Astronomers have discovered a white dwarf with unprecedented characteristics. It is simultaneously the smallest and most massive white dwarf ever observed by astronomers.
Astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility, which operates at the Palomar Observatory at California Institute of Technology, have discovered an extremely unusual white dwarf star with an extreme magnetic field nearly one billion times more powerful than the one of our Sun. The unique celestial object is both the smallest and most massive white dwarf discovered to date.
White dwarfs are dense, collapsed remnants of stars that were once about eight times more massive than the Sun. They form when stars literally shed their outer layers at the end of their life.
Recently, astronomers observing the sky received a shocking discovery. They found a large galaxy in a hitherto unexplored part of our galaxy. It materialized suddenly out of thin air.
So, how did the galaxy known as Crater 2 accomplish this, similar to a deer springing from cosmic bushes to look into our collective headlights? Although Crater 2 may appear to have suddenly appeared, he has been around the entire time. We just disregarded it.
However, now that we are aware of its existence, astronomers have uncovered a number of embarrassing characteristics. We cannot ascribe the galaxy’s relative obscurity to its size to begin with. Crater 2 is so enormous that it has already been identified as the fourth biggest galaxy inside the orbit of our galaxy. We also cannot blame its remoteness. Crater 2’s orbit around the Milky Way brings it directly overhead.
The James Webb Space Telescope found six massive galaxies that some scientists never thought could exist. The telescope is so powerful it might have just shattered scientific understanding of the universe. Theoretical Physicist and best selling author Dr. Michio Kaku talked to Gadi Schwartz about the groundbreaking report.
NASA announced Wednesday it has issued an award to The Boeing Company for the agency’s Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project, which seeks to inform a potential new generation of green single-aisle airliners.
Under a Funded Space Act Agreement, Boeing will work with NASA to build, test, and fly a full-scale demonstrator aircraft and validate technologies aimed at lowering emissions.
Over seven years, NASA will invest $425 million, while the company and its partners will contribute the remainder of the agreement funding, estimated at about $725 million. As part of the agreement, the agency also will contribute technical expertise and facilities.
A chunk from the fireball meteor that exploded on Feb. 15 has been recovered. Other fragments of the hefty space rock were likely showered across the nearby area.
West Virginia University physicists have made a breakthrough on an age-old limitation of the first law of thermodynamics.
Paul Cassak, professor and associate director of the Center for KINETIC Plasma Physics, and graduate research assistant Hasan Barbhuiya, both in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, are studying how energy gets converted in superheated plasmas in space.
Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, will revamp scientists’ understanding of how plasmas in space and laboratories get heated up, and may have a wide variety of further applications across physics and other sciences.
Bits of the stars are all around us, and in us, too. About half of the abundance of elements heavier than iron originates in some of the most violent explosions in the cosmos. As the universe churns and new stars and planets form out of old gas and dust, these elements eventually make their way to Earth and other worlds. After 3.7 billion years of evolution on our planet, humans and many other species have come to rely on them in our bodies and our lives. Iodine, for instance, is a component of hormones we need to control our brain development and regulate our metabolism. Ocean microplankton called Acantharea use the element strontium to create intricate mineral skeletons. Gallium is critical for the chips in our smartphones and our laptop screens. And the mirrors of the JWST are gilded with gold, an element useful for its unreactive nature and ability to reflect infrared light (not to mention its popularity in jewelry).
Scientists have long had a basic idea of how these elements come to be, but for many years the details were hazy and fiercely debated. That changed recently when astronomers observed, for the first time, heavy-element synthesis in action. The process, the evidence suggests, went something like this.
Eons ago a star more than 10 times as massive as our sun died in a spectacular explosion, giving birth to one of the strangest objects in the universe: a neutron star. This newborn star was a remnant of the stellar core compressed to extreme densities where matter can take forms we do not understand. The neutron star might have cooled forever in the depths of space, and that would have been the end of its story. But most massive stars live in binary systems with a twin, and the same fate that befell our first star eventually came for its partner, leaving two neutron stars circling each other. In a dance that went on for millennia, the stars spiraled in, slowly at first and then rapidly. As they drew closer together, tidal forces began to rip them apart, flinging neutron-rich matter into space at velocities approaching one-third the speed of light. At last the stars merged, sending ripples through spacetime and setting off cosmic fireworks across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
“These objects are way more massive than anyone expected,” said study coauthor Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, in a statement. “We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.”
The telescope observes the universe in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye, and is capable of detecting the faint light from ancient stars and galaxies. By peering into the distant universe, the observatory can essentially see back in time up to about 13.5 billion years ago. (Scientists have determined the universe is about 13.7 billion years old.)
The operations center for the telescope is in Baltimore City, at the Space Telescope Science Institute on the Johns Hopkins campus.
