Philip Plait's Blog, page 7

This one weird trick allows Hubble to make a huge infrared image of the sky

Astronomers employed a relatively new technique to create a highly detailed infrared mosaic of a patch of sky an impressive six times larger than the full Moon. This is the largest infrared field ever observed by Hubble, and likely won’t even be surpassed by JWST.

It’s getting harder for life in Venus’ atmosphere to exist

“Life, uh… finds a way.”

Except maybe not in the clouds of Venus.

Sure, our sister planet makes Dante’s vision of Hell look like a tropical paradise. I mean, a greenhouse-driven surface temperature hot enough to melt lead, a crushing atmospheric pressure equal to being a kilometer under the ocean, and clouds made of sulfuric acid; it’s not clear to me what would kill you first if you tried to take a stroll on Venus but I’m very sure it wouldn’t take long.

Hubble spies what may be a rogue black hole just 5,000 light years away

Using a combination of huge ground-based telescopic surveys and the keen vision of Hubble Space Telescope, two teams of astronomers have found what may be — may be — a rogue black hole zipping through space about 5,000 light years from Earth. 

The science of this is cool, and even more fun is that the two teams disagree with each other over some very fundamental aspects of this. So it’s not clear what’s happening here.

JWST mirror hit by micrometeoroid, but NASA says damage is minimal

Don’t panic! But sometime between May 23 and 25, 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope was hit by a micrometeoroid, a tiny piece of rock that came off a comet or asteroid. The telescope sustained a small bit of damage to one mirror segment, but engineers say it’s fine and the observatory is still well above its mission performance requirements.

OK, phew. 

What creates the aurora on Mars?

There are three things you need to create an aurora on a planet: 1) A lot of charged subatomic particles moving rapidly, like those continuously blown away from the Sun in its solar wind; 2) a magnetic field, which funnels the particles downward and concentrates them; and 3) an atmosphere filled with fun atoms and molecules that glow brilliantly when struck by a fast moving charged subatomic particle funneled by a magnetic field.

Astronomers find a treasure trove of black holes in small galaxies

We know that essentially all big galaxies, like our own Milky Way, have supermassive black holes in their centers. We also strongly suspect these enormous monsters with millions or billions of times the Sun’s mass may have grown from smaller “seed” black holes called intermediate-mass black holes — or IMBHs — which have thousands to hundreds of thousands of solar masses.

Are supermassive black holes killing their host galaxies?

A new study using archived astronomical observations across the electromagnetic spectrum has come to a rather startling and somewhat unsettling conclusion: Supermassive black holes in the centers of many galaxies may have suppressed star formation early on after those galaxies formed, effectively killing them.

The secret of the bulge: A gorgeous partially digested galaxy in the Milky Way’s core

There are times I just want to post a pretty astronomical image, something that delights the eyes and gives a sense of wonder about the sky.

The problem with this — or “problem,” I should say — is that there’s no such thing as just a pretty picture. In every case, they wind up leading to some interesting cosmic insight. 

But this time it’s more. This particular pretty picture may hold the key to how one of the critical components of our Milky Way galaxy formed.

So first, the eye candy:

Meteorite bears the imprint of a supernova from before the solar system was born

A very strange meteorite found in western Egypt in 1996 may have tiny pieces of the debris from a supernova in it, and not just any supernova but one created by the explosion of a white dwarf, the remnant core of a once Sun-like star.

A weird four-star system may lead the way to catastrophic supernovae

About 460 light-years from Earth lies the small but lovely star cluster IC 2391. It only has about 250 stars in it, but one of them is special… because it’s actually four stars, a quaternary system. Astronomers studying this system have now shown that complicated interactions between the stars will lead to quite the life for them, and maybe — maybe — quite the death.