Philip Plait's Blog, page 5
July 22, 2022
Blue blobs turn out to be orphan star clusters made of gas cast-off from galaxies
Astronomers have discovered a new kind of star system: Elongated and clumpy clusters of young, hot, blue stars, formed out of gas blown out of a galaxy as it rams its way through a galaxy cluster.
Everything about that sentence is awesome.
July 20, 2022
Big, bright, massive stars were more common when the Universe was young
One of the more irritating aspects of the Universe is that it changes over time.
July 19, 2022
Oh, the huge manatee: A natural particle accelerator quadrillions of kilometers long
So, a gaseous manatee 650 light-years across is shooting out extremely high-speed subatomic particles, and while we don’t know exactly why we do know what part they’re coming from.
Right, yeah, let’s back up a bit.
July 18, 2022
How is Canada like Mars? Lost Hammer Spring shows us
Earth and Mars are not terribly alike. Mars is incredibly cold, the air is incredibly thin, and the chemistry on the surface is incredibly different than what you’d find anywhere here.
Well, almost anywhere here.
July 15, 2022
Ultra-faint mini-galaxy found around the Milky Way’s sibling Andromeda
Astronomers have found an extremely faint and tiny galaxy in our cosmic neighbor’s back yard, and despite its diminutive nature it has big implications for our understanding of the Universe.
July 13, 2022
Ah, another lovely summer day where the sky is filled with puffy clouds of molten rock
Where I live in Colorado it’s pretty dry; we get less than 35 centimeters of rain per year (the U.S. average is more like 100). But hey: At least it’s not raining molten rocks!
July 12, 2022
July 11, 2022
This galaxy was already grown-up and spinning 13.3 billion years ago!
A galaxy so distant we see it practically at the edge of the observable Universe has been seen to act like a more fully grown galaxy: Observations show it’s rotating, spinning in a way similar to our own Milky Way, despite us seeing it as it was just 500 million years after the Big Bang!
July 8, 2022
Newly discovered star takes just four years to orbit Sgr A*, our local supermassive black hole
A star has been found with the shortest known orbit around Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy: It takes just four years to orbit the behemoth once.
July 6, 2022
BepiColombo’s second date with Mercury
On June 23, 2022, the joint European/Japanese Space Agencies’ mission to Mercury, BepiColombo, took a second swing past the solar system’s smallest and innermost planet, donating some of its orbital energy so the spacecraft can drop into an orbit closer in to the Sun.
