In 2017, an international group of astronomers and physicists excitedly reported the first simultaneous detection of light and gravitational waves from the same source–a merger of two neutron stars. In the world of astrophysics, Aug. 17, 2017, was a red-letter day. “This is a game-changer for astrophysics,” said UC Santa Barbara faculty member Andy Howell, who leads the supernova group at the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO). “A hundred years after Einstein theorized gravitational waves, we’ve seen them and traced them back to their source to find an explosion with new physics of the kind we’ve only dreamed about.”
Black holes are usually formed in the explosive deaths of massive stars. In dense environments like globular clusters and the cores of massive galaxies, several black holes can merge together, forming an even more massive black hole. In addition, black holes at the centers of galaxies can accrete infalling gas, gaining in mass and size. If this process continues for billions of years, the black hole can become a supermassive black hole, like the one located at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, weighing in at four million times the mass of the sun.
“Seeing this star is really amazing as we know it must have formed in the galactic center, a place very different to our local environment. It is a visitor from a strange land,” said NASA Hubble Fellow Ting Li with the Carnegie Observatories and Princeton University, about the discovery of the ultrafast star, S5-HVS1 in 2019, traveling at a blistering 6 million km/h. The doomed star was slingshotted by the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way five million years ago at the dawn of the human species.
With stories ranging from the quest for the origin of the universe to the strange cloud in the Outer Solar System to the 60-year extraterrestrial SETI silence of our Milky Way Galaxy, this week’s “Galaxy Report” brings you news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and adds a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
In 2019, two mysterious globular structures were spotted in the galaxy NGC 3079, located 67 million light years from Earth. Astronomers unveiled nuclear “super bubbles” thousands of light years wide that act like particle accelerators 100 times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider, and are around 2,000 times longer, on average, than our solar system.
Radio signals from two NASA probes, Cassini at Saturn (above) and Juno at Jupiter, allowed researchers to pierce the swirling clouds that hide the deep interiors of Jupiter and Saturn, where crushing pressure transforms matter into states unknown on Earth –“the two planets are more complex than we thought,” said Ravit Helled, a planetary scientist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. “Giant planets are not simple balls of hydrogen and helium.”
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
The Galaxy Report is our new daily email bringing you news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and adds a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
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Triple-Star System of Eta Carinae – Five Million Times Brighter than Our Sun
Evolution May Be a Cosmic Universal to the New Search for Alien Tech (The Galaxy Report)
Stephen Hawking’s Warning –“Treating AI as Science Fiction Would Potentially Be Our Worst Mistake Ever”
The Missing ‘Ghost’ in the Machine –Why Massive Black Holes are Not Found in Observatory DataLast Week’s Top 5 Space & Science Headlines –The Quasar Enigma to Life is Electric
Rise of Oxygen –The Evolutionary Moment that Shaped Our Habitable Planet
Scientists Warn of Extraterrestrial Microbial Invasion to How Dangerous is COVID Mutant B.1.1.529 (Planet Earth Report)
“Life is Electric” –NASA Explores Origins of Life on Earth & Beyond (Holiday-Weekend Feature)
Humans Could Be the Dominant Species in the Universe to Albert Einstein’s Forgotten Idea (The Galaxy Report –Holiday Feature)
“Shaking the Fabric of Spacetime” –Recreating Quark Matter of the Big Bang
