Astro Blog

  https://newsroom.usra.edu/a-steaming-cauldron-follows-the-dinosaurs-demise/ Source:   By Suraiya Farukhi, Ph.D, Universities Space Research Association.  Excerpt: Houston, TX and Columbia, MD. A new study reveals the Chicxulub impact crater may have harbored a vast and long-lived hydrothermal system after the catastrophic impact event linked to the extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago. The Chicxulub impact crater, roughly 180 kilometers in diameter, is the best preserved large impact structure on Earth and a target for exploration of several impact-related phenomena. In 2016, a research team supported by the International Ocean Discovery Program and International Continental Scientific Drilling Program drilled into the crater, reaching a depth of 1,335 meters (> 1 kilometer) below the modern-day sea floor. The team recovered rock core samples which can be used to study the thermal and chemical modification of Earth’s crust caused by the impact. The core sam...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/closest-black-hole-180974815 / Source:   By Megan Gannon, Smithsonian Magazine. Excerpt: The pair of stars in a system called HR 6819 is so close to us that on a clear night in the Southern Hemisphere, a person might be able to spot them without a telescope. What that stargazer wouldn’t see, though, is the black hole hiding right there in the constellation Telescopium. At just 1,000 light-years away, it is the closest black hole to Earth ever discovered, and it could help scientists find the rest of the Milky Way's missing black holes. Dietrich Baade, an emeritus astronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Germany and co-author of the study in Astronomy & Astrophysics, says the team never set out to find a black hole. They thought the HR 6819 system was a simple binary, made up of two visible stars orbiting each other. But their observations with the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile...