From NASA: At 6:07 a.m. EDT on Aug. 20, 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe successfully completed its first trajectory correction maneuver (known as TCM-1), achieving a near-perfect firing of its propulsion system and putting the spacecraft on course to “touch” the Sun. This maneuver sets up the orbital geometry that will allow Parker Solar Probe Read More
Category: The Stars
Astronomers Confirm Orbital Details of TRAPPIST-1’s Least Understood Planet
cientists using NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope identified a regular pattern in the orbits of the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system that confirmed suspected details about the orbit of its outermost and least understood planet, TRAPPIST-1h. TRAPPIST-1 is only eight percent the mass of our sun, making it a cooler and less luminous star. It’s home Read More
X-ray Telescopes Find Evidence for Wandering Black Hole
Astronomers have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory to discover an extremely luminous, variable X-ray source located outside the center of its parent galaxy. This peculiar object could be a wandering black hole that came from a small galaxy falling into a larger one. Astronomers think that supermassive black holes, with Read More
Studies Find Echoes of Black Holes Eating Stars
Supermassive black holes, with their immense gravitational pull, are notoriously good at clearing out their immediate surroundings by eating nearby objects. When a star passes within a certain distance of a black hole, the stellar material gets stretched and compressed — or “spaghettified” — as the black hole swallows it. A black hole destroying a Read More
Hubble Reveals Observable Universe Contains 10 Times More Galaxies Than Previously Thought
The universe suddenly looks a lot more crowded, thanks to a deep-sky census assembled from surveys taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories. Astronomers came to the surprising conclusion that there are at least 10 times more galaxies in the observable universe than previously thought. The results have clear implications for galaxy formation, Read More
Hubble Peers into the Storm
This shot from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a maelstrom of glowing gas and dark dust within one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). This stormy scene shows a stellar nursery known as N159, an HII region over 150 light-years across. N159 contains many hot young stars. These stars Read More
Young Magnetar Likely the Slowest Pulsar Ever Detected
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other X-ray observatories, astronomers have found evidence for what is likely one of the most extreme pulsars, or rotating neutron stars, ever detected. The source exhibits properties of a highly magnetized neutron star, or magnetar, yet its deduced spin period is thousands of times longer than any pulsar ever Read More
Vulcan may not be real, but Spock’s home system is
From NASA: The fictional planet Vulcan is set in the real star system 40 Eridani. 40 Eridani is a trinary star system made up of three dwarf stars. The orange and blue X’s in the visualization above indicate the barycenters, or the gravitational centers around which the stars orbit. Click 40 Eridani B or 40 Read More