Lifeboat Foundation

Astronomers have long predicted that as many as 20,000 black holes could be hiding in our galaxy’s center, but so far no one has been able to spot them. Until now.

A Columbia University-led team of scientists dug through data taken with the Earth-orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory to find the objects. They managed to find a dozen characteristic x-ray sources spewing energy from the galaxy’s inner three light-years. This is the first time anyone has observed these black holes.

“It’s the confirmation of several theories that predicted this ought to be the case,” study author Chuck Hailey, Columbia University astrophysics professor, told Gizmodo. “But it’s strange to have had this many and not really see them.”

Continue reading “Astronomers Find Evidence of Thousands of Black Holes at the Center of Our Galaxy” »

This animation gives a sense of the awe-inspiring scale of some of the known objects in our universe. It is difficult for human minds to comprehend the sheer size of distant stars, many of which completely dwarf our own Sun. Here we see some of the most famous objects displayed relative to one another. The animation begins with Earth, which has a radius of about 6.3 million metres, and ends at VY Canis Majoris, one of the largest known stars in existence, with a radius about 1420 times that of our own Sun, or 990 billion metres! Keep an eye on the changing scale underneath the objects to really appreciate the variation in size.

This animation will form part of the “The Living Universe” exhibition, to be displayed at the ESO Supernova, opening in spring 2018.

This graphic is perhaps more complex than first meets the eye. The Sun glows hot to the left, illuminating the Earth’s surface. The side facing away from the Sun is cast in deep shadow, and the man-made lights of cities are visible. The darkest patch of shadow, where the Earth blocks all the Sun’s light, is called the umbra. The lighter slivers of shadow either side of the umbra, which are not in total darkness, is the penumbra. Needless to say, this is not to scale!

This graphic will form part of the “The Living Universe” exhibition, to be displayed at the ESO Supernova, opening in spring 2018.

https://www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-yale-astronomers-discover-s…ark-matter

April 2 (UPI) — Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have observed the most distant star yet discovered.

Astronomers were trying to watch a gravitationally lensed supernova called Refsdal in the distant universe when they noticed an unexpected point source. The source turned out to be the universe’s most distant star. Astronomers dubbed it Lensed Star 1.

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Astronomer Kathryn Neugent discusses how scientists found the supermassive star moving at 300,000 miles per hour—and what caused its speedy travel.

A surprise discovery announced a month ago suggested that the early universe looked very different than previously believed. Initial theories that the discrepancy was due to dark matter have come under fire.

Stupefied astronomers on Wednesday unveiled the first and only known galaxy without dark matter, the invisible and poorly-understood substance thought to make up a quarter of the Universe.

The discovery could revise or even upend theories of how galaxies are formed, they reported in the journal Nature.

“This is really bizarre,” said co-author Roberto Abraham, an astronomer at the University of Toronto.

Continue reading “Astronomers find the ‘impossible’: a galaxy without dark matter” »