About the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian is a collaboration between Harvard and the Smithsonian designed to ask—and ultimately answer—humanity’s greatest unresolved questions about the nature of the universe. The Center for Astrophysics is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, with research facilities across the U.S. and around the world.

Recent strange activity around Jupiter’s volcanic moon, Io, confused and excited scientists.

Far below our feet, a giant may have started moving against us.

Earth’s inner core, a hot iron ball the size of Pluto, has stopped spinning in the same direction as the rest of the planet and might even be rotating the other way, research suggested on Monday.

Roughly 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) below the surface we live on, this “planet within the planet” can spin independently because it floats in the liquid metal outer core.

Summary: Researchers reveal how the olfactory system aids in threat assessment and have identified neurons that learn whether a specific smell represents a threat.

Source: University of Rochester.

Whether conscious of it or not, when entering a new space, we use our sense of smell to assess whether it is safe or a threat. In fact, for much of the animal kingdom, this ability is necessary for survival and reproduction.

An exploration of ten spooky objects hypothesized to lurk in the solar system.

My Patreon page!:
https://www.patreon.com/johnmichaelgo…

I’m also the host of Event Horizon!

Music:

Cylinder Eight by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.…

Source: http://chriszabriskie.com/cylinders/

Matter outflows in the form of jets are observed in astronomical systems at fast, medium and slow speeds. The fastest jets are highly relativistic, and travel very close to the speed of light. The origin, as well as many properties of the jets, is uncertain. Jet velocities seem to have a bi-modal distribution—some very fast and others slow, with a gap in velocities in between, which has long challenged experts. Bar-Ilan University researchers re-examined the data and have now seemingly solved the puzzle.

In many different galactic and extragalactic systems, emission of matter is commonly observed in the form of jets. The speed at which this occurs greatly varies. Alongside relatively slow jets associated with neutron stars or binary star systems, very fast, relativistic jets are seen at speeds very close to the speed of light. The fastest known jets are associated with a phenomenon known as gamma-ray bursts.

This phenomenon is characterized by an initial flash of gamma rays lasting for a few seconds, in which a strong emission of gamma radiation is visible. It is then followed by an afterglow lasting a much longer period of hours, days and even months. During this epoch, the emission subsequently fades and is observed as lower wavelengths, X-rays, ultraviolet, optical, infrared, and radio frequencies very late in the process.

When scientists revealed they’d received radio signals from a galaxy nine billion light years away we all got a bit excited with the hopes that maybe this was finally aliens trying to contact us. We’re always on the lookout for extra-terrestrial life, even if plenty of our movies about finally meeting aliens involves them killing us horribly until we figure out how to kill them right back.

A recent observational study of some 191 giant stars at the end of their lives as hydrogen-burning, main sequence stars, places more precise parameters our own star’s expansionary endgame. The Sun will finish its life at perhaps two to three hundred times its current angular size.

The observations were made between 1996 and 2008 with the now defunct Palomar Testbed Interferometer atop Mount Palomar in southern California. They were coupled with data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hipparcos and Gaia missions to more accurately calculate the stars’ distances and effective temperatures.

New survey of giant stars reveals details about the Sun’s own likely endgame as an expanding red giant.