Thursday, March 27, 2014

ScienceDaily: Astronomy News

ScienceDaily: Astronomy News

The search for seeds of black holes

Posted: 26 Mar 2014 02:03 PM PDT

How do you grow a supermassive black hole that is a million to a billion times the mass of our sun? Astronomers do not know the answer, but a new study using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has turned up what might be the cosmic seeds from which a black hole will sprout. The results are helping scientists piece together the evolution of supermassive black holes -- powerful objects that dominate the hearts of all galaxies.

Solar system has a new most-distant member

Posted: 26 Mar 2014 12:37 PM PDT

The Solar System has a new most-distant member, bringing its outer frontier into focus. New work reports the discovery of a distant dwarf planet, called 2012 VP113, which was found beyond the known edge of the Solar System. This is likely one of thousands of distant objects that are thought to form the so-called inner Oort cloud. The work indicates the potential presence of an enormous planet, not yet seen, but possibly influencing the orbit of inner Oort cloud objects.

First ring system around asteroid: Chariklo found to have two rings

Posted: 26 Mar 2014 11:18 AM PDT

Astronomers have made the surprise discovery that the remote asteroid Chariklo is surrounded by two dense and narrow rings. This is the smallest object by far found to have rings and only the fifth body in the Solar System — after the much larger planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — to have this feature. The origin of these rings remains a mystery, but they may be the result of a collision that created a disc of debris.

Contaminated white dwarfs: Scientists solve riddle of celestial archaeology

Posted: 26 Mar 2014 06:22 AM PDT

A decades old space mystery has been solved by an international team of astronomers. The team put forward a new theory for how collapsed stars become polluted -- that points to the ominous fate that awaits planet Earth. Scientists investigated hot, young, white dwarfs -- the super-dense remains of Sun-like stars that ran out of fuel and collapsed to about the size of the Earth.

Closest milemarker supernova in generation observed

Posted: 25 Mar 2014 11:31 AM PDT

Researchers have intently studied the closest type Ia supernova discovered in a generation. The proximity to Earth could yield better understanding of this particular type of supernova that astronomers use to gauge distances in the universe and learn about its expansion history. Type Ia supernovae may begin as a carbon/oxygen white dwarf star that feeds off a neighboring normal star. Once the white dwarf star accretes enough material to reach a mass that's 1.4 times the size of our sun compressed into a ball about the size of Earth, it becomes unstable and explodes into a supernova in a process that still isn't fully understood.

Lick's new Automated Planet Finder: First robotic telescope for planet hunters

Posted: 25 Mar 2014 09:15 AM PDT

Lick Observatory's newest telescope, the Automated Planet Finder, has been operating robotically night after night on Mt. Hamilton since January, searching nearby stars for Earth-sized planets. Its technical performance has been outstanding, making it not only the first robotic planet-finding facility but also one of the most sensitive.

Plugging the hole in Hawking's black hole theory

Posted: 24 Mar 2014 11:54 AM PDT

Recently physicists have been poking holes again in Stephen Hawking's black hole theory -- including Hawking himself. Now another professor has jumped into the fray. He believes he has solved the decades-old information paradox debate in a groundbreaking new study.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)