The distant star AU Microscopii may have mysterious cold spots. It seems to contain pockets of hydrogen that are more than 1500°C cooler than the surrounding areas, and astronomers aren’t sure why.
Category: space – Page 529
Gaia telescope’s new map of the Milky Way will let us rewind time
Our map of the Milky Way has been upgraded and it now lets us rewind the paths of stars to look back in time. The data set that enables this, released by the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Gaia space telescope, includes the detailed chemical make-up and speeds of almost 2 billion stars.
These NanoLeaf-Inspired Modular Lights Can Team Up to Create a Wall-Mounted Four-Digit Display
Built using a 3D-printed framework and an Espressif ESP32, this modular lighting system can double as a display.
Hoag’s Object is a galaxy with an central region and a bright outer ring, but lacks any intervening material.
Weird Object: Hoag’s Object
Hoag’s Object is a galaxy with an central region and a bright outer ring, but lacks any intervening material.
No. 7: With This Ring, I Thee Puzzle.
In 1950, astronomer Arthur Hoag came upon a tiny, faint, 16th-magnitude ring surrounding a ball-like center, and reasonably assumed it was a planetary nebula — a nearby puff of gas expelled from a single old-aged star. He also proposed an alternative and far more exotic explanation that this was an “Einstein Ring” from a faraway quasar. In this scenario, the quasar’s light is distorted into a halo by space-warping caused by a massive foreground spherical galaxy that it seems to surround. But later spectroscopic studies rejected this because the golden central ball and the blue ring have exactly the same redshift, indicating a whopping rush-away speed of 7,916 miles (12,740 kilometers) per second, which proves they’re both located exactly the same distance from us.
James Webb Space Telescope hit by a micrometeoroid, larger than what NASA had anticipated
The James Webb Space Telescope dima_zel/ iStock
Between May 23 and 25, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was hit by a micrometeoroid that has impacted one of its primary mirror segments, NASA said in a recent update on its website. The telescope continues to function at levels exceeding mission requirements.
A meteoroid is a fragment of an asteroid and can be either large or small. A micrometeoroid, though, is a microscopic fragment of a meteoroid and is smaller than a grain of sand. NASA estimates that millions of meteoroids and micrometeoroids strike the Earth’s atmosphere every day but most burn up due to the friction.
