Black holes are gatherers, not hunters. They lie in wait until a hapless star wanders by and then grab it and rip it apart.
Astrophysics
A Tale of Two Black Holes
Two black holes, one which would be all but lost within the other. The image on the left is the black hole at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87, the other the black hole at the center of our Milky Way, seen for the first time by human eyes.
Christmas Launch Now for the James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope is made ready for a Christmas Dayt launch. (ESA) Baltimore, MD-(ENEWSPF)- Weather is nudging the James Webb Space Telescope from December 24 to a Christmas Day launch. NASA and Arianespace successfully completed the Launch Readiness Review for the James Webb Space Telescope on Dec. 21. The[Read More…]
There’s a Lunar Eclipse Coming May 26: Everything You Need to Know
Events for the total lunar eclipse on the morning of May 26, 2021. This version is labeled for Universal Time. Please refer to the table below for corresponding times in various time zones. Due to the Moon’s off-center path through Earth’s umbra, the northern half of its disk should look[Read More…]
How Many Habitable Planets Are Out There?
This illustration depicts Kepler-186f, the first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a distant star in the habitable zone. Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle Mountain View, CA-(ENEWSPF)- Thanks to new research using data from the Kepler space telescope, it’s estimated that there could be as many as 300 million potentially habitable planets[Read More…]
Christmas Week: Worlds Will Align for Spectacular Heavenly Sight
A view showing how the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction will appear in a telescope pointed toward the western horizon at 6 p.m. CST, Dec. 21, 2020. The image is adapted from graphics by open-source planetarium software Stellarium. (This work, “jupsat1,” is adapted from Stellarium by Patrick Hartigan, used under GPL-2.0, and provided[Read More…]
Astronomers Discover New “Fossil Galaxy” Buried Deep Within the Milky Way
An artist’s impression of what the Milky Way might look like seen from above. The colored rings show the rough extent of the fossil galaxy known as Heracles. The yellow dot shows the position of the Sun. SDSS-(ENEWSPF)- Scientists working with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys’ Apache Point[Read More…]
Hubble Catches Possible ‘shadow Play’ of the Disk Around a Black Hole
This illustration depicts one possible explanation for the mysterious bright rays and dark shadows observed emanating from the blazingly bright center of nearby active galaxy IC 5063. In this scenario, a dusty disk surrounding the monster black hole is casting its shadow into space, which is interspersed with bright rays[Read More…]
Solar Orbiter Launch Takes Solar Science to New Heights
Launch of the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter mission to study the Sun from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Feb. 9, 2020. Credits: Jared Frankle Washington, D.C.-(ENEWSPF)- Solar Orbiter, a new collaborative mission between ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA to study the Sun, launched at 11:03 p.m. EST[Read More…]
Oxygen Line Opens New Perspective on the Far Universe
The discovery was made using the SEPIA instrument on the APEX telescope in Chile. On this archive photo the instrument is being hoisted inwards. The instrument was partly developed in the Netherlands by the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA). (c) ESO / Onsala Space Observatory / A. Ermakov The[Read More…]