Who knew that magnetic fields could be so useful?
Category: space – Page 31
Gamma-ray bursts reveal largest structure in the universe is bigger and closer to Earth than we knew: ‘The jury is still out on what it all means.’
“Since the most distant extent of the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall is hard to verify, the most interesting finding is that the closest parts of it lie closer to us than had previously been identified,” Jon Hakkila of the University of Alabama in Huntsville told Space.com.
The Milky Way, our home galaxy, is part of a different supercluster called Laniakea, which, at 500 million light-years wide, is dwarfed by the Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall. In fact, the team says the true extent of the latter structure is currently undetermined.
“Our gamma-ray burst sample is not large enough to place better upper limits on the maximum size of the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall than we already have,” Hakkila said. “But it probably extends farther than the 10 billion light-years we had previously identified. It is larger than the size of most anything to which it might be compared.”
Strange planet found orbiting two stars at once… sideways
Polar planet 2M1510 (AB) b was found around a pair of brown dwarfs, orbiting at an angle perpendicular to the brown dwarfs’ orbital plane.
James Webb Space Telescope Spots the First Potential Signs of Life Outside our Solar System
After confirming the potential historic observation, the results were evaluated for several possible errors. The work was also analyzed independently. Each time, the team came back to the conclusion that they may have found the first potential signs of life outside our solar system.
“It was an incredible realisation seeing the results emerge and remain consistent throughout the extensive independent analyses and robustness tests,” said co-author Måns Holmberg, a researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Notably, the concentrations of either DMS or DMDS spotted by JWST were thousands of times higher than concentrations found on Earth. According to the Cambridge astronomers, detecting high levels of either of these chemicals on Hycean (ocean) worlds due to large amounts of biological activity was previously predicted.
PUNCH sees first light, prepares to study how the Sun creates our space weather
The NFI opened its eye to the sky first on April 14, imaging the Sun against the background stars of the constellation Pisces. The view here has been specifically filtered to bring out those background stars, which are otherwise blotted out by the bright zodiacal light generated by sunlight glinting off dust particles in the inner solar system. Also visible is a sliver of the Sun’s corona at center, reminiscent of the view during an annular solar eclipse.
You might notice several strange, streaky crescent-shaped artifacts at right. These arise from a small misalignment between the imager and the Sun, allowing stray sunlight to glint off the optics where it’s not quite blocked by the coronagraph. Engineers will use this and subsequent images to adjust the NFI’s position on the sky to bring it in full alignment with our star and eliminate stray light in future scientific data. Ultimately, that calibration will allow just one percent of the corona’s light through to the imager, providing clear views of faint structures and changes within the corona as the Sun spews material out into space.
Two days later, on April 16, the three WFIs got their first look at the Sun, taking in a broad view across the solar system. These instruments are designed to look at the region of space out to some 45° from the Sun’s position, roughly out to the distance of Earth’s orbit projected on the sky. Their fields of view don’t overlap, but instead form a trefoil pattern that rotates over time.
