Philip Plait's Blog, page 31

A fleet of telescopes on and above Earth zooms in on M87’s enormous black hole

Fifty-five million light years from Earth lies a monster.

It's a supermassive black hole, one with the mass equivalent of 6.5 billion Suns. It may be hiding itself among the stars of the huge elliptical galaxy M87, but it does a bad job of it. It's right in the center of the galaxy, the first place we'd look. Also, as it feeds, it blasts out radiation from the material falling into it, making it bright and obvious.

And it's also roaring. Two long jets of material are screaming away from it at ...

A dead comet that doesn't chafe

In space, no one can hear you chafe.

You didn't know that? Well then, why else would dead comets be covered in talcum powder?

Or at least it appears that one dead comet may have a layer of talcum-powder-like grains on its surface, presumably so it can stay comfortable despite the sticky heat of being out in the Sun all the time.

The comet in question is called P/2016 BA14 (PANSTARRS)*. Discovered in 2016, it was initially thought to be an asteroid, but then very weak cometary activity was see...

If these brown dwarfs spun much faster they'd tear themselves apart

Astronomers have found three brown dwarfs — objects more massive than planets but less so than stars — that are the most rapidly rotating of any known. These beasts spin so dizzyingly fast they rotate about once per hour.

That's phenomenal. Think of it this way: They are about the same size as Jupiter, but that giant planet in our solar system spins once every ten hours. These objects spin ten times faster.

Or how about this: Standing on Earth's equator you'd experience a sideways velocity due...

A new way to find gigantic black holes paired up at the dawn of the Universe

Using what's really a pretty dang clever new technique, astronomers have discovered what appear to be two double-quasars (and possibly a third pair as well) billions of light years from Earth. This may help constrain how many of these ferocious objects existed when the Universe was young.

A quasar is a kind of active galaxy, a galaxy that has an actively feeding supermassive black hole in its center. As I've described before (in an article about binary quasars):

All big galaxies, and many smal...

Is it dusty in here or is it just the 14 tons of meteorite dust that settles to Earth every day?

How much dust from comets and asteroids do you think finds its way to our fair planet and falls to the ground every year?

Go ahead, guess. A ton? Ten tons?

New research looking at micrometeorites — literally microscopic bits of meteorites, particles of rocks and metals from space that fall to Earth — shows that about 5,200 tons of this cosmic debris settles onto the ground every year. 5.2 million kilos per annum, or about 14 tons per day. At least. That's equivalent to the mass of a garbage tr...

Did a giant impact and a crashing submoon form the bizarre ridge around Iapetus?

Of all the weird things we've seen in our solar system — and it's a long list — I think near the top would be the bizarre and very large ridge of mountains stretching all the way around Saturn's moon Iapetus.

And I do mean bizarre. It wraps around the moon's equator, is nearly continuous, and is punctuated by individual peaks some of which are 20 kilometers high! That's over twice as tall as Mt. Everest. And it's wide, too, in some places about 200 kilometers across. Images of the ridge from th...

Wobbling muons hint strongly at the existence of bizarre new physics

Muons aren't spinning the way the best physics model predicts. Why not? It may be due to completely unknown subatomic particles popping into and out of existence in the quantum foam.

This isn't some sort of sci-fi technobabble. This is from quite real experimental results, and may very well be the Universe telling us we don't yet understand everything about it.

These extremely interesting and possibly game-changing results come from Fermilab, a high-energy particle accelerator laboratory in Il...

The galaxy eats its own: The head of Taurus is being shredded by the Milky Way

If you go outside in late winter/early spring and look just to the right of Orion (for northern hemisphere observers), you'll see a V of brightish stars marking the head of Taurus the Bull. The bulk of these stars are actually part of a physical stellar cluster called the Hyades*, and at about 145 light years away it's the closest such cluster to Earth.

For now. The cluster is dissolving over time, the stars inside it slowly drifting away. This has been known for some time, and many stars in th...

A half million years ago, Antarctica was hit by a blowtorch from space

Sometime a bit less than a half million years ago, a decent-sized asteroid impacted over Antarctica. But it didn't hit the ground. Instead, it vaporized high above Earth's surface and created a white-hot blowtorch of superheated gas that touched down on the ice and released energies similar to that of a nuclear bomb.

The evidence for such a big event is surprisingly subtle: Scientists have found tiny spheres of rock and iron on the top of a mountain in coastal Antarctica. They're small, not muc...

Mars copter Ingenuity prepares to take the first powered flight on another world

Over Easter weekend, the Mars Perseverance rover dropped its own egg: It deployed the Ingenuity helicopter, a drone that will attempt the first powered atmospheric flight on another planet.

Oh yeah. The future is here.

The copter is called Ingenuity, and it's a technology testbed, which means it's designed to test out various engineering hardware components as opposed to doing scientific research.

It's quite small, standing about half a meter high and with a mass of just 1.8 kilograms (so i...