The first observation of a brand-new kind of supernova had been predicted by theorists but never before confirmed.
In 2,017 a particularly luminous and unusual source of radio waves was discovered in data taken by the Very Large Array (VLA) Sky Survey, a project that scans the night sky in radio wavelengths. Now, led by Caltech graduate student Dillon Dong (MS ’18), a team of astronomers has established that the bright radio flare was caused by a black hole or neutron star crashing into its companion star in a never-before-seen process.
“Massive stars usually explode as supernovae when they run out of nuclear fuel,” says Gregg Hallinan, professor of astronomy at Caltech. “But in this case, an invading black hole or neutron star has prematurely triggered its companion star to explode.” This is the first time a merger-triggered supernova has ever been confirmed.
High-energy cosmic rays have proven elusive… but we may have found their source.
Thanks to new research led by the University of Nagoya, scientists have quantified the number of cosmic rays produced in a supernova remnant for the first time. This research has helped resolve a 100-year mystery and is a major step towards determining precisely where cosmic rays come from.
While scientists theorize that cosmic rays originate from many sources — our Sun, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), and active galactic nuclei (sometimes called quasars) — their exact origin has been a mystery since they were first discovered in 1912. Similarly, astronomers have theorized that supernova remnants (the after-effects of supernova explosions) are responsible for accelerating them to nearly the speed of light.
As they travel through our galaxy, cosmic rays play a role in the chemical evolution of the interstellar medium (ISM). As such, understanding their origin is critical to understanding how galaxies evolve.
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This video’s topic is close to my own research, cosmology. The current standard model of cosmology rests on the “cosmological principle” — the idea that the universe looks, on the average, the same everywhere. Alas, it doesn’t look good for the cosmological principle. Just what does the evidence say and, if it holds up, what does this mean? At the end of this video, you’ll know.
0:00 Intro. 0:43 Sponsor Message. 1:41 The Cosmological Principle. 5:58 Trouble for the Cosmological Principle. 10:20 What does it mean?
Cats have many superior genetic mutations like night vision even immunity to the current pandemic. If we can find the key to their immunity we could find a way to have near super human immunity.
“Getting a better understanding of the cat’s biology and genetic makeup will help us better understand the biology of humans, too,” says Leslie Lyons. (Credit: Lottie/Flickr)
The findings, published in Trends in Genetics, come after decades of genome DNA sequencing by Leslie Lyons, professor of comparative medicine in the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine. Their cat genome assembly is nearly 100% complete.
Astronomers have used an “X-ray magnifying glass” to study a black hole system in the early Universe. The amplification and magnification of light by an intervening galaxy allowed the detection of two distant X-ray-emitting objects. The objects are either two growing supermassive black holes.
A spectacular portrait of the galaxy Centaurus A has been captured by astronomers using the Dark Energy Camera mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. This galaxy’s peculiar appearance—cloaked in dark tendrils of dust—stems from a past interaction with another galaxy, and its size and proximity to Earth make it one of the best-studied giant galaxies in the night sky.
The galaxy Centaurus A, which lies over 12 million light-years away in the direction of the southern-hemisphere constellation Centaurus (The Centaur), is the leading light of this striking image. This image provides a spectacular view of the luminous glow of stars and the dark tendrils of dust that hide the bright center of the galaxy. This dust is the result of a past galactic collision, in which a giant elliptical galaxy merged with a smaller spiral galaxy. As well as large amounts of gas and dust, Centaurus A’s dust lane contains widespread star formation, as indicated by the red clouds of hydrogen and by the large number of faint blue stars visible at each end of the dust lane.
The proximity and brightness of Centaurus A—it is one of the closest giant galaxies to Earth—make it one of the best-studied objects in the southern hemisphere night sky. Since its discovery in 1,826 scientists have studied the galaxy exhaustively with many different kinds of telescopes, revealing a variety of intriguing features. Radio telescopes reveal a colossal jet of matter spewing outward from the heart of the galaxy. This jet is accelerated to almost half the speed of light by a supermassive black hole at the center of Centaurus A, and its bright emissions at radio wavelengths make this galaxy one of the most prominent radio sources in the night sky. In fact, in July 2,021 the Event Horizon Telescope produced an image of a jet launching from the black hole in Centaurus A, which weighs in at 55 million times the mass of the Sun.
