Scientists Spot Yet Another Unexplained Ring-Shaped Radio Structure In Space. ASKAP images of the new ORC.
Image: Koribalski et al. 2021 ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. Scientists have spotted yet another bizarre, gigantic, and unexplained circle-shaped radio structure in outer space, a discovery that contributes to “exciting times in astronomy,” reports a new study. The bubble is the latest example of an Odd Radio Circle (ORC), an aptly named type of spectral ring that debuted in a 2020 paper led by Western Sydney University astrophysicist Ray Norris. Norris and his colleagues detected four of these enormous circles eerily glowing in faint radio wavelengths far beyond our galaxy.
Now, scientists led by Bärbel Koribalski, a research scientist at CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility, have discovered a fifth ORC that appears to span about one million light years. Because ORCs are so faint, it’s difficult to judge exactly how far they are from Earth, which complicates estimates of their size. Half the matter in the universe was missing — we found it hiding in the cosmos. This Is What the Entire Known Universe Looks Like in a Single Image. Budassi was able to do this by collecting maps, photographs, and data from Princeton researchers and NASA.
In 2005, a team of Princeton researchers published a collection of logarithmic maps of the Universe in Astrophysical Journal (you can see them here). While they look more like charts than they do rich photographs, the researchers were able to accurately "display the entire range of astronomical scales from the Earth's neighborhood to the cosmic microwave background" to a logarithmic scale. Using this information, Budassi put together "Photoshop using images from NASA and some textures created [on] my own. " Scientists discover ancient solar system hosting five Earth-sized planets.
Artist's impression of the ancient solar system (Image: Tiago Campante/Peter Devine)
Of black holes, naked singularities, and quantum gravity. Modern science has introduced us to many strange ideas on the universe, but one of the strangest is the ultimate fate of massive stars in the Universe that reached the end of their life cycles.
Spooky alignment of quasar axes across billions of light-years with large-scale structure. This artist’s impression shows schematically the mysterious alignments between the spin axes of quasars and the large-scale structures that they inhabit that observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope have revealed.
These alignments are over billions of light-years and are the largest known in the Universe. The large-scale structure is shown in blue and quasars are marked in white with the rotation axes of their black holes indicated with a line around them. This picture is for illustration only and does not depict the real distribution of galaxies and quasars. Vanishing dark matter points to a dark future for our Universe. A study conducted at the University of Rome and the University of Portsmouth is suggesting that the amount of dark matter in the cosmos, the catalyst that facilitates the creation of new stars and galaxies, is decreasing as it interacts with dark energy.
If this is true it would mean that, as time passes, the Universe could be destined to end up a desolate and nearly featureless place (even more so than it already is). Since the days of Newton, we've known that gravity attracts ordinary matter closer together. Applied to the vastness of space, this means that the stars and galaxies in the Universe, though they are still traveling further and further apart in the wake of the Big Bang, should gradually slow down, come to a stop and eventually start collapsing toward each other. However, over the past few months, several cosmological surveys have cast doubts on the validity of this model. Different theories have been advanced to resolve these discrepancies. Prof. Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time in 4,000 Years of Mapping the Universe.
Long before Galileo pioneered the telescope, antagonizing the church and unleashing a “hummingbird effect” of innovation, humanity had been busy cataloging the heavens through millennia of imaginative speculative maps of the cosmos.
We have always sought to make visible the invisible forces we long to understand, the mercy and miracle of existence, and nothing beckons to us with more intense allure than the majesty and mystery of the universe. Four millennia of that mesmerism-made-visible is what journalist, photographer, and astrovisualization scholar Michael Benson explores with great dedication and discernment in Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time (public library) — a pictorial catalog of our quest to order the cosmos and grasp our place in it, a sensemaking process defined by what Benson aptly calls our “gradually dawning, forever incomplete situational awareness.” Supermassive Black Hole Discovered Inside Tiny Dwarf Galaxy. Feel Like Having Your Teeny-Little Mind Blown? Just Start Watching. It Won't Take Long. What Will First Photos of Black Holes Look Like? A giant black hole is thought to lurk at the center of the Milky Way, but it has never been directly seen.
Now astronomers have predicted what the first pictures of this black hole will look like when taken with technology soon to be available. In particular, researchers have found that pictures of a black hole ― or, more precisely, the boundaries around them ― will take a crescent form, rather than the blobby shape that is often predicted. By modeling what these pictures will look like, scientists say they are preparing to interpret the photos that will become available from telescopes currently under construction.
"No one has been able to image a black hole," said University of California, Berkeley student Ayman Bin Kamruddin, who presented a poster on the research last week in Long Beach, Calif., at the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society. "So far it's been impossible because they're too small in the sky. Black Hole Quiz: How Well Do You Know Nature's Weir... Astronomers discover how early planets fuel the growth of their own stars. Observations made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile, which is scheduled for completion this year, have solved a longstanding mystery in solar system formation.
They showed how protoplanets forming around a young star can use their own gravitational pull to slingshot matter in the direction of their host star, fueling its growth. When a new star is formed, the surrounding clouds of gas and dust, which amount to a very large mass, slowly begin to orbit it creating a flat disk. Best Space Pictures of the Week - Dec. 15, 2012. Hercules A: Huge black hole emits two beams of matter into space. Black holes may be the most ironic objects in the Universe.
They are objects with gravity so fierce that if you venture too close, literally no force in the Universe can prevent you from falling in. Not even light can escape, which is why we call them what we do. Yet they also power the brightest objects in the Universe. As matter falls in, it forms a disk just outside the black hole that gets infernally hot, blasting out radiation bright enough that it can be seen across the Universe. Not only that, due to forces in the disk like friction and magnetism ramped up to mind-numbing intensities, this disk can focus and blast out two incredibly powerful beams of matter and energy which scream out into space, forming structures both vast and beautiful … like the ones seen in the galaxy Hercules A: Seriously, grab the embiggened version of that.
And it’s hungry. Image credit: A. Your Help Needed to Study Andromeda Galaxy. A group of astronomers is inviting the public to join their star-hunting team in a search of the bright Andromeda Galaxy. The project aims to identify star clusters in our neighboring galaxy, also known as M31. All it takes to find the clusters in Andromeda is an Internet-enabled computer and a desire to help, said Anil Seth, the team's lead investigator. "No special training is required," he said. The so-called "Andromeda Project," which began Wednesday (Dec. 5), will generate the largest sample of clusters from a single spiral galaxy when it is completed.
Scientists expect the project could identify 2,500 new star clusters when finished. Monster Black Hole Is Biggest Ever Found. Astronomers have discovered what may be the most massive black hole ever known in a small galaxy about 250 million light-years from Earth, scientists say. The supermassive black hole has a mass equivalent to 17 billion suns and is located inside the galaxy NGC 1277 in the constellation Perseus.
It makes up about 14 percent of its host galaxy's mass, compared with the 0.1 percent a normal black hole would represent, scientists said. Glimpse at early universe finds expansion slowdown. Farthest Known Galaxy in the Universe Discovered. A new celestial wonder has stolen the title of most distant object ever seen in the universe, astronomers report. The new record holder is the galaxy MACS0647-JD, which is about 13.3 billion light-years away. The universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old, so this galaxy's light has been traveling toward us for almost the whole history of space and time. The Topsy-Turvy Galaxy NGC 1313.
Massive Planets Might Escape Stellar Engulfment Largely Undiminished. Artist's conception of the planets orbiting KIC 05807616. Credit: S. Charpinet Having your planet swallowed by a star is no fun. But some planets might be able to run the astrophysical gauntlet and make it through more or less intact. When a star comparable to or somewhat larger than the sun enters advanced age, it swells up into a red giant, expanding far beyond its original radius. Mercury, Venus and Earth are all too small to endure engulfment, and will quickly spiral in toward the sun due to drag forces from the surrounding stellar atmosphere. New telescope array reveals death spiral of old star. As stars like our Sun die, they swell to a huge size and shed much of the gas in their outer layers. A refutation of the history channel show Ancient Aliens. Dark Energy Camera captures its first images. Australian study backs major assumption of cosmology. In mankind's attempts to gain some understanding of this marvelous place in which we live, we have slowly come to accept some principles to help guide our search.
One such principle is that the Universe, on a large enough scale, is homogeneous, meaning that one part looks pretty much like another. Recent studies by a group of Australian researchers have established that, on sizes greater than about 250 million light years (Mly), the Universe is indeed statistically homogeneous, thereby reinforcing this cosmological principle. The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog. Does Triton Have a Subsurface Ocean? Triton was discovered in 1846 by the British astronomer William Lassell, but much about Neptune’s largest moon still remains a mystery. NASA's Dawn probe sets its sights on dwarf planet Ceres. After 14 months spent collecting data on the asteroid Vesta, Dawn will soon start its journey toward the dwarf planet Ceres (Image: JPL/NASA) Image Gallery (6 images)
Black Holes: Millions Revealed By NASA's WISE Space Telescope. Radiation Belt Probes Mission: NASA Launches Twin Satellites On Quest To Protect Earth From Solar Outbursts. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Newly discovered planetary system alters our view of planet formation. The discovery of Kepler-47 shows that binary stars can not only house single planets, but planetary systems too. (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T.Pyle) Almost a year ago, scientists discovered a planet which totally changed our view of planet formation. The planet orbited not just one but two stars. Stunning Galaxy Photos From NASA's WISE Telescope.