About the second image: "The complex, cirrus-like emission from the Galactic centre super bubble dominates this image. This is traversed by the Radio Arc, a complex of many parallel radio filaments. The radio bubble nestles against the diffuse Sagittarius A region in the lower centre of the image. The bright dot near the centre of this region is Sagittarius A*, a 4 million solar mass black hole."

And the third: "In the centre of the image is the supernova remnant G359.1-0.5. To the left is ‘the Mouse’, a runaway pulsar possibly formed and ejected by the supernova event. To the upper right is one of the longest and most famous radio filaments, known as ‘the Snake’."

More about the research here: https://www.sciencealert.com/jaw-dropping-new-image-of... and here: https://www.sarao.ac.za/.../new-meerkat-radio-image.../

Originally posted on Facebook.

Oxygen Created on Mars

Oxygen on Mars. And I'm not even kidding. https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8926/nasas-perseverance-mars-rover-extracts-first-oxygen-from-red-planet/

Granted, not a lot of oxygen just yet - about 5 grams produced in an hour - but Percy's MOXIE module just MADE oxygen out of the carbon dioxide in the Mars atmosphere.

MOXIE, like Ingenuity, is another technology demonstration project included in the Perseverance mission. And like Ingenuity, it worked!

Honestly, this might be the biggest breakthrough to come from the entire Perseverance mission. There are a thousand challenges to overcome for humans to live and work on Mars, but oxygen generation has got to be one of the biggest (note: oxygen is also enormously helpful to get people back home to Earth).

What a month for our future in space!

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Originally posted on Facebook.

Sunlit Water on the Moon

To be clear, we already knew there was water on the moon, but until this discovery, we'd only found it deep in shadowy, frozen crevices.The more water that is harvestable on the moon, the easier it will be for us to establish permanent bases and, eventually, colonies, so this is great news!Also, the science is rather interesting, mostly because we don't know *how* water is not being created but retained in these areas of the lunar surface. Also, SOFIA is a very cool telescope, and an example of scientists getting creative with the resources available to them.

“NASA’s SOFIA Discovers Water on Sunlit Surface of Moon”: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-sofia-discovers-water-on-sunlit-surface-of-moon/

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Originally posted on Facebook.

Life on Venus?

HYPE-WORTHY SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY ALERT

Cue the hype in 3...2...1...go! Alien life on Venus? Well...maybe. Just maybe. For today, feel free to let your imagination run wild about Venusites (Venusians?) floating around in the toxic clouds of the planet next door, doing things that life does.

"Deep within the acidic clouds of Venus, astronomers have detected a tantalizing gas never found on the planet before — a gas that, remarkably, could be a sign of life on the hellish world. The gas’s presence isn’t enough to say for sure that Venus hosts life forms, but the fact that it exists in the planet’s clouds indicates that something is going on there that we don’t fully understand.

"Phosphine is a toxic and explosive molecule with a lingering odor of garlic and dead fish. Astronomers discovered the putrid gas lurking within a layer of clouds on Venus, where temperatures are pretty close to those on our planet. Phosphine is considered a "biosignature"—a molecule strongly associated with the chemistry of life that has few non-life methods of production, particularly on a rocky planet like Venus.

"But finding even a small amount of phosphine on Venus is enticing because of how the gas is made here on Earth. Either it is manufactured artificially by humans — into products like fumigants or biological weapons — or it is a natural byproduct of life. Phosphine can be found in swamps and marshlands, where it’s thought to be produced by microbes. It can also be found in the guts of animals or in the poop they leave behind. Above all, it’s a gas that is almost exclusively associated with life on Earth, raising the possibility that it could be a sign of microbes floating in the Venusian clouds.

“Or it could be coming from something that we can’t yet comprehend.

"Ultimately, everything comes back to one question: are we alone? Microbes on Venus may not seem that impressive, but if life can form on two worlds right next to each other, that opens up the possibility that life is much more abundant in the Universe than we think.

"No matter what, this detection is just the beginning of a long journey to discovering more about Venus and its potential for habitability. Right now, there’s no definitive answer. There may never be. “As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” says Clements of the Imperial College of London. “We’ve got pretty good evidence, I wouldn’t say it’s extraordinary yet.”

Here are a few of the million+ articles that have been published about this announcement in the last two days:

The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/21428796/venus-gas-life-sign-discovery-phosphine-biosignature (source of most of the text above)

Space.com: https://www.space.com/venus-clouds-possible-life-chemical-discovery.html

The Planetary Society: https://www.planetary.org/articles/venus-phosphine-biosignature

Sky News: https://news.sky.com/story/signs-of-alien-life-detected-on-venus-12071625

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Originally posted on Facebook.

We Are Starstuff Indeed

How cool is this? We are starstuff indeed.

"The hydrogen in your body, present in every molecule of water, came from the Big Bang. There are no other appreciable sources of hydrogen in the universe. The carbon in your body was made by nuclear fusion in the interior of stars, as was the oxygen. Much of the iron in your body was made during supernovas of stars that occurred long ago and far away. The gold in your jewelry was likely made from neutron stars during collisions that may have been visible as short-duration gamma-ray bursts or gravitational wave events. Elements like phosphorus and copper are present in our bodies in only small amounts but are essential to the functioning of all known life.

"The featured periodic table is color coded to indicate humanity's best guess as to the nuclear origin of all known elements. The sites of nuclear creation of some elements, such as copper, are not really well known and are continuing topics of observational and computational research."

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200809.html

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Originally posted on Facebook and Twitter.

Closest Images of the Sun Ever Taken

This morning, the European Space Agency and NASA have unveiled the closest images of the Sun ever taken by a spacecraft: high-resolution pictures taken by their newly launched Solar Orbiter spacecraft. Already, the pictures are revealing weird phenomena on the Sun that we’ve never seen in such detail.

“We didn’t really expect the first images to turn out really this great,” Daniel Müller, ESA’s project scientist for the Solar Orbiter mission, tells The Verge. “They’re not only really sharp and perfectly exposed from the technical perspective, but they really show things that we have not seen before.”

Thanks to these images, scientists have discovered what appear to be relatively “tiny” solar flares peppered across the Sun’s surface. The scientists behind the mission have dubbed these small flares “campfires,” as they are millions to billions of times smaller than the massive, energetic flares that periodically erupt from the Sun. Dozens of these campfires can be seen at any give time within the field of view of Solar Orbiter’s camera. “What is intriguing is that they seem to be happening everywhere on the Sun all the time,” says Müller.

More info: https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/16/21326014/esa-nasa-solar-orbiter-images-flares-campfires-sun-close-distance

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Originally posted on Facebook and Twitter.

Boom

The biggest cosmic explosion on record has been detected – an event so powerful that it punched a dent the size of ⚡️15 Milky Ways⚡️ in the surrounding space. Even on a cosmic scale, that's a *big* dent!

Scientists' current working theory is that a massive plasma jet shooting out of a supermassive black hole in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster slammed into *something* and went boom [the technical term].

Thanks to Rebecca Hammond for the tip!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/27/biggest-cosmic-explosion-ever-detected-makes-huge-dent-in-space

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Originally posted on Facebook.

2 Earth-mass Planets Orbit Teegarden's Star a Mere 12.5 Light-years Away

Astronomers have found two Earth-sized and *potentially Earth-like* planets orbiting a star just 12.5 light years away. The planets were found using an instrument called CARMENES, which stands for Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exoearths with Near-infrared and optical Échelle Spectrographs). That's a mouthful, but it means an extremely sensitive detector mounted on a telescope at the Calar Alto observatory in Spain that looks for alien worlds like Earth orbiting very cool red dwarfs.

http://edit.syfy.com/syfywire/two-earth-sized-planets-found-in-a-nearby-stars-habitable-zone

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Originally posted on Twitter.

Event Horizon

Here you go, space nerds: the first ever image of the event horizon of a black hole! The supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87 is 54 million light-years from earth and has a mass of 6.5 billion suns.

The close-up image is from the Event Horizon Telescope, the wide-field view from the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Early analysis suggests the observations are consistent with Einstein's Theory of General Relativity (some were hoping they would conflict, because having to redo all the theories is kind of exciting).

Download a high-res version of the image here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lightsinthedark/47579266551/

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Originally posted on Facebook.

Galactic Center visualization

Guys, this video.

From the Chandra Observatory: “Want to take a trip to the center of our Milky Way? A new visualization using Chandra data & @NASAAmes supercomputer simulations provides viewers with an immersive, 360-degree view of the center of our Galaxy! “

YouTube link in case the embed doesn’t work for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBxW2_B9_Is .

Originally posted on Twitter.

The New Planet Hunters

Life probably exists beyond Earth. So how do we find it? With next-generation telescopes, tiny space probes, and more, scientists aim to search for life beyond our solar system—and make contact: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/03/extraterrestrial-life-probably-exists-how-do-we-search-for-aliens/

Excellent piece by National Geographic on the science and philosophy driving the next generation of planet-hunters. Courtesy of Carolyn McBride.

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Originally posted on Twitter.

It's a snowman!

NASA presents Ultima Thule: it's a snowman! ⛄️

Okay, it's actually a contact binary Kuiper Belt object (this means it was once two separate objects that gently merged over a long period of time). It's the most distant "world" and the first contact binary ever visited by a human spacecraft. It's a reddish color, similar to the red regions of Pluto that New Horizons imaged so beautifully, and is 21 miles/33 kms long.

Because scientists are not science fiction writers (well, almost never), they named the bottom, larger lobe "Ultima" and the smaller, top lobe "Thule." 🤨

Expect even better images and a lot more details in coming months; New Horizons recorded gigabytes of data, but the transmission rate is ssllllooowwwww.

 
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Originally posted on Facebook.