Astro Blog

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/black-hole-first-picture-event-horizon-telescope Source:   By Lisa Grossman and Emily Conover, ScienceNews. Excerpt: A world-spanning network of telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope [EHT; https://eventhorizontelescope.org/ ] zoomed in on the supermassive monster in the galaxy M87 to create this first-ever picture of a black hole.  ...“We’ve been studying black holes so long, sometimes it’s easy to forget that none of us have actually seen one,” France Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation....  ...The image also provides a new measurement of the black hole’s size and heft. ...Estimates made using different techniques have ranged between 3.5 billion and 7.22 billion times the mass of the sun. But the new EHT measurements show that its mass is about 6.5 billion solar masses. ...The team has also determined the behemoth’s size — its diameter stretches 38 billion kilometers — and that the black hole spins clockwis...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/japans-asteroid-mission-faces-breathtaking-touchdown Source:   By Dennis Normile, Science Magazine. Excerpt: "By looking at the details of every asteroid ever studied, we had expected to find at least some wide flat area suitable for a landing," says Yuichi Tsuda, Hayabusa2's project manager at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), which is headquartered in Sagamihara. Instead, when the spacecraft reached Ryugu in June 2018—at 290 million kilometers from Earth—it found a cragged, cratered, boulder-strewn surface that makes landing a daunting challenge. The first sampling touchdown, scheduled for October, was postponed until at least the end of this month, and at a symposium here on 21 and 22 December, ISAS engineers presented an audacious new plan to make a pinpoint landing between closely spaced boulders....

Source:   By JoAnna Wendel   Earth & Space News EoS (AGU) Excerpt: 1. Dwarf Planets Are as Complex as Regular Planets. ...2. Dwarf Planets Reveal Neptune’s Orbital Origins. ...3. Dwarf Planets Give Us a Peek into the Early Solar System. ...4. Dwarf Planet Candidates Helped Scientists “Find” Planet 9. ...5. Ceres (We Hope) Will Help Us Understand Icy Ocean Moons. ...6. Dwarf Planets Are Prolific.... https://eos.org/articles/six-things-dwarf-planets-have-taught-us-about-the-solar-system

Source:   Joyce Sutphen, The Writ'ers Almanac Excerpt: Astronomer Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of other galaxies on this date in 1924. At the time it was thought that our Milky Way galaxy represented the entirety of the universe. Hubble was studying the Andromeda Nebula .... Hubble crunched the numbers and realized that the star he was observing was 800 thousand light years away, more than eight times the distance of the farthest star in the Milky Way. ...he realized that the "cloud of gas" he'd been observing was really another vast galaxy that was very far away.... writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php

Source:   Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY Excerpt: Astronomers may have spotted the most distant object in the universe -- 13.14 billion light years away. Going by the prosaic name GRB 090429B, the object came to their attention because of a 10-second gamma-ray burst originally detected by NASA's Swift satellite in April 2009.... content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2011/05/cosmic-explosion-may-be-most-distant-object-in-universe/1

Source:   Paul Preuss, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Excerpt:  … the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III (SDSS-III) released the largest digital image of the sky ever made, and it’s free to all. The image has been put together over the last decade from millions of 2.8-megapixel images, thus creating a color image of more than a trillion pixels. ... so big and detailed that one would need 500,000 high-definition TVs to view it at its full resolution. newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2011/01/11/sdss-largest-sky-image/