Month: November 2021
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China’s Mars rover has amassed reams of novel geological data
More than 30 scientists across mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau are rushing to process data collected by China’s Mars rover, Zhurong, and by the nation’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft, which is in orbit around the planet. Several studies have trickled out, but researchers say that more are coming in the next weeks and months, offering insights…
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Vast satellite constellations are alarming astronomers
On may 24th 2019 a Falcon 9 rocket built by SpaceX launched 60 communication satellites into a low orbit around the Earth. That evening they appeared as a string of sunlit dots moving across the sky, many of them as bright as the brightest stars, a source of passing wonder and mystery to casual observers—and…
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Magellanic Stream arcing over Milky Way may be five times closer than previously thought
Our galaxy is not alone. Swirling around the Milky Way are several smaller, dwarf galaxies — the biggest of which are the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, visible in the night sky of the Southern Hemisphere. During their dance around the Milky Way over billions of years, the Magellanic Clouds’ gravity has ripped from each…
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Intermediate mass black hole in the centre of M31’s largest globular cluster
Very cool research on the detection of an intermediate-mass (approx. 100,000 times the mass of the Sun) black hole in the most massive Globular Cluster of Andromeda. This means that this cluster is a tidally stripped nucleus of a larger galaxy. This technique can be used to estimate the number of galaxies that have merged…
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Record number of new gravitational waves offers game-changing window into universe
Scientists say 35 novel discoveries included a pair of massive black holes 145 times as heavy as the sun orbiting each other. Astronomers have detected a record number of gravitational waves, in a discovery they say will shed light on the evolution of the universe, and the life and death of stars. An international team…
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Squeezing down the Theory Space for Cosmic Inflation
An updated search for primordial gravitational waves has not found a signal, which implies that some popular early Universe models are becoming less viable. Remarkably, the large-scale Universe can be adequately described by a model involving only a handful of parameters. This lambda cold dark matter (LCDM) model postulates that the expansion of the Universe…