A research team has used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to study a body known as BD+44°493, the brightest known second-generation star in the sky. BD+44°493 is thought to have been enriched by elements from one of the first generation of stars and the researchers detected several elements that had never been seen before in such a star.
A computer simulation of the powerful jets generated by supermassive black holes at the centres of the largest galaxies explains why some burst forth as bright beacons visible across the universe, while others fall apart and never pierce the halo of the galaxy. A jet’s hot ionised gas is propelled by the twisting magnetic fields of the central rotating black hole.
An unprecedented view from the world’s most advanced adaptive optics system on the Gemini South telescope in Chile probes a swarm of young and forming stars that appear to have been triggered, or shocked, into existence. The group, known as N159W, is located some 158,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite to our Milky Way Galaxy.
An international team of astronomers has used the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) to detect glowing oxygen in a distant galaxy seen just 700 million years after the Big Bang. This is the most distant galaxy in which oxygen has ever been unambiguously detected, and it is most likely being ionised by powerful radiation from young giant stars.
Astronomers have found the organic molecule methyl alcohol, or methanol, in the protoplanetary disc of TW Hydrae, 175 light-years from Earth — the first such detection of this chemical compound in a young planet-forming disc. Since methanol forms on the icy coatings of dust grains, this discovery provides a window into the region where comets are likely forming.
A small asteroid designated 2016 HO3 has been discovered in an orbit around the Sun that keeps it as a constant companion of Earth, and it will remain so for centuries to come. It is too distant to be considered a true satellite of our planet, but it is the best and most stable example to date of a near-Earth companion, or “quasi-satellite.”
A matter of scientific speculation since the 1930s, dark matter itself cannot yet be detected, but its gravitational effects can be. Now, eight scientists from Johns Hopkins University consider the possibility that the first black hole binary detected by LIGO could be part of this mysterious substance known to make up about 85 percent of the mass of the universe.
© 2019 Pole Star Publications Limited