Astro Blog

https://www.science.org/content/article/black-hole-center-milky-way-may-be-blasting-out-jet   By DANIEL CLERY , Science.  Excerpt: The supermassive black holes at the centers of many galaxies generate powerful jets, blasting particles thousands of light-years into space. This new image of the Milky Way’s black hole, known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), suggests it may have one, too, but perhaps of a more modest nature. The image—taken with polarized light—was  released today by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) , a worldwide array of radio telescopes that in 2019 produced the  first ever image of a black hole . The new image shows light that is oriented in a particular direction, revealing magnetic field lines around the black hole. Although jets would not be visible in such a zoomed-in image, strong magnetic fields are thought to be essential in launching them.... See also European Southern Observatory press release . 

https://www.science.org/content/article/number-known-moonquakes-tripled-discovery-apollo-archive By  PAUL VOOSEN , Science Excerpt:  THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS— The Moon suddenly seems more alive. From 1969 to 1977, seismometers left on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts detected thousands of distinctive “moonquakes.” Now, half a century later, a new analysis has cut through the noise in the old data and nearly tripled the number of moonquakes, adding more than 22,000 new quakes to 13,000 previously identified ones.  The finding,  presented  last week here at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, shows “that the Moon may be more seismically and tectonically active today than we had thought,” says Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna, a geophysicist at the University of Arizona unaffiliated with the work, which is  in review  at the  Journal of Geophysical Research . “It is incredible that after 50 years we are still finding new surprises in the data.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/science/moon-landing-sideways-gravity.html By Kenneth Chang , The New York Times.  Excerpt: When the robotic lander  Odysseus last month became the first American-built spacecraft to touch down on the moon  in more than 50 years, it toppled over at an angle. ...Just a month earlier, another spacecraft, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, sent by the Japanese space agency, had also tipped during landing,  ending up on its head . ...people pointed to the height of the Odysseus lander — 14 feet from the bottom of the landing feet to the solar arrays at the top — as a contributing factor for its off-kilter touchdown. ...Philip Metzger, a former NASA engineer who is now a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, explained  the math and the physics  of why it is more difficult to remain standing on the moon. ...“The side motion that can tip a lander of that size is only a few meters per second in lunar gravity.” ...Odysseus wa