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Explanation: What happens when a black hole devours a star? Many details remain unknown, but observations are providing new clues. In 2014, a powerful explosion was recorded by the ground-based robotic telescopes of the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (Project ASAS-SN), with followed-up observations by instruments including NASA's Earth-orbiting Swift satellite. Computer modeling of these emissions fit a star being ripped apart by a distant supermassive black hole. The results of such a collision are portrayed in the featured artistic illustration. The black hole itself is a depicted as a tiny black dot in the center. As matter falls...

(NASA Goddard) It's a question that has dogged humanity since we first learned about black holes a little over a century ago: What the heck would it be like to plunge beyond the point of no return? We still don't have an answer, but a new supercomputer simulation is the best guess we have, based on current data. "People often ask about this, and simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real Universe," says astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "So I simulated two different scenarios, one where...

"This was a powerful blast - More info to come on what sort of impact we should expect here on earth! This marks the 4th X-flare since May 3rd (X1.6, X1.2, X1.2, X4.5), making AR3663 the most active sunspot of Solar Cycle 25 so far."

A new study of metal ore deep inside the moon is offering fresh evidence that Earth's natural satellite was formed by an ancient planet crashing into Earth long ago. This long-theorized interplanetary collision — which scientists believe occurred some 4.5 billion years ago — saw a Mars-sized planet named 'Theia' slice itself into hot lava fragments upon impact with the Earth. While some of Theia's planetary remains appear to be buried as dense and massive 'blobs' deep underneath Africa and the Pacific Ocean's tectonic plates, scientists said evidence for where the rest of Theia went after this crash had remained...

Apparently Earth has at least one, and probably several "mini moons" that follow Earth's orbit around the sun, and most likely come from chunks of Earth's moon blasted out from collisions with meteors and asteroids. Interesting, didn't know anything about this.

Explanation: This is how the Sun disappeared from the daytime sky last month. The featured time-lapse video was created from stills taken from Mountain View, Arkansas, USA on 2024 April 8. First, a small sliver of a normally spotted Sun went strangely dark. Within a few minutes, much of the background Sun was hidden behind the advancing foreground Moon. Within an hour, the only rays from the Sun passing the Moon appeared like a diamond ring. During totality, most of the surrounding sky went dark, making the bright pink prominences around the Sun's edge stand out, and making the amazing...

VIDEO AT LINK.....................

Our cosmic neighborhood is littered with asteroids. Scientists have already discovered more than 1.3 million of the space rocks, most of which lie in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, according to NASA. There are likely hundreds of thousands if not millions more asteroids waiting to be discovered. However, these remaining space rocks are likely the smallest and therefore faintest bodies in the solar system, which makes them very hard to spot.In the new study, published March 15 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, researchers highlighted 1,031 previously uncategorized asteroids from archival Hubble data. They were identified by artificial...

Explanation: What happens to a star that goes near a black hole? If the star directly impacts a massive black hole, then the star falls in completely -- and everything vanishes. More likely, though, the star goes close enough to have the black hole's gravity pull away its outer layers, or disrupt, the star. Then, most of the star's gas does not fall into the black hole. These stellar tidal disruption events can be as bright as a supernova, and an increasing amount of them are being discovered by automated sky surveys. In the featured artist's illustration, a star has...

Scientists have calculated the rotational speed of asteroid 2024 BX1, which exploded over Berlin earlier this year, by letting it trail in images of the sky. It turns out, 2024 BX1 was spinning faster than any other near-Earth object ever seen...The space rock, dubbed 2024 BX1, turned into a fireball and exploded over Berlin in the early hours of Jan. 21. Although small asteroids on collision courses with Earth are typically detected only when they crash into the atmosphere, scientists spotted this one roughly three hours before impact.That's not the only way 2024 BX1 was unusual, according to a paper...

Explanation: Despite their resemblance to R2D2, these three are not the droids you're looking for. Instead, the enclosures house 1.8 meter Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs) at Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert region of Chile. The ATs are designed to be used for interferometry, a technique for achieving extremely high resolution observations, in concert with the observatory's 8 meter Very Large Telescope units. A total of four ATs are operational, each fitted with a transporter that moves the telescope along a track allowing different arrays with the large unit telescopes. To work as an interferometer, the light from each telescope is...

Explanation: A mere 280 light-years from Earth, tidally locked, Jupiter-sized exoplanet WASP-43b orbits its parent star once every 0.8 Earth days. That puts it about 2 million kilometers (less than 1/25th the orbital distance of Mercury) from a small, cool sun. Still, on a dayside always facing its parent star, temperatures approach a torrid 2,500 degrees F as measured at infrared wavelengths by the MIRI instrument on board the James Webb Space Telescope. In this illustration of the hot exoplanet's orbit, Webb measurements also show nightside temperatures remain above 1,000 degrees F. That suggests that strong equatorial winds circulate the...

Explanation: Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. The large galaxy of over 100 billion stars has well-defined spiral arms, similar to our own Milky Way. One of the brightest members of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, M100, also known as NGC 4321 is 56 million light-years distant toward the well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. In this telescopic image, the face-on grand design spiral shares a nearly 1 degree wide field-of-view with slightly less conspicuous edge-on spiral NGC 4312 (at upper right). The 21 hour long equivalent exposure from a dark sky...

(NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Scientists using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have successfully mapped the weather on a planet 280 light years away. Earlier detections made by older space telescopes had hinted at the presence of an atmosphere on WASP-43b, however, the instruments aboard the JWST are the first to measure the actual weather in the planet’s atmosphere. “With Hubble, we could clearly see that there is water vapor on the dayside. Both Hubble and Spitzer suggested there might be clouds on the nightside,” explained Taylor Bell, a researcher from the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute...

Explanation: To some, this nebula looks like the head of a fish. However, this colorful cosmic portrait really features glowing gas and obscuring dust clouds in IC 1795, a star forming region in the northern constellation Cassiopeia. The nebula's colors were created by adopting the Hubble color palette for mapping narrowband emissions from oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur atoms to blue, green and red colors, and further blending the data with images of the region recorded through broadband filters. Not far on the sky from the famous Double Star Cluster in Perseus, IC 1795 is itself located next to IC 1805,...

The solar flare is the most powerful eruption from sunspot region R3654 yet. Last night (April 30), the sun released an extremely powerful solar flare triggering widespread radio blackouts across the Pacific region. The flare peaked at 7:46 p.m. EDT (2346 GMT) and ended shortly after at 7:58 p.m. EDT (2358). Solar flares are eruptions from the sun's surface that emit intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation. They are created when magnetic energy builds up in the solar atmosphere and is released. Solar flares are categorized by size into lettered groups, with X-class being the most powerful. Then there are M-class...

Explanation: The star system GK Per is known to be associated with only two of the three nebulas pictured. At 1500 light years distant, Nova Persei 1901 (GK Persei) was the second closest nova yet recorded. At the very center is a white dwarf star, the surviving core of a former Sun-like star. It is surrounded by the circular Firework nebula, gas that was ejected by a thermonuclear explosion on the white dwarf's surface -- a nova -- as recorded in 1901. The red glowing gas surrounding the Firework nebula is the atmosphere that used to surround the central star....

Scientists have taken a significant step in understanding these whirling quasiparticles and putting them to work in future semiconductor technologies. Researchers reported that they have imaged the exciton’s electron and hole for the first time, revealing how excitons may be trapped in dense, stable arrays. According to the scientists, the findings have significant implications for the development of various future technologies as well as the quest to better understand excitons. The findings were published on March 8th, 2022, in the journal Nature by researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, and the Okinawa Institute for...

In 1957, the astrophysicist Herman Bondi wrote a paper in which he considered the possible existence of a negative mass in Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity. A negative mass would repel a positive mass away from it. Given that, a pair of positive and negative masses could accelerate together up to the speed of light. The negative mass would push away the positive mass which in turn would pull the negative mass for the ride. The runaway pair would accelerate indefinitely, without any need for fuel or a propulsion system. Energy conservation would not be violated because the sum of...

...Unlike most near-Earth asteroids, which are thought to hail from the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, asteroid 2016 HO3, also known as Kamo'oalewa, was likely blasted from the Giordano Bruno crater on the moon's far side and has been hurtling through space for several million years...Measuring between 150 and 190 feet in diameter, the asteroid is about half the size of the "London Eye" Ferris wheel...Previous research pointing to Kamo'oalewa likely originating from the moon included its reflectance spectrum, which is more compatible with lunar materials rather than the general population of near-Earth asteroids, and...