Space News
Poster: Aron Schatz
Posted on January 7, 2003 at 4:20:16 PM
There is a bunch of space news that I found interesting, maybe you will too.
Black hole starving.
A year in 29 Hours.
Milkey Way has a star ring.
CO2 carves Mars.
Black hole starving.
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Indeed, evidence for such events, which astronomers are viewing 26,000 years later due to the time it takes light to travel to Earth from the center of the galaxy, can be found in the image. A faint streak of X-rays about one light-year long has been discovered 1.5 light-years from Sgr A*. The streak points at Sgr A*, suggesting the streak may be a jet of particles expelled at nearly the speed of light from just outside the event horizon of the black hole. The intensity and size of this jet indicate the flaring activity has been occurring for many years.
On a much larger scale, huge lobes of 20-million-degree- Centigrade gas, extending over dozens of light-years on either side of the black hole, have also been discovered. "These lobes show that enormous explosions have occurred several times over the last 10,000 years," said Mark Morris of UCLA, lead author of a second paper on Sgr A*, who also participated in the press conference.
A year in 29 Hours.
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The planet, dubbed OGLE-TR-56b, is about the size of Jupiter. It is extremely hot and whips around its star in the constellation Sagittarius every 29 hours, compared with Earth's 365-day orbit round the sun.
"The new planet is in the strangest-ever orbit," Sasselov said. "It's so hot there, it rains iron."
Milkey Way has a star ring.
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It is also unclear how such a structure might have formed. One possibility is that the stars originated within our galaxy but were flung out over time. Another is that the gravity of the Milky Way tore a smaller satellite galaxy to pieces leaving this outer debris.
If confirmed, the existence of a ring of stars encircling the Milky Way would not be a complete surprise, says Michael Merrifield, at Nottingham University, UK. "There are quite a number of other spiral galaxies similar to the Milky Way that have been observed to be surrounded by faint rings of stars," he says.
CO2 carves Mars.
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"Nothing based on water can flow at these temperatures, so the culprit must be avalanches of gaseous carbon dioxide and rocky debris."
This is because carbon dioxide does not melt on Mars: it boils directly from the solid - a process called sublimation.
"The boiling dry ice acts like a armada of miniature hovercraft carrying a shower of sand, dust, and tumbling rocks down the slope, carving out the gullies as it goes," Dr Hoffman says.