The coronavirus pandemic provided a pair of astronomers the free time to travel back through archives of old 1997 data from W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauankea in Hawaii and old X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to unlock a mystery 10-billion light years away surrounding an extremely rare, bright, gravitationally-lensed quasar–the first discovered, spectacularly luminous Einstein ring, named MG 1131+0456, an early universe galaxy– obscured by a feeding black hole stirring up gas and dust, cloaking the ancient object.
Black Holes, strange galactic paradoxes for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order, have been described as “the seductive dragons of the universe.” NASA astronomers have actually filmed a flare-up from one of these seductive dragons and its companion star that make up a system called MAXI J1820+070, located in our galaxy about 10,000 light years from Earth ejecting hot material that has escaped the “event horizon” into space at close to the speed of light. The event, with the northern jet is moving at 60% the speed of light, while the southern one is traveling at an impossible-sounding 160% of light speed, was captured in a new movie from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Two of our planet’s leading astrophysicists say it’s time to get serious about aliens: Adam Frank of the University of Rochester and Andrew Siemion, director of the U of California Berkeley SETI Research Center, who wrote in an email that “I suspect there are other intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way – we just need to look!” But, asks Frank, will they, or have they, survived their Anthropocene bottleneck?
“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
ESPRESSO, the successor to HARPS, one of most productive and precise planet hunters, “has made it possible to measure the mass of the planet with a precision of over one-tenth of the mass of Earth. It’s completely unheard of,” says Michel Mayor, mission architect. Mayor is winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2019 “for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos.”
“Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
In January of 2019, astronomers at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii and the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy’s ATLAS twin telescopes, reported evidence of the exact moment a star collapsed to form a compact object, such as a black hole or neutron star. They dubbed the object “The Cow”, shown in the image above, just visible as one of two bright spots in the lower right quadrant of the spiral galaxy classified as CGCG 137-068. The objects incredibly bright glow –10 to 100 times brighter than a typical supernova–was caused by stellar debris, swirling around its event horizon.
