Philip Plait's Blog, page 34

The red hypergiant VY CMa is bigger than Betelgeuse and belching out vast clouds of dust

When it comes to star sizes, there are dwarfs, there are giants, and there are supergiants.

And then there are hypergiants.

These are very massive stars that live fast, die young, and go out with an enormous bang: Supernovae. And now we know that before they go they also suffer from coughing fits: epic eruptions of clouds of dust that scream away at high speed, causing the star to change rapidly and profoundly in brightness.

If that sounds familiar, yeah, keep Betelgeuse in mind. We'll get ba...

Turns out, getting slammed by a supernova can make you collapse. If you're a cometary globule.

There is a type of cloud in space called a cometary globule — a blob of dense gas and dust, usually a light year or so across, with a long tail of material that can stream for several light years.

They're usually what are called a secondary star forming feature. If you have some huge gas cloud dozens of light years across, it can form thousands of stars, some of which are massive and terribly luminous. A dense clot of gas and dust nearby will face an onslaught of high-energy ultraviolet light f...

Listening for techno-savvy aliens: a search of 31 nearby Sun-like stars

If technologically advanced aliens wanted to talk to us, how would they do it?

The easiest way is probably using radio waves. They're easy to make (we've been doing it since the 19th century) and easy to detect (the first radio telescope was built in the 1930s). They move at the speed of light, can be encoded with lots of information — that's how radio stations work, after all ­— and can be detected for thousands of light years, a pretty big chunk of the Milky Way galaxy.

The hard part is know...

The Sun is surrounded by millions of binary stars!

The Sun swings around its galactic orbit alone, a solo voyage through space.

But for half the stars in the Milky Way that's not the case. They exist with a companion, a duo traveling the cosmos together. Bound by gravity, these binary stars come in a bewildering variety of characteristics and in many ways are the key to understanding the cosmos.

And now we know there are well over a million of them within about 3,000 light years of the Sun.

That's due to the Gaia observatory and a dedicated t...

Deep sea bacteria spurn the Sun, instead using Earth's internal heat for photosynthesis

Deep sea bacteria found that use the glow of Earth's internal heat for photosynthesis

Last week, Science Twitter was all abuzz about a paper that came out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about a bacterium found at the ocean floor off the coast of Mexico. It was first tweeted by planetary scientist Michael Malaska:

It took me a second to take this in, but when I grokked it I gasped. I hadn't heard of anything quite like this (despite the paper being published in 2005), ...

A comet makes a pit stop near Jupiter but will eventually get flung into interstellar space

In June 2019, the automated survey ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) found a new object moving against the background stars. Initially called 2019 LD2, it was thought to be an asteroid orbiting the Sun out near Jupiter. However, an amateur astronomer noticed it appeared to be fuzzy, not point-like, which means it was more like a comet: Icy material on the surface turning into a gas as it's warmed by the Sun.

Checking archived images, astronomers determined it had been "activ...

Sunset on Mars

It's funny what photographs from a space mission impact you the most.

The day after NASA landed the Perseverance Mars rover, they released spectacular images of the landing, including the rover dangling down from the descent stage (or “sky crane”), close-ups of the Martian ground, and more. I was pretty impressed by these and certainly relieved to know things were working well.

Then a few days later they released jaw-droppingly incredible video of the descent, including shots of the parachute ...

Is there an angry baby neutron star in the middle of Supernova 1987A?

Where the heck is the neutron star that should be in the middle of the debris from Supernova 1987A?

It's one of the bigger mysteries of modern astronomical times. On the night of February 23/24, 1987 (essentially 34 years ago today, so happy anniversary!) the light from an exploding star reached Earth. Dubbed Supernova 1987A, it came from the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way just 160,000 light years away. That's close enough that the supernova was visible to the naked...

Staring down the throat of an ancient, *extremely* distant black hole

Using one of the largest optical light telescopes in the world, astronomers have identified one of the rarest beasts in the Universe: An extremely distant type of galaxy called a BL Lac object, a galaxy's supermassive black hole spewing out a beam of energy so powerful it dwarfs the light of the entire galaxy it comes from.

While over a hundred BL Lac objects are known, this is the first one every seen at this incredible distance — the light we see from it has traveled 12 billion years to get t...

Watch groundbreaking video from the Mars Perseverance landing!

Last week, on Feb. 18, 2021, NASA landed Perseverance on Mars, the most sophisticated rover ever sent to the Red Planet.

The next day, the agency released a handful of amazing images, including one taken from the rocket-powered sky crane that was hovering over the ground as it lowered the rover to the surface via cables. The crane has downward-facing cameras that caught the incredible shot.

That camera didn't just take that one image. It took video. Yeah, prepare yourself. Make this full scree...