Space News

Toroid

Founding Member
NASA's TESS mission finds the smallest planet.
https://phys.org/news/2019-06-nasa-tess-mission-smallest-planet.html
Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite - Wikipedia
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a world between the sizes of Mars and Earth orbiting a bright, cool, nearby star. The planet, called L 98-59b, marks the tiniest discovered by TESS to date.

Two other worlds orbit the same star. While all three planets' sizes are known, further study with other telescopes will be needed to determine if they have atmospheres and, if so, which gases are present. The L 98-59 worlds nearly double the number of small exoplanets—that is, planets beyond our solar system—that have the best potential for this kind of follow-up.

"The discovery is a great engineering and scientific accomplishment for TESS," said Veselin Kostov, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. "For atmospheric studies of small planets, you need short orbits around bright stars, but such planets are difficult to detect. This system has the potential for fascinating future studies."

A paper on the findings, led by Kostov, was published in the June 27 issue of The Astronomical Journal and is now available online.

L 98-59b is around 80% Earth's size and about 10% smaller than the previous record holder discovered by TESS. Its host star, L 98-59, is an M dwarf about one-third the mass of the Sun and lies about 35 light-years away in the southern constellation Volans. While L 98-59b is a record for TESS, even smaller planets have been discovered in data collected by NASA's Kepler satellite, including Kepler-37b, which is only 20% larger than the Moon.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wkNlv5nDLE
 

michael59

Celestial
Bright, colorful pockets of star formation are blooming in this spiral galaxy just under 70 million light-years away seen by @NASAHubble. The orange-pink glow is created as hydrogen gas reacts to the intense light streaming outwards from newborn stars:

6a12f3bbb2ae8aad7876d5e51cbf3c47.jpg
 

Toroid

Founding Member
Astronomers believe the young Milky Way once swallowed a dwarf galaxy
Astronomers believe they've mapped an important sequence of events that shaped our galaxy 10 billion years ago. In a paper published in Nature Astronomy today, researchers from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) share their findings that a dwarf galaxy, Gaia-Enceladus, once collided and merged with the early Milky Way. Their discovery offers a new understanding of how the Milky Way formed.

Astronomers previously believed that the galaxy was made of two separate sets of stars, but exactly how or when they came together was a mystery. Using the Gaia space telescope, these researchers were able to take more precise measurements of the position, brightness and distance of roughly one million stars. They also looked at the density of "metals," or elements without hydrogen or helium, that the stars contain. The researchers determined that both sets of stars are about the same age but that one was set into "chaotic motion," evidence of a galaxy collision.

The researchers believe Gaia-Enceladus collided with the young Milky Way about 10 billion years ago, and over the course of millions of years, the Milky Way consumed the dwarf galaxy. The researchers also determined that the collision contributed to a four-billion-year stretch of star formation, and gas from that activity settled to form the "thin disk" that runs through the center of the Milky Way. They believe the remnants of Gaia-Enceladus eventually formed the halo of the present-day Milky Way.

According to the researchers, this information provides "unprecedented detail" about the early stages of our cosmic history. Of course, it's not the first time we've heard of one galaxy consuming another. In fact, our galactic neighbor Andromeda cannibalized a nearby galaxy some two billion years ago, and it's on track to collide with the Milky Way in the very distant future.
 

Toroid

Founding Member
Something crashed into Jupiter.
Meteorite Collision On Jupiter So Big, It Was Visible From Earth
xmeteorite-collision-on-jupiter-so-big-was-visible-from-earth-1565344206.jpg.pagespeed.ic.6bE1K7J04L.jpg
 

Toroid

Founding Member

The Soyuz has finally docked with the ISS.
Vladimir Putin's six-foot tall Russian robo-naut Fedor has finally reached the ISS | Daily Mail Online
Russia's Soyuz rocket with Vladimir Putin's six-foot tall humanoid robot Fedor has finally docked at the ISS
  • Failed attempt at the weekend blamed on the International Space Station, not the spaceship, by Roscosmos
  • Fedor the six foot tall humanoid robot was on-board the Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft with no humans
  • Also known as Skybot F850 - it is first Russian robot in space and allows astronauts carry out tasks remotely
 

Sheltie

Fratty and out of touch.
I saw a documentary recently on The History Channel that speculated about extrasolar planets and the type of life that may exist on them. I'm beginning to believe life on other planets could be very different from anything we can imagine.

One thing I had never considered is that, even though there may be over 500 billion stars in our galaxy, most of those may be uninhabitable due to the extreme radiation they may receive as you get closer to the center of the galaxy. It could be that only the solar systems like ours, out in the suburbs of the galaxy, are safe for life. Even so, that would still leave a mind boggling amount of planets that could be habitable.
 

Toroid

Founding Member
I saw a documentary recently on The History Channel that speculated about extrasolar planets and the type of life that may exist on them. I'm beginning to believe life on other planets could be very different from anything we can imagine.

One thing I had never considered is that, even though there may be over 500 billion stars in our galaxy, most of those may be uninhabitable due to the extreme radiation they may receive as you get closer to the center of the galaxy. It could be that only the solar systems like ours, out in the suburbs of the galaxy, are safe for life. Even so, that would still leave a mind boggling amount of planets that could be habitable.
The Drake Equation estimated 1,000 to 100,000,000 civilizations in the Milky Way.
Drake equation - Wikipedia
Inserting the above minimum numbers into the equation gives a minimum N of 20 (see: Range of results). Inserting the maximum numbers gives a maximum of 50,000,000. Drake states that given the uncertainties, the original meeting concluded that NL, and there were probably between 1000 and 100,000,000 civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.
 

nivek

As Above So Below
That's interesting, I haven't heard of those holes in our galaxy before, I doubt dark matter would cause them though...It doesn't seem possible even a concentration of dark matter making these holes like a bullet hole through the plane of stars...It must be something else...

What do you think @Thomas R. Morrison ?...

...
Statistically there should be areas where multiple supernovas occur. That would be my guess - a series of supernova events in the same region over a period of time could make a hole and leave no observable signs.
 
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