Two decades of monitoring from W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaiʻi reveals a peculiar cloud dubbed X7 being pulled apart as it accelerates toward the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
Astronomy
Feb 21, 2023
178
502
Was it a catastrophic collision in the star's asteroid belt? A giant impact that disrupted a nearby planet? A dusty cloud of rock and debris? A family of comets breaking apart? Or was it alien megastructures built to harvest ...
Astronomy
Nov 25, 2015
6
1109
The best observations so far of the dusty gas cloud G2 confirm that it made its closest approach to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way in May 2014 and has survived the experience. The new result from ...
Astronomy
Mar 26, 2015
10
4025
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured images of a brown dwarf with silicate particles in its atmosphere. In their paper posted on the arXiv preprint server, astronomers describe their analysis of the brown dwarf ...
(PhysOrg.com) -- Tiny crystals of a green mineral called olivine are falling down like rain on a burgeoning star, according to observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
Astronomy
May 27, 2011
9
0
Although engineers, scientists and manufacturers are still in the process of building all of the instruments that will fly aboard NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, they had to figure out long ago, how it was going to "unfold" ...
Space Exploration
May 13, 2009
0
0
Ryo Ando, a graduate student of the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues have observed the galaxy NGC 253 and resolved its locations of star formation down to the scale of a molecular cloud, a star formation site with ...
Astronomy
Nov 6, 2017
0
529
(PhysOrg.com) -- Observations made with the APEX telescope in submillimetre-wavelength light reveal the cold dusty clouds from which stars form in the Carina Nebula. This site of violent star formation, which plays host to ...
Astronomy
Nov 16, 2011
2
0
Even while construction of the James Webb Space Telescope is underway on the most advanced infrared vision of any space observatory, its technologies are already proving useful to human eye health here on Earth.
Space Exploration
Jul 29, 2011
3
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- Star clusters are among the most visually alluring and astrophysically fascinating objects in the sky. One of the most spectacular nestles deep in the southern skies near the Southern Cross in the constellation ...
Astronomy
Oct 29, 2009
1
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