Given there are known polar planetary discs, and this orbit seems stable, wouldn't that suggest that polar systems are formed because of some past interaction between the two stars that disrupted them from the original plane of formation?
Possibly. I didn't dive in deeper to see if they even know the shape of the orbit. From my understanding a capture is very unlikely to have a near circular orbit. But planetary discs definitely aren't captures, so something changed the stars in those.
What I like about this image is that this is probably the biggest object that I can compare to something I know, that I can “comprehend”. With 6 km wide, it is about the same size as Grenoble, a city I have seen from above while hiking. I can understand how far the picture looks from it, how small a human would be on it
Neat to see a 6-7 solar mass black hole spotted. First one without a companion star to give it away! As we get better at finding black holes of this size, will be interesting to see if they end up explaining part of the “dark matter” problem.
In the best case, the detection is at the 2.4 sigma confidence level (less than the usual 3 for reasonable confidence and will below the 5 required for strong confidence), and if previously suspected issues with the instrument are true, the detection could disappear completely.
I do not have a strong confidence in this result. (But at least they didn’t publish it in Nature, in which case you would absolutely know it’s wrong…)
NASAs “habitat words observatory” was ment to be the next major telescope after the Roman space telescope, and was meant to have its primary function be the search for extraterrestrial life which would help tremendously with these kinds of situations.
Was being the key word as apparently the shitbag GOP administration decided they want to axe ALL future telescope programs including the Hubble replacement Nany Roman… Scumbags.
Their only interest in space is glory and imperialism. They don’t give a shit about the science they just want to claim Mars as US territory. And as someone that has been a huge space nerd ever since I was a kid I am absolutely livid at the defunding of NASA.
“For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other colonization spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.”
From the SpaceX TOS. Oligarchs want to rule as kings on Mars, not as Americans.
Even the commercialisation of space flight bothers me. I mean, I know its inevitable but when the point of crewed space flight currently is still overwhelmingly for science, there’s just something gross about for-profit companies making a mint off human endeavour. But I also grew up in the 80s when science and the future seemed bright and exciting and not a capitalist dystopia.
This is just super fucking cool. It’s so rad they can pick out chemical signatures from the light passing through a planet’s atmosphere from a star 120 light years away. Absolutely gonzo bananas, the JWT is too cool. I will go on a personal mission to punch Donald Trump in the taint if they actually do cut the Roman telescope.
Are the tracking systems for those massive telescopes sophisticated enough to track objects by designation, or do they still require coordinates? Like I know they have tracking for earths rotation but I can’t even imagine needing to look up the info to set sights on some body for the allotted view time, however many days that would be done for (I assume it’s a set of long precise numbers, far too long to easily memorize)
Astronomers have generally thought that massive black holes at the centers of galaxies expel gas in jets of material only during their formative years, when the central black hole is gobbling up gas and stars and producing lots of radiation. This makes them stand out as what astronomers call active galactic nuclei (AGN), or quasars.
If, as the new study suggests, the ionized hydrogen halo around galaxies is more diffuse, but also more extensive, than thought, this implies that the central black holes may actually become active at other times in their lives.
I love how we keep finding more and more about the role that black holes play in our universe.
astronomy
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