In this video, we go over the current normalized flux graph of Tabby’s star, where we review Bruce Gary’s latest measurements showing a possibly new dimming event about to happen. We also show you a weird signature or structure that Bruce discovered in the flux data that is currently unexplained. Special thanks goes out to Bruce Gary for taking these measurements and producing the graphs.
Incredible New Observation Shows Supermassive Black Holes Orbiting Each Other
You think our galaxy is special? Ha. Our boring pinwheel of gas and dark matter might be a nice hangout for humans. But 750 or so million light years away, there’s an elliptical galaxy, Galaxy 0402+379, whose two supermassive black holes are orbiting each other from a distance of only 24 or so light years. Their combined mass is around 15 billion times that of our Sun.
If you’re not convinced, a team lead by scientists from the University of New Mexico have actually spotted the black holes moving relative to one another using the Very Long Baseline Array, a system of ten radio telescopes across the US, with locations in Hawaii and the Caribbean. Not only is it the first direct measurement of galactic centers orbiting each other like this, but it was a challenging calculation to actually do.
One of the study’s authors, Roger Romani from Stanford University, told Gizmodo “I think, to me it’s a technical tour de force to measure such small motion in the sky,” he said. “It took a dozen years of measurement with the largest telescopic array on earth.”
as the paper puts it:
While additional observations are needed to confirm this motion and obtain a precise orbit, this is apparently the first black hole system resolved as a visual binary.
Most Detailed Image of Another Star that has Ever Been Produced
An international team of astronomers have used ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array), the world’s largest radio telescope, to make the most detailed image of the surface of a star (other than our Sun) that has ever been created at radio wavelengths. The image was taken of Betelgeuse, the famous Red Supergiant located in the constellation Orion, and remarkably reveals that the temperature in its inner atmosphere is far from uniform. The discovery could help explain how the atmospheres of these stars are heated and how material from these stars is transported to the interstellar medium.
Red dots is a project to attempt detection of the nearest terrestrial planets to the Sun. Terrestrial planets in temperate orbits around nearby red dwarf stars can be more easily detected using Doppler spectroscopy, hence the name of the project.
For the 2017 campaign we will be focused on three of these red-dwarfs. The observational strategy is the same on all three objects. We will obtain about 90 observations with HARPS (weather permitting) spread over 100 nights while obtaining quasi-simultaneous photometry with different observatories all over the world.
- Proxima Centauri
- Barnard’s star
- Ross 154
and back to what passes for normal with this crazy star
New study suggests Jupiter’s formation divided Solar System in two
Gas giants like Jupiter have to grow fast. Newborn stars are embedded in a disk of gas and dust that goes on to form planets. But the ignition of the star releases energy that drives away much of the gas within a relatively short time. Thus, producing something like Jupiter involved a race to gather material before it was pushed out of the Solar System entirely.
Simulations have suggested that Jupiter could have won this race by quickly building a massive, solid core that was able to start drawing in nearby gas. But, since we can’t look at the interior or Jupiter to see whether it’s solid, finding evidence to support these simulations has been difficult. Now, a team at the University of Münster has discovered some relevant evidence in an unexpected location: the isotope ratios found in various meteorites. These suggest that the early Solar System was quickly divided in two, with the rapidly forming Jupiter creating the dividing line.
Do All Stars Form as Binaries?
Sarah Sadavoy (Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie) and Steven Stahler (UC-Berkeley) found 55 young stars in 24 multiple star systems (all but five of these are binary) and 45 single star systems in the Perseus cloud. All the widely separated binaries (> 500 AU) were made up of Class 0 stars (less than 500,000 years old), and were aligned with the long axis of the dense core. The older Class I binary stars (between 500,000 and 1 million years old) were closer together (separations ~ 200 AU) and showed no such alignment.
These alignments may not be random. For the authors have produced a mathematical model that explains the observations, and it’s a model with a twist. What they deduce is that stars like the Sun — all of them — are born with a companion. Says Stahler:
“We ran a series of statistical models to see if we could account for the relative populations of young single stars and binaries of all separations in the Perseus molecular cloud, and the only model that could reproduce the data was one in which all stars form initially as wide binaries. These systems then either shrink or break apart within a million years.”
another dip it seems
Hubble Applauds Waltzing Dwarfs
This seemingly unspectacular series of dots with varying distances between them actually shows the slow waltz of two brown dwarfs. The image is a stack of 12 images made over the course of three years with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Using high-precision astrometry, an Italian-led team of astronomers tracked the two components of the system as they moved both across the sky and around each other.
The observed system, Luhman 16AB, is only about six light-years away and is the third closest stellar system to Earth — after the triple star system Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star. Despite its proximity, Luhman 16AB was only discovered in 2013 by the astronomer Kevin Luhman. The two brown dwarfs that make up the system, Luhman 16A and Luhman 16B, orbit each other at a distance of only three times the distance between the Earth and the sun, and so these observations are a showcase for Hubble’s precision and high resolution.
Scientists Discover A Scorched Planet With A Comet-Like Tail
“It is so hot that it is hotter than most stars that we know of out there,” says Scott Gaudi of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, whose team describes the scorching world called KELT-9b in the journal Nature.
The planet, which is around three times more massive than Jupiter, orbits a blue star about 650 light-years away from Earth. This star is nearly twice as hot as our own sun, and this planet whips around it once every one and a half Earth days.
One side of the planet is locked in perpetual night. The other side always faces the searing heat of its host star and has a surface temperature of around 7,820 degrees Fahrenheit.
“It’s so hot that we think that there’s no molecules that can live on the day side of this planet,” Gaudi says. “Its day side would be very bright orange. Its night side would be very dark red. And it would have a cloud of evaporating hydrogen and helium, which would actually look violet.”
The 40-Year Old Mystery of the “Wow!” Signal Was Just Solved
In 1977, the sound of extraterrestrials was heard by human ears for the first time — or so people at the time thought. The Wow! Signal was detected by astronomer Jerry Ehman using Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope. It is a radio signal detector that, at the time, was pointed at a group of stars called Chi Sagittarii in the constellation Sagittarius.
[…]
However, Professor Antonio Paris, of St Petersburg College, has now discovered the explanation: A pair of comets. The work was published in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences.
These comets, known as 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs, have clouds of hydrogen gas millions of kilometers in diameter surrounding them. The Wow! Signal was detected at 1420MHz, which is the radio frequency hydrogen naturally emits. Notably, the team has verified that the comets were within the vicinity at the time, and they report that the radio signals from 266/P Christensen matched those from the Wow! signal.
When two stars align, they open new windows to understanding our galaxy, thanks to “gravitational microlensing” – an effect predicted by Einstein and confirmed in the June 9, 2017 edition of the journal Science. Astronomer Terry Oswalt, Ph.D., chair of the Physical Sciences Department at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Daytona Beach, Fla. Campus, author of a Science perspective essay, comments on the importance of gravitational lensing and offers a fun, hands-on demonstration to illustrate how it works. “Unlike most science experiments,” Dr. Oswalt notes in this video, “this is one you can try at home.”
Gravitational Waves Felt From Black-Hole Merger 3 Billion Light-Years Away
Astronomers said Thursday that they had felt space-time vibrations known as gravitational waves from the merger of a pair of mammoth black holes resulting in a pit of infinitely deep darkness weighing as much as 49 suns, some 3 billion light-years from here.
This is the third black-hole smashup that astronomers have detected since they started keeping watch on the cosmos back in September 2015, with LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. All of them are more massive than the black holes that astronomers had previously identified as the remnants of dead stars.
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