Scientists doubling as art detectives have traced Vincent van Gogh's "The Starry Night" to a celestial scene that suggests a new date for one of the world's most famous paintings.
Technion researchers have presented evidence for the existence of solar-storm-like outbursts near supermassive black holes, which can be a million times larger than the sun or more. The phenomenon was discovered in the vicinity of the black hole in the galaxy NGC 3783, and the researchers' findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
By analyzing data on around 100,000 quasars, or extremely luminous galactic nuclei, researchers at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) have found statistical evidence that some supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies are ejected from their positions after forming. The relationship now identified in the data was predicted 10 years ago by members of the same research group, Peter Raffai and Zsolt Frei, together with Zoltán Haiman.
In this Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope, we visit a turbulent cauldron of star formation to see what is brewing inside dense clumps of gas. This is a star-forming region named LHA 120-N 159, or simply N159, located 161,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way galaxy. This image spans about 230 light-years across.
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope continues to reveal hidden parts of the cosmos with its advanced suite of infrared instruments. In a newly released image, Webb revealed many stars previously hidden by the dust clouds of NGC 7129, a stellar nursery about 3,300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cepheus. The image is already improving our understanding of how new stars are born and evolve with time.
Private companies are getting better at launching more mass into space with larger rockets. But there is still a major constraint on the size of objects we can get into orbit—fairing size. This places physical constraints on the overall shape of what we can launch and severely limits the sizes of, say, a communications array or a power satellite. But a new paper from researchers at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Beijing Institute of Technology offers a solution—a self-shaping, deployable module that can fine-tune both its positioning and its own dimensions. The findings are published in the journal Space: Science & Technology.
In the deepest region of the Earth's mantle, just above the core, much of the material consists of crystals of magnesium oxide. In larger rocky exoplanets called super-Earths, the higher pressures in the lower mantle may drive magnesium oxide to transform into a new high-pressure crystal structure or a metallic, electrically conductive liquid that generates a magnetic field. And in gas giants, magnesium oxide could exist in the cores themselves.
A sweeping barred spiral galaxy marks the spot in this image, but the real treasure is the gravitational lens in the lower-right corner, where a distant background galaxy is being magnified and distorted by the gravity of a closer galaxy.
With a successful Mars gravity assist in its rearview mirror, NASA's Psyche spacecraft has fired up its thrusters and is accelerating toward the metal-rich asteroid of the same name. During the first leg of its journey, following an October 2023 launch, the mission used its electric propulsion system intermittently to maneuver into the right position to harness Mars' gravity for a propellant-saving speed boost and a slight trajectory change.
Do cosmic radiation doses near the moon differ significantly from those received by astronauts in low Earth orbit? Experimental lithium fluoride detectors, installed aboard the Orion spacecraft during the Artemis I mission, have now made it possible to obtain preliminary estimates.
Astronomers identified an exceptionally tiny core that may represent an early stage in the formation of a massive star. Located in an infrared-dark area called Dragon Cloud, the core is nicknamed the "dragon egg." The paper, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics, was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Oct. 5.
Two black holes can collide and merge into one. But could the opposite happen: could a single black hole split into two smaller ones? That question is explored in a new theoretical study: "When Black Holes Admit Pair-of-pants Topologies," published in the journal Physical Review D.
The Orion Nebula is a large star-forming region visible to the naked eye. Some of the young stars in the nebula are surrounded by disks of gas and dust in which planets form. Radiation from the massive central star, 1 Ori C1 (Theta-1 Orionis C1), gradually strips material from these disks, giving them shapes that resemble tadpoles.
Establishing a long-term presence on the moon will require solving challenges that are easy to overlook on Earth. Lunar temperatures, for instance, can vary from hundreds of degrees below zero to boiling, making effective insulation essential for lunar habitats.
NASA is moving fast on its plans to build a moon base and return astronauts to the lunar surface in as little as two years.
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