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Astrophysics

sun

Shedding light on the Sun

Categories Bloggers

An example of a gravitational lens found in the DESI Legacy Surveys data. There are four sets of lensed images in DESI-090.9854-35.9683, corresponding to four distinct background galaxies — from the outermost giant red arc to the innermost bright blue arc, arranged in four concentric circles. All of them are gravitationally warped — or lensed — by the orange galaxy at the very center.

Astrophysicists show how to “weigh” galaxy clusters with artificial intelligence

Categories Physics & Mathematics, Space, Technology

Many chemical elements are formed during a supernova explosion, so studying them can give scientists insight into the universe's chemical make-up.

Galactic explosion offers astrophysicists new insight into the cosmos

Categories Physics & Mathematics, Space

Artist’s Impression of the “Tadpole” Molecular Cloud and the black hole at the gravitational center of its orbit.

‘Tadpole’ Spotted Playing Around Black Hole

Categories Physics & Mathematics, Space

Illustration of spherical explosion

Astrophysicists discover the perfect explosion in space

Categories Physics & Mathematics, Space

The mysterious black behemoths controlling our galaxies

Categories Bloggers

This artist's illustration shows how the gravity of a foreground white dwarf star warps space and bends the light of a distant star behind it. Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have for the first time directly measured the mass of a single, isolated white dwarf (the surviving core of a burned-out Sun-like star) – due to this optical trick of nature. The greater the temporary, infinitesimal deflection of the background star's image, the more massive the foreground star is. (This deviation is so small that it is equivalent to observing an ant crawl across the surface of a quarter from 1,500 miles away.) Researchers found that the dwarf is 56 percent the mass of our Sun. This effect, called gravitational lensing was predicted as a consequence of Einstein's theory of general relativity from a century ago. Observations of a solar eclipse in 1919 provided the first experimental proof for general relativity. But Einstein didn't think the same experiment could be done for stars beyond our Sun because of the extraordinary precision required.

For the first time Hubble directly measures mass of a lone white dwarf

Categories Physics & Mathematics, Space

A meteorite thin section under a microscope. Different colors represent different minerals, because light travels through them in different ways. The round mineral aggregates are chondrules, which are a major component in primitive meteorites.

Solar System formed from “poorly mixed cake batter”

Categories Space

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the distribution of dark matter in the center of the giant galaxy cluster Abell 1689, containing about 1,000 galaxies and trillions of stars. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the universe’s mass. Hubble cannot see the dark matter directly. Astronomers inferred its location by analyzing the effect of gravitational lensing, where light from galaxies behind Abell 1689 is distorted by intervening matter within the cluster. Researchers used the observed positions of 135 lensed images of 42 background galaxies to calculate the location and amount of dark matter in the cluster. They superimposed a map of these inferred dark matter concentrations, tinted blue, on an image of the cluster taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. If the cluster’s gravity came only from the visible galaxies, the lensing distortions would be much weaker. The map reveals that the densest concentration of dark matter is in the cluster’s core. Abell 1689 resides 2.2 billion light-years from Earth. The image was taken in June 2002. Image credit: NASA, ESA, D. Coe (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, and Space Telescope Science Institute), N. Benitez (Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, Spain), T. Broadhurst (University of the Basque Country, Spain), and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University)

A new model for dark matter

Categories Physics & Mathematics, Space

The power of JWST to map galaxies at high resolution and at longer infrared wavelengths than Hubble allows it look through dust and unveil the underlying structure and mass of distant galaxies. This can be seen in these two images of the galaxy EGS23205, seen as it was about 11 billion years ago. In the HST image (left, taken in the near-infrared filter), the galaxy is little more than a disk-shaped smudge obscured by dust and impacted by the glare of young stars, but in the corresponding JWST mid-infrared image (taken this past summer), it’s a beautiful spiral galaxy with a clear stellar bar.

Milky Way-like galaxies found in young universe

Categories Space

Halton Arp: Looking at the sky with an open mind

Categories Bloggers

Dispatches from the Scientific Fringe

Categories Bloggers

Largest chemical map of the Milky Way unveiled

Fermi Bubbles Explained: Fast Outward Winds and ‘Reverse Shock’ at Center of Galaxy

Categories Physics & Mathematics, Space

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