Scientists have to reset their superlatives. A quasar known as J0529-4351 is the most luminous single object in the known universe, emitting as much energy as 500 trillion suns.
It's powered by a supermassive black hole that swallows 300,000 Earth masses of gas every day.
NASA engineers are still struggling to fix a data glitch that has left Voyager 1 unable to talk to Earth.
For most if my life, Voyager 1 has been exploring our solar system & beyond. This could be the end for humanity's most distant space probe, currently venturing into interstellar space.
“Well Captain Roykirk it appears the issue with Voyager not communicating has been fixed by colliding with another vessel that repaired it. But I led with the good news. You’d better sit down before I tell you the bad news.”
“I don’t need to sit down. Just spit it out, Spock. And why did you call me Captain Roykirk?”
By scanning the cosmic microwave background, researchers have used the South Pole Telescope to create a map of all matter between here... and the edge of the visible universe.
Figuring out your place in space is easier than you might think.
In one day, with the help of a friend, you can determine the shape of the Earth & estimate the minimum distance to the Moon -- using nothing but your own eyes.
Give yourself a year and you can measure the entire solar system, all by yourself.
The SKAMPI radio telescope is the first piece of the enormous new SKA Observatory. When complete, it will be the world's most powerful radio array, combing 197 dishes with 131,072 (!) antennas.
The SKA Observatory will scan the early universe & probe mysterious radio bursts from deep space.
@coreyspowell SKA Observatory? I do so hope their tagline is something like, “If there’s a signal out there, we’ll pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.”
Saturn's "Death Star" moon, Mimas, seems to have thawed only very recently, creating a huge internal ocean. Today, up to 60% of its interior may be liquid water.
Which raises a couple big questions:
Can life arise in an ice-covered ocean?
If so, how long does it take--could new life be emerging right now?
when I was a child, I several times encountered the claim that Earth was the only planet in the solar system with a moon that could cover the Sun during (some) eclipses viewed from the planet's surface, but leave the Sun's corona visible.
Assuming the top of the cloud layer counts as "surface" for gas and ice giants, is this true?
@llewelly
Interesting question! It's certainly true for planets with solid surfaces. The closest match is Phobos on Mars, and it covers only about half of the Sun. But if my off the cuff memory is right, Callisto appears just a little larger than the Sun from Jupiter, so it could make a nice (though quite a bit smaller) solar eclipse.
Astronomers have found multi-planet systems around a number of nearby stars, but none that's much like our own. They're not a lot like each other, either.
We still don't know what a normal planetary system looks like, or if there even is such a thing.
I'm intrigued by the tiny glimpses we're getting from microlensing and studies of white dwarf systems, where the selection effects are quite different.
@coreyspowell I did a huge analysis ending about 5 years ago, carefully synthesizing everything we knew about planet distribution to date into a synthetic total distribution with error bars. It was quite instructive.
For the first time, astronomers have direct evidence of planets that survived the death of their star.
These remarkable JWST images appear to show Jupiter-like planets still clinging to burned-out white dwarf stars. Our solar system might look a lot like this in 8 billion years.
Here's an interesting twist. The white dwarf planets seem to be similar in mass & distance to Jupiter and Saturn. In some ways, then, this is the closest thing we've seen to a planetary system resembling our own.
Japan's SLIM lunar lander not only survived its sideways touchdown, it managed to complete its science mission...and along the way, take some beautiful landscape photos.
Amazing but true: We can now see black holes! The Event Horizon Telescope just released a second, direct image of hot gas swirling around a supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87.
Conditions around the hole appear to have changed a lot over the course of one year. This is the first step toward black hole movies.