The National Radio Astronomy Observatory has completed a new survey with the updated Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico. It's called the VLASS, the Very Large Array Sky Survey, and it's the most detailed radio survey of the sky ever completed. The VLA used the power of its 28 movable dishes to complete the survey.
Planetary debris disks around white dwarfs appear to be more plentiful than thought. That's because some white dwarfs are magnetic, and those magnetic fields create patches of metallic debris near the stars' poles, where it's more difficult to detect. This leads to an underestimation of debris, something new research is trying to correct.
What happens when a black hole and a star meet in the middle of nowhere in a galaxy? It sounds like it could be a dramatic science fiction backdrop, with some hapless starship caught in the crunch. Actually, such encounters in real life are pretty rare. They happen maybe once every 100,000 years. But, when they do occur, the immense gravity of the supermassive black hole tears the star apart. It's an eerie-looking process. The star gets "spaghettified" — that is, pulled on one side by the black hole. That rips out a stream of gas from the star which eventually forms a disk around the black hole.
Based on a new analysis of the Chang'e-6 lunar samples, scientists are again questioning the timing and intensity of the Late Heavy Bombardment period.
The search for extrasolar rocky planets circling other stars is more than mere science. It offers researchers a chance to gain crucial insight into how our own planet functions.
In recent years, the idea that galaxy mergers are responsible for quenching galaxies has grown in importance. This paradigm says that galaxies merge, their black holes form a powerful quasar, and that quasar stifles star formation. But new results from the IllustrisTNG simulations shows that this paradigm may not be accurate.
Long before a human ever sets foot on the Red Planet, we already know how hard the environment is. Once one finally does, the only things protecting them from that harsh environment will be the infrastructure we’ve built up there, and the spacesuit that keeps that in a protective bubble. Unfortunately, modern space suits aren’t built with Martian gravity, which is 3/8ths of Earth’s, in mind. To prove that point, a team of NASA and industry engineers made a presentation at the 55th International Conference on Environmental Systems (ICES) that showed that the newest generation of spacesuits are simply too heavy to use on Mars.
