Tomanowos, aka the Willamette Meteorite, may be the world’s most interesting rock. Its story includes catastrophic ice age floods, theft of Native American cultural heritage and plenty of human folly.
One of Einstein’s weirder predictions is that massive, spinning objects exert a drag on space-time itself. Now an orbiting pair of unusual stars has revealed this effect in action.
Today we hear about some of the fascinating space research underway at Siding Spring Observatory – and how, despite gruelling hours and endless paperwork, astronomers retain their sense of wonder for the night sky.
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Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation e Cameron Furlong, The Conversation
‘The size, the grandeur, the peacefulness of being in the dark’: what it’s like to study space at Siding Spring Observatory
The Conversation, CC BY54,3 MB(download)
Three hours north-east of Parkes lies a remote astronomical research facility, unpolluted by city lights, where researchers are trying to unlock some of the biggest questions about our Universe.
An artist’s conception of two black holes entwined in a gravitational tango.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Christopher Go
Smadar Naoz, University of California, Los Angeles
There is a massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Measurements of star orbits near this black hole suggest that there may be a second companion black hole nearby.
Anomalies in nuclear physics experiments may show signs of a new force.
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A recent experiment with atomic nuclei is hard to square with our current understanding of physics.
A recently discovered black hole – found by the way it makes a nearby star wobble – is hard to square with our understanding of how these dark cosmic objects form.
NAOC, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Astronomers using a new technique to hunt black holes found one 70 times as heavy as the Sun
Measuring in at 10,159 miles (16,350 kilometers) in width (as of April 3, 2017) Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is 1.3 times as wide as Earth.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Christopher Go
Little bits of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot seem to be flaking off. Is it a sign of the demise of this enigmatic red cloud, or just a consequence of atmospheric chaos we can’t see from above?
Stars begin their life inside very large, fluffy clouds of space dust and gas called nebulae.
A composite image showing the distribution of dark matter, galaxies and hot gas in a merging galaxy cluster taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii.
NASA
Matt Agnew is on the hunt for love as star of the new Bachelor Australia series. But whoever he picks (and he already has, apparently) will have to compete with TESS. So who, or what, is TESS?
Another reason you don’t want to get too close to a black hole is because of something we call ‘spaghettification’. If this happened to Earth it would be… unpleasant.
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If you got too close to a black hole, it would suck you in and you’d never be able to escape, even if you were travelling at the speed of light.
This point of no return is called the event horizon.
Today, we’re asking two astrophysicists and a planetary scientist: what’s the likelihood we’ll be living on Mars or the Moon in future?
Pixabay/WikiImages
Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation e Molly Glassey, The Conversation
What’s the next ‘giant leap’ for humankind in space? We asked 3 space experts
The Conversation, CC BY27,3 MB(download)
What's the next thing that will blow us away or bring us together the way the Moon landing did in 1969? Moon mining? Alien contact? Retirement on Mars? Three space experts share their predictions.
People do live outside Earth – on the International Space Station! But humans have had to find a way to make the conditions there more like what we’re used to at home.
Flickr/NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center
It’s true that here on Earth, if you want to burn something you need oxygen. But the Sun is different. It is not burning with the same kind of flame you would have on Earth if you burned a candle.