Astronomers know that evolved AGB stars shed their outer layers, contributing to the makeup of the interstellar medium. But new JWST observations show this can happen even near a supermassive black hole, where powerful radiation could obliterate molecules.
For decades, scientists have theorized that young protostar jets are shaped and driven by complex, twisted magnetic fields. But they couldn't detect them. Now, thanks to ALMA, they've found them around a young binary protostar.
Black holes aren't just engines of inexorable destruction. They're complex regions of space and time, and under the right conditions, giant planets can form in their AGN disks.
Engineers developed a unique fabric-based design for a ground-penetrating radar that will be a key instrument on NASA’s SkyFall Mars helicopters. The hardware will enable the SkyFall mission’s trio of planetary rotorcraft to use ground-penetrating radar to study the Martian subsurface.
Little red dots have puzzled astronomers since their discovery in JWST data from the Universe’s deep past. Their ‘powering engines’ might resemble a newly discovered phenomenon dubbed a “black hole star”—an early, rapidly growing black hole wrapped in dense gas. This object, described in a study published today in Nature by researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and international collaborators, may help explain how billion-solar-mass black holes formed so soon after the Big Bang.
Readers of a certain age will remember a golden area of asteroid films, capstoned by two with very different endings. Deep Impact engrained the devastating consequences of letting a large piece of rock hit our planet, whereas Armageddon, though arguably the more kitschy of the two films, was an uplifting story about technical ingenuity and sacrifice. And now, the central crux of that movie’s storyline - essentially blasting an asteroid with a nuclear detonation - is taking center stage as our last line of defense against a potential Deep Impact scenario. A new paper from researchers at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, and published in Space: Science & Technology, describes two potential scenarios examining how we might actually be able to nuke a space rock - and whether it would actually save us.
If an alien civilization could see Earth only as a single pale blue dot, what could they learn? We start with transit spectroscopy, the biosignature cocktail of oxygen, methane, ozone, and water, and why even the James Webb will struggle to find life.
