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Final dance of unequal black hole partners

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Solving the equations of general relativity for colliding black holes is no simple matter.

Physicists began using supercomputers to obtain solutions to this famously hard problem back in the 1960s. In 2000, with no solutions in sight, Kip Thorne, 2018 Nobel Laureate and one of the designers of LIGO, famously bet that there would be an observation of gravitational waves before a numerical solution was reached.

He lost that bet when, in 2005, Carlos Lousto, then at The University of Texas at Brownsville, and his team generated a solution using the Lonestar supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. (Concurrently, groups at NASA and Caltech derived independent solutions.) [Read more…] about Final dance of unequal black hole partners

Has the hidden matter of the universe been discovered?

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Astrophysicists consider that around 40 percent of the ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets and galaxies remains undetected, concealed in the form of a hot gas in the complexe cosmic web.

Scientists at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay) may have detected, for the first time, this hidden matter through an innovative statistical analysis of 20-year-old data. Their findings are published on November 6, 2020 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Galaxies are distributed throughout the Universe in the form of a complex network of nodes connected by filaments, which are in turn separated by voids. This is known as the cosmic web. [Read more…] about Has the hidden matter of the universe been discovered?

New mineral discovered in moon meteorite

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A team of European researchers discovered a new high-pressure mineral in the lunar meteorite Oued Awlitis 001, named donwilhelmsite (CaAl4Si2O11).

The team around Jörg Fritz from the Zentrum für Rieskrater und Impaktforschung Nördlingen, Germany and colleagues at the German Research Centre for Geoscience GFZ in Potsdam, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Natural History Museum Vienna, Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Science, Natural History Museum Oslo, University of Manchester, and Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt Berlin published their findings in the scientific journal “American Mineralogist“.

Besides the about 382 kilograms of rocks and soils collected by the Apollo and Luna missions, lunar meteorites allow valuable insights into the formation of the Moon. They are ejected by impacts onto the lunar surface and subsequently delivered to Earth. [Read more…] about New mineral discovered in moon meteorite

Water on ancient Mars

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There’s a long-standing question in planetary science about the origin of water on Earth, Mars and other large bodies such as the moon.

One hypothesis says that it came from asteroids and comets post-formation. But some planetary researchers think that water might just be one of many substances that occur naturally during the formation of planets.

A new analysis of an ancient Martian meteorite adds support for this second hypothesis. [Read more…] about Water on ancient Mars

Where were Jupiter and Saturn born?

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New work led by Carnegie’s Matt Clement reveals the likely original locations of Saturn and Jupiter.

These findings refine our understanding of the forces that determined our Solar System’s unusual architecture, including the ejection of an additional planet between Saturn and Uranus, ensuring that only small, rocky planets, like Earth, formed inward of Jupiter.

In its youth, our Sun was surrounded by a rotating disk of gas and dust from which the planets were born. The orbits of early formed planets were thought to be initially close-packed and circular, but gravitational interactions between the larger objects perturbed the arrangement and caused the baby giant planets to rapidly reshuffle, creating the configuration we see today. [Read more…] about Where were Jupiter and Saturn born?

Stars and planets grow up together as siblings

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Astronomers have found compelling evidence that planets start to form while infant stars are still growing. The high-resolution image obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) shows a young proto-stellar disk with multiple gaps and rings of dust.

This new result, just published in Nature, shows the youngest and most detailed example of dust rings acting as cosmic cradles, where the seeds of planets form and take hold.

An international team of scientists led by Dominique Segura-Cox at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Germany targeted the proto-star IRS 63 with the ALMA radio observatory. [Read more…] about Stars and planets grow up together as siblings

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Evidence of broadside collision with dwarf galaxy discovered in Milky Way

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Nearly 3 billion years ago, a dwarf galaxy plunged into the center of the Milky Way and was ripped apart by the gravitational forces of the collision.

Astrophysicists announced today that the merger produced a series of telltale shell-like formations of stars in the vicinity of the Virgo constellation, the first such “shell structures” to be found in the Milky Way.

The finding offers further evidence of the ancient event, and new possible explanations for other phenomena in the galaxy. [Read more…] about Evidence of broadside collision with dwarf galaxy discovered in Milky Way

NASA to announce new space tech public-private partnerships

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NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine will give a keynote address at the virtual fall Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium meeting at 11:45 am EDT Wednesday, October 14.

The event, co-hosted by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and Arizona State University, will stream live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.

Bridenstine will discuss NASA’s Artemis program and announce the agency’s latest Tipping Point selections and their potential impact on sustainable lunar exploration. [Read more…] about NASA to announce new space tech public-private partnerships

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