#astronomers

#astronomers

Whether we like it or not, someday, our Sun will swell outward and engulf our planet like a fiery amoeba.That's the fate of most worlds around middleweight stars, according to physics.And astronomers recently witnessed it for the first time in a star system 12,000 light years away.They published their findings in the journal Nature.

An artist's impression of an aging star swelling up and beginning to engulf a planet, much like the Sun will do in about 5 billion years.K. Miller/R.Hurt (Caltech/IPAC) Astronomers have gotten a sneak peek at what could be Earth's ultimate fate in about 5 billion years when the sun reaches the end of its life and engulfs the solar system's inner planets including our own.

(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.)For the first time, scientists have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet not just a nibble or bite, but one big gulp.Astronomers on Wednesday reported their observations of what appeared to be a gas giant around the size of Jupiter or bigger being eaten by its star.

By MARCIA DUNN | AP Aerospace Writer CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) For the first time, scientists have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet not just a nibble or bite, but one big gulp.Astronomers on Wednesday reported their observations of what appeared to be a gas giant around the size of Jupiter or bigger being eaten by its star.

Astronomers have witnessed a star gobbling up a planet, offering the first direct glimpse of a gnarly process called planetary engulfment that most likely awaits Earth in the deep future.Scientists serendipitously spotted a gas planet like Jupiter but possibly larger as it was swallowed up by an aging sun-like star about 12,000 light-years from Earth.

For the first time, astronomers have captured the powerful jets spewing out of a black hole and the black hole itself in the same image.Until now, they'd only been able to capture them in separate images.As detailed in a new paper in Nature, the image shows the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, also known as M87, and was put together using 2018 data collected by telescopes across the world, including the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile.

An aging star dubbed ZTF SLRN-2020 has been caught in the act of swallowing a planet.Credit: K. Miller/R.Hurt (Caltech/PAC)

Roughly five billion years from now, our Sun will end, not with a bang but with a whimper.That's when it finally burns through all the fuel in its core and puffs outward into a red giant, swallowing all the inner planets of our Solar System in the process, including Earth.

Astronomers have witnessed the intense burst of light from a planet being swallowed by its host star, the same dramatic fate that awaits Earth when the sun expands rapidly near the end of its life.It is the first time researchers have captured the moment when an ageing star swells so much that a nearby planet starts to skim the surface, sending streams of gas and dust into space, before finally plunging into the fiery depths.

Astronomers have captured the first image showing a powerful jet being launched from the edge of a black hole's event horizon into intergalactic space.The observations of the black hole at the centre of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) could help reveal how black hole jets, which are among the brightest objects in the universe, are created.

An explosion the size of our solar system has baffled scientists, as its shape similar to that of an extremely flat disc challenges everything they know about explosions in space.Astronomers observed the explosion 180 million light years away, and they say it is much flatter than ever thought possible.

On the morning of October 9, 2022, multiple space-based detectors picked up a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) passing through our Solar System, sending astronomers around the world scrambling to train their telescopes on that part of the sky to collect vital data on the event and its aftermath.Dubbed GRB 221009A and deemed likely to be the "birth cry" of a new black hole, the gamma-ray burst is the most powerful yet recorded.

An asteroid big enough to wipe out a city will pass harmlessly between Earth and the moon's orbit this weekend, missing both, while providing scientists a chance to study the object close up.Asteroid flybys are common but Nasa said it was rare for one so big to come so close and that events like this occurred only about once a decade.

"Lights Out: Recovering Our Night Sky," an exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History, explores the impact of light pollution on different organisms.(Avalon.red/AlamyStock Photo)One of the darkest places in daytime Washington at the moment is a tribute to the night sky.The notably low-lit exhibition "Lights Out: Recovering Our Night Sky" is the National Museum of Natural History's effort to illustrate what's been lost as artificial illumination bleaches out the heavens.

Move Over, Oumuamua
Remember Oumuamua, that weird and allegedly alien object that flew past Earth back in 2017, when we were all so young and starry-eyed?Now, some scientists have a new and boring explanation for what it was - and reader, it may have nothing to do with aliens.In a new study published in the journal Nature this week, astronomy researchers out of Cornell and Berkeley suggested that Oumuamua, the interstellar interloper that whizzed past Earth in 2017 and has puzzled, mesmerized, and frustrated astronomers ever since, may well have been a gas-propelled comet with a tail so faint that we couldn't see it.

No matter what science fiction says, it's hard to imagine humans will ever be able to stomp around a planet in another planetary system looking for life - the distances, time, and energy involved are simply too great.But what if we could look somewhere else? Somewhere a little closer to home?What if fossilized alien microbes are already coming to visit us-even if it's by accident?

The cigar-shaped 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object in recorded human history to whizz through the Solar System, is a comet after all, a pair of astronomers declared in research published in Nature on Wednesday.In 2017, 'Oumuamua captured the imagination of scientists and space fans with its peculiar characteristics.

Ultraviolet light blasting the atmosphere of giant exoplanet WASP-39b is producing a toxic gas called sulfur dioxide.WASP-39b, an exoplanet about 700 light years away, is about as massive as Saturn, but it orbits its Sun-like star on a scorchingly close four-day orbit.Its hellishly hot 1600°F atmosphere contains carbon dioxide, water, and a noxious chemical called sulfur dioxide.

In late 2017, our Solar System received its very first known interstellar visitor: a bizarre cigar-shaped object hurtling past at 44 kilometers per second, dubbed 'Oumuamua (Hawaiian for "messenger from afar arriving first").Was it a comet?An asteroid?A piece of alien technology?Scientists have been puzzling over the origin and unusual characteristics of 'Oumuamua ever since, most notably its strange orbit, and suggesting various models to account for them.

Last September, the Double Asteroid Redirect Test, or DART, smashed a spacecraft into a small binary asteroid called Dimorphos, successfully altering its orbit around a larger companion.We're now learning more about the aftermath of that collision, thanks to two new papers reporting on data collected by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.

Astronomers have uncovered the first evidence of an active volcano on Venus, using computer images captured more than 30 years ago by a NASA spacecraft.Launched in May 1989, the Magellan probe became the first of its kind to image almost the entire surface of Venus (like, 98 percent) using radar.The spacecraft no longer exists - it was crashed into the planet in 1994.

Astronomers have been looking for the source of the matter that makes up early galaxies for decades.Now, for the first time, astronomers have observed the cold, steady streams of gas that make up the raw material for stars.Despite the name, the filamentary stream surrounding and heading into the galaxy 4C 41.17- more than 10 billion light years away - is immense: a thin stream of cold carbon gas 100 kiloparsecs, or half a million light years, wide, and as massive as 140 billion suns.

Spin Kick
Last year, NASA rammed its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft into a tiny moonlet called Dimorphos, demonstrating a promising way to redirect a potential incoming killer asteroid to save life on Earth.Now, given the huge amount of scrutiny following the collision, scientists have made another surprising discovery: Dimorphos' much larger companion Didymos is spinning so fast, they say, that it's capable of shooting pieces of rubble into space, a puzzling conclusion that highlights the fact that asteroids aren't necessarily the inert lumps of rock they're often thought of, Scientific American reports.

An ultramassive black hole about 30 billion times the mass of the Sun has been discovered by astronomers in the UK.Scientists at Durham University said the gargantuan black hole was one of the biggest ever found.The team described their findings, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, as extremely exciting.

Astronomers just found another case of something out there bigger than a supermassive black hole: ultramassive black holes, which are the true behemoths of the Universe, clocking in at over 10 billion times the mass of our Sun.While there aren't any fundamental differences between supermassive and ultramassive black holes besides their size, scientists sometimes use the term to set apart the really big ones.

An ultramassive black hole around 33 billion times the mass of the Sun has been discovered by astronomers in the UK.Scientists from Durham University said the gargantuan black hole is one of the biggest ever found.The team described its findings, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, as extremely exciting.

Recent observations with the James Webb Space Telescope suggest that the innermost world of the TRAPPIST-1 system has no atmosphere - or at most, it's extremely thinly veiled with the tattered remnants of its original atmosphere.That's not surprising, given how closely the planet orbits a star with a wild past.

An artist's impression of a black hole, which distorts light passing near it creating a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing Handout / ESA/HUBBLE/AFP One of the largest black holes ever recorded has been discovered using a new technique that could spot thousands more of the insatiable celestial monsters in the coming years, according to astronomers.

Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter.Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.Telescopes around the world were watching when a NASA spacecraft intentionally crashed into an asteroid in September 2022.New images released Tuesday by astronomers who used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile reveal detailed views of debris streaming away from the collision created by the Double Asteroid Redirect Test.