HubbleSite said on April 6, 2023, that scientists have identified a 200,000-light-years-long bridge of hot, young, blue stars. It spans twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. This star bridge – located halfway across the universe – appears to stretch between a runaway supermassive black hole and the galaxy the black hole is escaping. Astronomers think the black hole is causing gas to compress along its wake.
The existence of black holes was predicted more than a century ago, using only mathematical equations to do so. Now that we’ve taken the first shot of one, we may go on to the next. Black holes, on the other hand, continue to retain a wealth of mysteries. Similar to their even more enigmatic mirror twins: the white holes!
White holes are hypothetical cosmic areas that operate oppositely to black holes in their function. Nothing can escape from a black hole, and nothing can enter a white hole in the same way.
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Link contributed by Terrance Hutchinson
Black holes are regions of space-time where gravity is so strong, nothing can escape the pull — not even light. So it’s remarkable that scientists have now directly observed light from behind a supermassive black hole — but it wouldn’t have surprised Albert Einstein.
The hole story: We don’t actually know what’s inside a supermassive black hole, but we do know that a spinning plane of gas and dust, called the accretion disc, rotates around it.
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On October 9, 2022, the brightest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever detected lit up monitors across Earth. Nicknamed BOAT for brightest of all time, the blast is thought to have been from a star becoming a black hole. It was so powerful that it disturbed Earth’s ionosphere from 2.4 billion light-years away. And its x-ray radiation illuminated dust in our Milky Way galaxy, creating the apparent concentric rings seen in the image above (the increase in size is really a perspective effect, with the largest ring the closest to us).
link submitted by Gene Savoy Jr.
Humankind is getting very good at looking deep into space: We have already seen two neutron stars colliding, we have encountered mysterious radio blasts and we are about to see, for the first time, the event horizon of a black hole.
But there are still some surprises out there, right here in our own corner of the Universe.
Upon retaking the observations of a nearby globular cluster, the Hubble Space Telescope accidentally captured an unpublished galaxy. The newly discovered galaxy was named Bedin I – and is almost as old as the Universe.
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An ultramassive black hole, understood to be one of the largest ever detected, has been discovered by astronomers using a new technique.
The findings, published by the Royal Astronomical Society, show that the black hole is more than 30 billion times the mass of the sun – a scale rarely seen by astronomers.
The researchers described it as an “extremely exciting” discovery that opens up “tantalizing” possibilities for detecting further black holes.
link submitted by Robert Petrovich
The weather is slowly changing on Jupiter and Uranus, according to our galaxy’s own interplanetary meteorologist.
The NASA Hubble Space Telescope captured Earth’s outer planetary neighbors in images from 2014 to 2022, documenting changes in the planets’ weather and seasons over time.
With Jupiter at about 484 million miles (779 million kilometers) away from our sun and Uranus about 1.8 billion miles (3 billion kilometers) away, each takes longer to orbit the sun, which means a slower pace of seasons. But the gas giants still experience extreme weather.
link submitted by Gene Savoy Jr.
Note: This shows that climate change is not just happening on Earth.
Of all of the fundamental forces known to humanity, gravity is both the most familiar and the one that holds the Universe together, connecting distant galaxies in a vast and interconnected cosmic web. With that in mind, a fascinating question to ponder is whether gravity has a speed. It turns out that it does, and scientists have precisely measured it.
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When we think of ancient technology, we often imagine simple tools and primitive machinery. But what if we told you that over 2,000 years ago, the ancient Greeks had built the world’s oldest computer? That’s right, we’re talking about the Antikythera mechanism , a complex device discovered in a shipwreck off the coast of Greece in 1901.
This incredible machine contained a system of gears and cogs that was able to predict astronomical positions and eclipses with incredible accuracy. It’s no wonder that some have called it the world’s first computer, a marvel of engineering that was centuries ahead of its time. The Antikythera mechanism is a reminder that even in the ancient world, there were minds that were capable of incredible feats of technology and innovation.
This article is video only.
Watch the video at youtube.com. (14:42)
link submitted by Robert Petrovich