Based on observations by the European Souther Observatory’s GRAVITY instrument, this simulation shows gases swirling around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way — at just 30% the speed of light — “the first time material has been observed orbiting close to the point of no return.”
ESO/Gravity Consortium/L. Calçada
Perhaps the most important supernova of the modern era is SN 1987A, the closest supernova to Earth since the invention of the telescope. Scientists have been observing the explosion’s remnants since the 1987 event.
Scientists led by University of Toronto graduate student Yvette Cendes have presented a new report showing the 25 years of radio wave observations of the stellar corpse’s evolution from 1992 to 2017. You can watch those observations in the timelapse below.
After guiding us across the universe, astrophysicist and Space.com columnist Paul Sutter closes his basic astronomy series this week by looking at the arguments for and against the existence of quark stars.
In Episode 12 of the Facebook Watch series “Ask a Spaceman,” Sutter continues to explore the topic of these stars, finishing a miniseries that began with Episode 10 and Episode 11. Scientists haven’t observed quark stars yet, but the objects may exist. Such a star would be a leftover remnant of a star that exploded and would be packed even more densely than a neutron star; the quark star would have such strong gravity that fundamental particles in the core, such as protons and neutrons, would break down into their constituent parts, called quarks.
“Is there any astrophysical scenario at all that enables them [quark stars] to appear in our universe?” Sutter asks in the new episode. At first, he suggests there might be some things we categorized a dwarf stars that are more dense and massive than what physics would suggest. So, maybe we have seen quark stars, but we can’t tell the difference between a quark star and a neutron star — they look too much alike, Sutter says. [Supernova Fail: Giant Dying Star Collapses Straight into Black Hole].
Posted in cosmology
There is a monster at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy that eats stars. If it’s not a black hole, astronomers don’t know what else it could be: https://nyti.ms/2RrvazD
Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), Aalto University in Finland, and ETH Zurich have demonstrated a prototype device that uses quantum effects and machine learning to measure magnetic fields more accurately than its classical analogues. Such measurements are needed to seek mineral deposits, discover distant astronomical objects, diagnose brain disorders, and create better radars.
“When you study nature, whether you investigate the human brain or a supernova explosion, you always deal with some sort of electromagnetic signals,” explains Andrey Lebedev, a co-author of the paper describing the new device in npj Quantum Information. “So measuring magnetic fields is necessary across diverse areas of science and technology, and one would want to do this as accurately as possible.”
Scientists have previously suspected supermassive black holes can merge together, and have seen signs of these cosmic collisions on a smaller scale. Now new research backs up the hypothesis – and shows evidence that it could be happening all across the Universe.
Astronomers studying detailed radio maps of jet sources – powerful beams of ionised matter thrown out by black holes – have found a surprisingly high number of scenarios that matched patterns consistent with binary black holes (two black holes orbiting each other).
Jet stream radio map. (M. Krause/University of Hertfordshire)
