Reckless Reality |

Hundreds of massive black holes left over from the early universe may wander the Milky Way, according to new calculations.

These rogue black holes are thought to have originally lurked at the centers of tiny, low-mass galaxies. Over billions of years, those dwarf galaxies smashed together to form full-sized galaxies like the Milky Way.

The idea of such wandering black holes has been suggested before, but a new computer simulation calculated that hundreds of them should be left over, and predicted that they might now be shrouded by small star clusters. Read the rest of this entry »

A faint gamma-ray burst (GRB) captured last Thursday by NASA’s Swift satellite has smashed the record for the earliest, most-distant known object in the universe.

The burst, named GRB 090423 for its discovery date, went off in Leo and was seen to last for 10 seconds. Several teams, including a group using the Gemini-North telescope in Hawaii and a European group using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, followed up the Swift detection by observing the burst’s fading infrared afterglow. Based on how much the afterglow’s light was stretched by cosmic expansion since the era when the burst happened, the group determined that it went off about 630 million years after the Big Bang. Read the rest of this entry »

Two space probes are to be sent to explore the Sun, in an attempt to get closer to the centre of the star than any previous mission.

The spacecraft will travel more than 70 million miles to one of the least hospitable regions of our solar system, where temperatures are hot enough to melt metal and intense radiation along with chaotic magnetic fields can tear manmade structures apart.

Scientists hope the missions will help them answer a long list of questions that still exist about the sun, including why its outer atmosphere is hotter than its surface, and what causes solar wind, sun spots and flares. Read the rest of this entry »

A lack of sunspots and solar flares has made the Sun its dimmest for nearly a century, claim scientists.

The Sun normally undergoes an 11-year cycle of activity.

At its peak, it has a tumultuous boiling atmosphere that spits out flares and planet-sized chunks of super-hot gas. This is followed by a calmer period.

Last year, it was expected that it would have been hotting up after a quiet spell. But instead it hit a 50-year low in solar wind pressure, a 55-year low in radio emissions, and a 100-year low in sunspot activity. Read the rest of this entry »

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, were searching space for evidence of amino acids: the basic chemicals from which life is created.

They told the Guardian newspaper that, despite failing to locate any such aminos, they did find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour of raspberries. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve already seen pictures of his eye … now we have the first image of the hand of God.

A ghostly blue cloud seems to form an outstretched thumb and fingers grasping a ball of fire.

The amazing image was taken by NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory, which is orbiting 580km above the Earth.

It recalls pictures of the Helix planetary nebula, with its blue centre surrounded by white clouds which earned it the nickname “the eye of God”. Read the rest of this entry »

The crust of neutron stars is 10 billion times stronger than steel, according to new simulations. That makes the surface of these ultra-dense stars tough enough to support long-lived bulges that could produce gravitational waves detectable by experiments on Earth.

Neutron stars are the cores left behind when relatively massive stars explode in supernovae. They are incredibly dense, packing about as much mass as the sun into a sphere just 20 kilometres or so across, and some rotate hundreds of times per second.

Because of their extreme gravity and rotational speed, neutron stars could potentially make large ripples in the fabric of space – but only if their surfaces contain bumps or other imperfections that would make them asymmetrical. Read the rest of this entry »

The Sun will begin its death throes in about 5 billion years, when it starts to swell into a red giant star. Though it’s not clear exactly what its planetary nebula will look like – its shape will likely be sculpted by factors such as the Sun’s future magnetic field – observations of the 1600 or so known planetary nebulae suggest our star will go out in a blaze of glory.

Lasting no more than a few tens of thousands of years, planetary nebulae help seed space with heavier chemical elements that can be incorporated into the next generation of stars. Read the rest of this entry »

Pluto’s status nowadays as a so-called plutoid and former planet may be official in the latest textbooks, but someone forgot to tell the astronomers.

A panel of six of them gathered here last Tuesday to debate the former ninth planet’s status at the American Museum of Natural History, along with moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Public interest in poor Pluto has peaked ever since the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto from planet status in 2006. And it became clear at the museum event that fierce disagreement still exists among top scientists at the leading edge of the debate. Read the rest of this entry »

The European Organisation for Astronomical Research has released an impressive image of the Helix Nebula captured by La Silla Observatory in Chile. The nebula, lying at around 700 light-years away in the constellation of Aquarius, has quickly been dubbed the “Eye of God”, for obvious reasons. The organization explains that the Helix (NGC 7293) is the result of the “final blooming” of a Sun-like star before its “retirement” as a white dwarf.

An image released today of a distant star and its potential planetary companion could go down in history as the first picture of a planet outside our solar system orbiting a sunlike star.

The possible planet—a hot, young body (upper left) about eight times more massive than Jupiter—sits roughly 330 times as far from its host star as Earth is from the sun. The pair lies about 500 light-years from Earth.

In 2004 a European team took the first direct snapshot of a likely planet near a brown dwarf, a dim object that astronomers think is a type of failed star. But scientists have been able to “see” extrasolar planets near sunlike stars only by looking for their gravitational effects.

Now scientists at the University of Toronto have captured infrared images of a so-called normal star and its potential orbiter using a ground-based telescope at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii. Read the rest of this entry »

A mountain top above the clouds and light-polluted cities was a good place to go to watch this Perseid meteor shower. In fact, this composite picture from one of the highest points in Romania, the Omu summit (2,507 meters) in the Southern Carpathian Mountains, captures about 20 of the shower’s bright streaks against a starry night sky. The cosmic debris stream that creates the shower is composed of dust particles moving along parallel paths, following the orbit of their parent comet Swift-Tuttle. Looking toward the shower’s radiant point in the constellation Perseus, perspective causes the parallel meteor streaks to appear to diverge. But looking directly away from the radiant point, as in this view, perspective actually makes the Perseid meteors seem to be converging toward a point below the horizon.