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Category: space – Page 387

A team of 86 scientists from 13 countries recently carried out extensive high-time resolution optical monitoring of a distant active galaxy, BL Lacertae (BL Lac). Mike Joner, BYU research professor of physics and astronomy, was one of the astronomers contributing to the project.

Dr. Joner and BYU undergraduate student Gilvan Apolonio secured over 200 observations of the galaxy using the 0.9-meter reflecting at the BYU West Mountain Observatory. Their measurements were combined with observations made by other scientists around the world in a collaboration known as the Whole Earth Blazar Telescope (WEBT). The WEBT network makes it possible to monitor objects around the clock from different locations during times of high variability.

Using the WEBT observations made in the summer of 2020, astronomers discovered surprisingly rapid oscillations of brightness in the central jet of the galaxy BL Lac. The scientists attribute these cycles of brightness change to twists in the jet’s magnetic field. Their study was recently published in Nature.

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This article was originally published at The Conversation. (opens in new tab) The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

A glowing blob known as “the cocoon,” which appears to be inside one of the enormous gamma-ray emanations from the center of our galaxy dubbed the “Fermi bubbles,” has puzzled astronomers since it was discovered in 2012.

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A NASA X-ray spacecraft delivers new dimensions to the first images from the Webb telescope.

Images touch people in a way that words cannot. The unprecedented clarity of the Webb telescope’s first scientific images dazzled people across the world when they became public on July 12, 2022. Three months later, the team working on NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory released new images of the same target objects: Stephan’s Quintet, galaxy cluster SMACS 0723.3–7327, and the “Cosmic Cliffs” of the Carina Nebula. An image that Webb later took of the Cartwheel Galaxy also got an update. All these visuals add more “turbulent” information about these structures and give the originals a whole new dimension.

The full set of images is available here. To appreciate the new data, Inverse set some of them side by side with their corresponding original image.

Chandra launched in 1999 and is named after Indian-American Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. The new images became public the same day the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, which highlighted achievements in quantum entanglement, were announced, coincidentally.

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A fluid dynamics theory that violates causality would always generate paradoxical instabilities—a result that could guide the search for a theory for relativistic fluids.

The theory of fluid dynamics has been successful in many areas of fundamental and applied sciences, describing fluids from dilute gases, such as air, to liquids, such as water. For most nonrelativistic fluids, the theory takes the form of the celebrated Navier-Stokes equation. However, fundamental problems arise when extending these equations to relativistic fluids. Such extensions typically imply paradoxes—for instance, thermodynamic states of the systems can appear stable or unstable to observers in different frames of reference. These problems hinder the description of the dynamics of important fluid systems, such as neutron-rich matter in neutron star mergers or the quark-gluon plasma produced in heavy-ion collisions.

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Peering incredibly far back into time, astronomers found a group of much older stars than they expected.

Astronomers made a new discovery in the very first full-color image released from the James Webb Space Telescope.

The first full-color James Webb image, revealed by President Joe Biden on July 11, shows a vast network of galaxies and peers billions of years into the past. Within that network, astronomers believe they have identified the most distant globular clusters ever identified, as per a BBC report.

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, and stsci

The discovery is indicative not only of the new insight James Webb is yet to reveal but also of the treasure trove of information stored in every image it has already released.

Continue reading “Astronomers may have found some of the very earliest stars thanks to James Webb” | >

The helicopter has been scouting the red planet for over a year.

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter went from being a proof of concept for off-world flight to becoming a fully-fledged aerial scout for NASA’s Perseverance mission.

The helicopter wasn’t alone, as per a blog post from NASA. Images from the chopper show a flowing debris object, resembling a piece of a plastic bag, for part of its journey.

NASA

The helicopter was initially only expected to fly about five times — proving humans could perform a controlled flight in Mars’ thin atmosphere — but it took off for the 33rd time on September 24 for a short repositioning flight.

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