“After ruling out a range of potential experimental errors, we started to suspect that the interaction between the white dwarf and neutron star was not as simple as had been assumed to date,” concluded Willem van Straten, an astronomer at the Auckland University of Technology, about the detection of Lense-Thirring precession. This relativistic effect first hypothesized a century ago alters the orbit of two compact massive objects in a binary star system. The results of the twenty-year study confirm a prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. When a massive object rotates, general relativity predicts that it pulls the surrounding spacetime around with it, a phenomenon known as frame-dragging.
In the nearby Whirlpool galaxy and its companion galaxy, M51b, two supermassive black holes heat up and devour surrounding material. These two monsters should be the most luminous X-ray sources in sight, but a new study using observations from NASA’s NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) mission shows that a much smaller object is competing with the two behemoths.
“We know from theory that black holes and neutron stars form when a star dies, but we’ve never seen them right after they are born. Never!” said Raffaella Margutti, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University about the mysterious bright object that has baffled astronomers dubbed ‘The Cow’. “A ‘lightbulb’ was sitting deep inside the ejecta of the explosion. It would have been hard to see this in a normal stellar explosion. But The Cow had very little ejecta mass, which allowed us to view the central engine’s radiation directly.”
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you daily news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
Rarest Thing Ever Detected –“One Trillion Times Age of the Universe” 
The Most Terrifying Science-Fiction Series to Misinterpreting JWST Alien Planet Signals (The Galaxy Report)
Pale Yellow Dots to Exoplanet Discovery Shows What Earth Will Be Like in Five Billion Years (Planet Earth Report)
The Missing Galaxy: “Milky Way’s Long-Lost Companion We Didn’t Know Existed”
Super-Earths More Common and Habitable Than Earth Itself (The Galaxy Report)
Our ‘Glowing’ Universe: “An Eye-Opening Surprise” (Weekend Feature)
Chinese Fossil Discovery Rewrites History of Life to World’s Largest Organism Has Stopped Growing (Planet Earth Report Weekend)
Milky Way’s Graveyard of Dead Stars to Math Proof Alien Life Exists? (The Galaxy Report)
Mystery of Jupiter’s Metallic Oceans and Enormous Magnetic FieldEarth is ‘Well-Hidden’ from Extraterrestrial Civilizations Hunting for Habitable Planets (The Galaxy Report)
