- Astronomers discover 2nd-ever ‘Tatooine’ star system with multiple planets orbiting multiple suns Livescience.com
- New Tatooine-like exoplanet discovered orbiting twin suns. Meet BEBOP-1c. Space.com
- Direct from `Star Wars`: Tatooine-like planet that orbits twin stars discovered WION
- Astronomers Discover BEBOP-1c: Tatooine-Like Exoplanet Orbits Twin Stars in a Multiplanetary System SciTechDaily
- New Solar System Found Where Planets Orbit Two Suns—Just like Luke Skywalker’s Home in Star Wars Good News Network
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: orbiting
Second potentially habitable Earth-size planet found orbiting nearby star
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A NASA mission has spotted an Earth-size exoplanet orbiting a small star about 100 light-years away.
The planet, named TOI 700 e, is likely rocky and 95% the size of our world. The celestial body is the fourth planet to be detected orbiting the small, cool M dwarf star TOI 700. All of the exoplanets were found by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS mission.
Another planet in the system, discovered in 2020 and named TOI 700 d, is also the size of Earth. Both of these exoplanets exist in their star’s habitable zone, or just the right distance from the star that liquid water might potentially exist on their surfaces. The potential for liquid water suggests that the planets themselves could be, or might once have been, habitable for life.
The discovery of the fourth planet was announced Tuesday at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, and a study about the exoplanet has been accepted for publication by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“This is one of only a few systems with multiple, small, habitable-zone planets that we know of,” said lead study author Emily Gilbert, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement.
“That makes the TOI 700 system an exciting prospect for additional follow-up. Planet e is about 10% smaller than planet d, so the system also shows how additional TESS observations help us find smaller and smaller worlds.”
Small, cool M dwarf stars like TOI 700 are common in the universe, and many have been found to host exoplanets in recent years, like the TRAPPIST-1 system and its seven exoplanets that the James Webb Space Telescope will observe.
Closest to the star is TOI 700 b, which is 90% of Earth’s size and completes one rapid orbit around the star every 10 Earth days. Then there’s TOI 700 c, which is 2.5 times bigger than our planet and finishes one orbit around the star every 16 days. These planets are both likely tidally locked, meaning they always show the same side to the star — much like how the same side of the moon always faces Earth.
The two exoplanets in the habitable zone of the star, planets d and e, have longer orbits of 37 days and 28 days, respectively, because they’re a little more distant from the star. The newly announced planet e is actually located between planets c and d.
The TESS mission, launched in 2018, monitors large portions of the night sky for 27 days at a time, staring at the brightest stars and tracking their changes in brightness. These dips in luminosity indicate orbiting planets as they pass in front of their stars, called transits. The mission began observing the southern sky in 2018, then turned to the northern sky. In 2020, the mission refocused on the southern sky again for additional observations, revealing the fourth planet in the TOI 700 system.
“If the star was a little closer or the planet a little bigger, we might have been able to spot TOI 700 e in the first year of TESS data,” said study coauthor Ben Hord, a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a graduate researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement. “But the signal was so faint that we needed the additional year of transit observations to identify it.”
While the researchers use other space and ground-based observatories to conduct follow-up observations of the intriguing planetary system, more TESS data is pouring in.
“TESS just completed its second year of northern sky observations,” said Allison Youngblood, a research astrophysicist and the TESS deputy project scientist at Goddard. “We’re looking forward to the other exciting discoveries hidden in the mission’s treasure trove of data.”
Scientists Discovered A Strange ‘Mini Moon’ Asteroid Orbiting Earth
Has Earth ever had more than one moon? Well, it depends how you define it, but Earth definitely has had other orbiting objects over the years. In fact, three have been confirmed in the 21st century alone. One of those was discovered in December 2022. It’s an asteroid known as 2022 YG, per CNET.
© Buradaki/Getty
asteroid and Earth in space
Though it was first seen on December 15, the official discovery is recorded on December 16 at the MARGO Observatory in Nauchnij, Crimea (via Minor Planet Center). It was spotted by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov, who also previously discovered the first known interstellar comet, according to CNET. 2022 YG was last observed on December 23 at the Steward Observatory on Mount Lemmon, Arizona (via Minor Planet Center). The European Space Agency estimates its next pass near Earth will be around December 22, 2023.
Despite having been spotted only recently, 2022 YG has been orbiting Earth since about 1961, according to astronomers’ estimates. They guess it may stay in orbit until around 2181, but CNET says astronomers will be doing further research to refine that estimate.
The Numbers On 2022 YG
© AstroStar/Shutterstock
man with telescope starry background
Simulations of 2022 YG’s orbital path show that it’s unusually shaped: like an elongated oval, stretching out far beyond Earth in two directions but closer to us on its other two sides (via CNET). This type of orbit is called Apollo, named for asteroid 1862 Apollo. Per NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, this term applies to asteroids close to Earth but with a semi-major axis longer than Earth’s, meaning that its orbital path is longer than ours in at least one direction.
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Astronomers believe 2022 YG takes about 366 days to orbit Earth once, similar to the length of Earth’s orbit of the Sun, per the European Space Agency. Of course, it isn’t perfectly circular; CNET says it’s estimated to have a diameter of about 52 feet in one direction and 98 feet in the other.
The Minor Planet Center records 2022 YG’s arc length as eight days. This is the length of time over which a celestial object has been consistently observed. The arc length helps astronomers guess the object’s orbital path (via European Space Agency). 2022 YG has been observed from nine different places on Earth so far, per the Minor Planet Center.
Earth’s Mini-Moons
© Xxllxx/Getty Images
Irregular shaped asteroids
During the 19th and 20th centuries, various people made claims of having discovered “mini-moons” — other objects orbiting Earth. None of these were accurate. According to Discover Magazine, clouds of dust or debris near the moon can sometimes be mistaken for mini-moons, but they aren’t really solid enough to qualify. However, scientists believe there may be more mini-moons we don’t know about. In 2014 and 2016, two small fireball meteors smashed into Earth, and estimates of their orbital paths suggested they’d been orbiting Earth.
Most mini-moons don’t stay orbiting Earth for very long. The two confirmed mini-moon asteroids discovered in the 21st century only stayed with us briefly, per CNET. Discover explains this is because the Earth’s gravity only has a weak hold on them. 2022 YG’s projected 220-year orbit of Earth is unusual.
The first confirmed mini-moon was discovered in 2006. The moon’s gravitational pull knocked it out of Earth’s orbit by June 2007, after which it orbited the sun. The second confirmed mini-moon was discovered in 2020. Called 2020 CD3, it was hard to spot because it was much smaller than 2022 YG, only about three feet wide. It probably orbited Earth from 2017 to 2020 (via Space.com). It was around 300,000 miles away from Earth, slightly closer than the moon, per Discover Magazine. Astronomers hope our orbiting asteroids could provide a new opportunity in space exploration, allowing for short missions from Earth.
Read this next: What The James Webb Telescope Can Tell Us About Deep Space
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Apollo 8 astronauts shared Christmas Eve message while orbiting the moon
On Christmas Eve in 1968, Apollo 8’s astronauts captivated the world with a live broadcast from lunar orbit.
It was the night before Christmas in 1968 when the Apollo 8 astronauts beamed back a message for “the good Earth” while circling the moon.
NASA Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders became the first to orbit the moon on Dec. 24, 1968.
With the pressure mounting under President John F. Kennedy’s challenge for a moon landing and the tragedy of the Apollo 1 fire, NASA made bold changes to Apollo 8, pressing ahead with a human lunar orbiting mission.
The decision sent the crew to the moon and back without a lunar module on the first human spaceflight of the Saturn V rocket and with a single engine on the capsule to bring them back home.
After launching on Dec. 21, 1968, Borman, Lovell and Anders arrived in lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, orbiting the lunar surface 10 times.
Left: A still image from the fifth TV broadcast of the Apollo 8 mission. Right: An image of the Earth from the mission’s final TV transmission. (Image: NASA)
(NASA)
When the crew emerged from behind the moon on the first orbit, the Apollo 8 astronauts shared images of the moon and Earth, including the view of Earthrise more than 240,000 miles away. The image of Earth with the moon below became one of the most well-known images of the Apollo era, according to NASA.
Fast-forward more than 50 years to December 2022, and NASA’s Orion spacecraft, designed to carry the next humans to the moon, also shared a similar view of Earthrise.
NASA managers had told the Apollo 8 astronauts to prepare to share some words with the world that would be broadcast around the globe. The crew was given the creative freedom to choose what to say but were told “to do something appropriate,” Borman said in a 2008 interview.
With that in mind, they chose to read the first 10 verses of the Book of Genesis.
Lovell said years later, the message was chosen because of its universal meaning.
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“The first ten verses of Genesis is the foundation of many of the world’s religions, not just the Christian religion,” Lovell said in 2008. “There are more people in other religions than the Christian religion around the world, and so this would be appropriate to that, and so that’s how it came to pass.”
As the Apollo 8 capsule orbited the moon more than 240,000 miles from Earth, each astronaut took turns reading verses.
“From the crew of Apollo 8, we close with goodnight, good luck, a merry Christmas, and god bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”
The broadcast was seen or heard by 1 out of 4 people on Earth.
The message from the moon would be the last before the astronauts attempted to return to Earth, and mission control waited to learn if Apollo 8’s engine burn to leave moon orbit worked.
After the successful engine burn, Lovell told mission control, “Roger, please be informed there is a Santa Claus.”
The Apollo 8 capsule splashed down on Dec. 27, 1968, in the Pacific Ocean.
Two Worlds Orbiting A Nearby Star Could Be More Than Half Water : ScienceAlert
Two worlds orbiting a tiny star 218 light-years away appear to be of a kind unlike anything we have in our Solar System.
The exoplanets are named Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d. Both are around 1.5 times the radius of Earth, and both appear to be soggy worlds consisting of thick, steamy atmospheres and insanely deep oceans, all wrapped around a rocky-metallic interior.
“We previously thought that planets that were a bit larger than Earth were big balls of metal and rock, like scaled-up versions of Earth, and that’s why we called them super-Earths,” says astronomer Björn Benneke of the University of Montreal.
“However, we have now shown that these two planets, Kepler-138c and d, are quite different in nature: a big fraction of their entire volume is likely composed of water. It is the first time we observe planets that can be confidently identified as water worlds, a type of planet that was theorized by astronomers to exist for a long time.”
A recent analysis of another world found that it could be a water world, but follow-up observations will be needed to confirm. According to the researchers, their work on Kepler-138’s two oceanic planets is less uncertain.
Working out what planets outside our Solar System (or exoplanets) are made of usually requires quite a bit of detective work. They’re very far away and very dim compared to the light of the stars they orbit; direct images are very hard to obtain and subsequently very rare, and don’t show much detail.
The composition of an exoplanet is usually inferred from its density, which is calculated using two measurements – one taken from the eclipsing (or transit) of the star’s light by the planet and the other from the star’s radial velocity or ‘wobble’.
The amount of starlight that gets blocked by the transit tells us the size of the exoplanet, from which we get a radius. Radial velocity is induced by the gravitational tug of the exoplanet, seen as a regular but very small expansion and contraction of the wavelength of the star’s light as it gets pulled about. The amplitude of this movement can tell us how much mass an exoplanet has.
Once you have an object’s size and mass, you can calculate its density.
A gaseous world, like Jupiter or even Neptune, will have a relatively low density. Rocky worlds that are rich in metals will have higher densities. At 5.5 grams per cubic centimeter, Earth is the densest planet in our Solar System; Saturn is the least dense, at 0.69 grams per cubic centimeter.
Transit data show Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d have radii 1.51 times that of Earth, and measures of their respective tugs on Kepler-138 give us masses of 2.3 and 2.1 times that of Earth, respectively. Those characteristics, in turn, give us a density of around 3.6 grams per cubic centimeter for both worlds – somewhere between a rocky and a gaseous composition.
That’s pretty close to the Jovian ice moon Europa, which has a density of 3.0 grams per cubic centimeter. It happens to be covered by a liquid global ocean underneath an icy shell.
“Imagine larger versions of Europa or Enceladus, the water-rich moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, but brought much closer to their star,” says astrophysicist Caroline Piaulet of the University of Montreal, who led the research. “Instead of an icy surface, Kepler-138c and d would harbor large water-vapor envelopes.”
According to the team’s modeling, water would make up more than 50 percent of the exoplanets’ volume, extending down to a depth of about 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles). Earth’s oceans, for context, have an average depth of 3.7 kilometers (2.3 miles).
But Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d are much closer to their star than Earth. Although that star is a small, cool red dwarf, that proximity would make the two exoplanets much, much hotter than our world. They have orbital periods of 13 and 23 days, respectively.
This means that the oceans and atmospheres on these worlds are unlikely to look much like our ocean, the researchers say.
“The temperature in Kepler-138c’s and Kepler-138d’s atmospheres is likely above the boiling point of water, and we expect a thick, dense atmosphere made of steam on these planets,” Piaulet says.
“Only under that steam atmosphere there could potentially be liquid water at high pressure, or even water in another phase that occurs at high pressures, called a supercritical fluid.”
Alien, indeed.
The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.
Russian Cosmonauts Spacewalk Outside Space Station Orbiting Above Brazil
Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin work on the outside of the Rassvet module.
On November 17, two Russian cosmonauts ventured outside the International Space Station (ISS) for a nearly seven hour spacewalk. The walk took place for some hardware transfers and electronics connections on the International Space Station.
In the video shared by the space station on Instagram, the cosmonauts can be seen walking in space. However, it does appear that they are floating as the Earth is seen in the background.
Sharing the video on the social media platform, they wrote, “Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin were conducting the first of four Russian maintenance spacewalks planned before the end of the year on Nov. 17, 2022, as the station orbited 260 miles above the coast of Brazil. The duo from Roscosmos prepared a radiator on the Rassvet module for installation on the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module.”
According to NASA, it was the third spacewalk in Mr Prokopyev’s career, and the first for Mr Petelin. It was the tenth spacewalk at the station in 2022 and the 255th spacewalk for space station assembly, maintenance and upgrades.
The space agency also added that Mr Prokopyev and Mr Petelin completed their major objective, preparing a radiator on the Rassvet module for installation on the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module.
Since being shared, the post has amassed over 4.3 lakh views and 96,000 likes. Many users were stunned to see the view from space.
Also Read: James Webb Space Telescope Reveals Never Seen Before Images Of Earliest Galaxies
One user wrote, “A view of a lifetime.”
“Space walks are about the coolest thing ever,” said a second person.
“They’re so brave! It must be freaking scary to be out there,” said a third user.
A fourth user commented, “That must be so awesome to do even if it’s to do maintenance or when installing modules but I can also imagine it being a bit scary as well though.”
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Russian Cosmonauts Spacewalk Outside Space Station Orbiting Above Brazil
Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin work on the outside of the Rassvet module.
On November 17, two Russian cosmonauts ventured outside the International Space Station (ISS) for a nearly seven hour spacewalk. The walk took place for some hardware transfers and electronics connections on the International Space Station.
In the video shared by the space station on Instagram, the cosmonauts can be seen walking in space. However, it does appear that they are floating as the Earth is seen in the background.
Sharing the video on the social media platform, they wrote, “Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin were conducting the first of four Russian maintenance spacewalks planned before the end of the year on Nov. 17, 2022, as the station orbited 260 miles above the coast of Brazil. The duo from Roscosmos prepared a radiator on the Rassvet module for installation on the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module.”
According to NASA, it was the third spacewalk in Mr Prokopyev’s career, and the first for Mr Petelin. It was the tenth spacewalk at the station in 2022 and the 255th spacewalk for space station assembly, maintenance and upgrades.
The space agency also added that Mr Prokopyev and Mr Petelin completed their major objective, preparing a radiator on the Rassvet module for installation on the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module.
Since being shared, the post has amassed over 4.3 lakh views and 96,000 likes. Many users were stunned to see the view from space.
Also Read: James Webb Space Telescope Reveals Never Seen Before Images Of Earliest Galaxies
One user wrote, “A view of a lifetime.”
“Space walks are about the coolest thing ever,” said a second person.
“They’re so brave! It must be freaking scary to be out there,” said a third user.
A fourth user commented, “That must be so awesome to do even if it’s to do maintenance or when installing modules but I can also imagine it being a bit scary as well though.”
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Giant Fluffy Planet Orbiting a Cool Red Dwarf Star
Artist impression of an ultra fluffy gas giant planet orbiting a red dwarf star. A gas giant exoplanet [right] with the density of a marshmallow has been detected in orbit around a cool red dwarf star [left] by the NASA-funded NEID radial-velocity instrument on the 3.5-meter WIYN Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. The planet, named TOI-3757 b, is the fluffiest gas giant planet ever discovered around this type of star. Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/Spaceengine/M. Zamani
Kitt Peak National Observatory telescope helps determines that
Using the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, astronomers have observed an unusual Jupiter-like planet in orbit around a cool red dwarf star. Located in the constellation of Auriga the Charioteer around 580 light-years from Earth, this planet, identified as TOI-3757 b, is the lowest-density planet ever detected around a red dwarf star and is estimated to have an average density akin to that of a marshmallow.
Red dwarf stars are the smallest and dimmest members of so-called main-sequence stars — stars that convert hydrogen into helium in their cores at a steady rate. Although they are “cool” compared to stars like our Sun, red dwarf stars can be extremely active and erupt with powerful flares. This can strip orbiting planets of their atmospheres, making this star system a seemingly inhospitable location to form such a gossamer planet.
“Giant planets around red dwarf stars have traditionally been thought to be hard to form,” says Shubham Kanodia, a researcher at Carnegie Institution for Science’s Earth and Planets Laboratory and first author on a paper published in The Astronomical Journal. “So far this has only been looked at with small samples from Doppler surveys, which typically have found giant planets further away from these red dwarf stars. Until now we have not had a large enough sample of planets to find close-in gas planets in a robust manner.”
There are still unexplained mysteries surrounding TOI-3757 b, the big one being how a gas-giant planet can form around a red dwarf star, and especially such a low-density planet. Kanodia’s team, however, thinks they might have a solution to that mystery.
From the ground of the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, the Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOIRLab (WIYN) 3.5-meter Telescope seemingly eyes the Milky Way as it spills from the horizon. A reddish airglow, a natural phenomenon, colors the horizon as well. KPNO is located in the Arizona-Sonoran Desert on the Tohono O’odham Nation and this clear view of part of the Milky Way’s galactic plane shows the favorable conditions in this environment that are needed to view faint celestial objects. These conditions, which include low levels of light pollution, a sky darker than a magnitude of 20, and dry atmospheric conditions, have allowed researchers in the WIYN Consortium to pursue observations of galaxies, nebulas, and exoplanets as well as many other astronomical targets using the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope and its sibling telescope the WIYN 0.9-meter Telescope. Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Sparks
They propose that the extra-low density of TOI-3757 b could be the result of two factors. The first relates to the rocky core of the planet; gas giants are thought to begin as massive rocky cores about ten times the mass of Earth, at which point they rapidly pull in large amounts of neighboring gas to form the gas giants we see today. TOI-3757b’s star has a lower abundance of heavy elements compared to other M-dwarfs with gas giants, and this may have resulted in the rocky core forming more slowly, delaying the onset of gas accretion and therefore affecting the planet’s overall density.
The second factor may be the planet’s orbit, which is tentatively thought to be slightly elliptical. There are times it gets closer to its star than at other times, resulting in substantial excess heating that can cause the planet’s atmosphere to bloat.
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (
“Potential future observations of the atmosphere of this planet using NASA’s new
NASA spacecraft captures image of ocean world orbiting Jupiter during flyby
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A NASA spacecraft flew by one of the most intriguing ocean worlds in our solar system on Thursday.
The Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016, made its closest approach yet to the moon Europa at 5:36 a.m. ET, flying within 219 miles (352 kilometers) of its icy surface.
Juno captured some of the highest-resolution images ever taken of Europa’s ice shell. The first one has already been transmitted to Earth and shows surface features in a region north of the moon’s equator called Annwn Regio.
“Due to the enhanced contrast between light and shadow seen along the terminator (the nightside boundary), rugged terrain features are easily seen, including tall shadow-casting blocks, while bright and dark ridges and troughs curve across the surface,” a NASA release said. “The oblong pit near the terminator might be a degraded impact crater.”
The spacecraft also gathered data about the moon’s interior, where a salty ocean is thought to exist.
“It’s very early in the process, but by all indications Juno’s flyby of Europa was a great success,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio in a statement.
“This first picture is just a glimpse of the remarkable new science to come from Juno’s entire suite of instruments and sensors that acquired data as we skimmed over the moon’s icy crust.”
The ice shell that makes up the moon’s surface is between 10 and 15 miles (16 and 24 kilometers) thick, and the ocean it likely sits on top of is estimated to be 40 to 100 miles (64 to 161 kilometers) deep.
Juno’s Microwave Radiometer instrument will study the ice crust to determine more about its temperature and composition. It’s the first time this kind of information will be collected about Europa’s frozen shell.
The data and images captured by Juno could help inform NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which will launch in 2024 to perform a dedicated series of 50 flybys around the moon after arriving in 2030. Europa Clipper may be able to help scientists determine whether the interior ocean exists and if the moon – one of many orbiting Jupiter – has the potential to be habitable for life.
Clipper will eventually transition from an altitude of 1,700 miles (2,735 kilometers) to just 16 miles (26 kilometers) above the moon’s surface. While Juno has largely focused on studying Jupiter, Clipper will be dedicated to observing Europa.
“Europa is such an intriguing Jovian moon, it is the focus of its own future NASA mission,” Bolton said. “We’re happy to provide data that may help the Europa Clipper team with mission planning, as well as provide new scientific insights into this icy world.”
All of Juno’s instruments collected data during the flyby, including those that could measure the top layers of Europa’s atmosphere and how Europa interacts with Jupiter’s magnetic field. The team is hoping to spot a water plume rising up from cracks in the ice shell. Previous missions have spied plumes of water vapor erupting into space through the ice shell.
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“We have the right equipment to do the job, but to capture a plume will require a lot of luck,” Bolton said. “We have to be at the right place at just the right time, but if we are so fortunate, it’s a home run for sure.”
Juno is in the extended part of its mission, which was set to end in 2021. The spacecraft is now focused on performing flybys of some of Jupiter’s moons. The spacecraft visited Ganymede in 2021 and will zoom by Io in 2023 and 2024. Its mission is now set to end in 2025.
The Europa maneuver shortened Juno’s orbit around Jupiter from 43 to 38 days.
The spacecraft’s flyby was quick, zooming by the moon at 52,920 miles per hour (85,167 kilometers per hour).
Europa is about 90% of the size of Earth’s moon, and Juno’s flyby was the closest a NASA spacecraft has come to it since the Galileo mission flew by in 2000.
“The science team will be comparing the full set of images obtained by Juno with images from previous missions, looking to see if Europa’s surface features have changed over the past two decades,” said Candy Hansen, a Juno coinvestigator who leads planning for the JunoCam camera at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, in a statement.
Superhot blob of gas discovered orbiting Milky Way’s black hole at ‘mind-blowing’ velocity
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Astronomers have detected a blob of hot gas whizzing around the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy at an extraordinary speed. A powerful magnetic field surrounding the colossal space-time tear has supercharged the bizarre gaseous globule, speeding it up to 30% the speed of light, a new study finds.
The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A*, is around 4 million times more massive than the sun and stretches around 40 million miles (60 million kilometers) across. Normally, anything that gets too close to such a massive black hole gets dragged beyond its event horizon by an overwhelming gravitational pull. But the newly discovered gas blob, or hot spot, is moving so quickly that it appears to have formed a stable orbit around the massive cosmic void.
The gaseous blob’s orbit around Sagittarius A* is equivalent in size to the orbit of Mercury around the sun. But the blazing blob completes a full rotation around the black hole every 70 minutes, compared with the 88 days it takes Mercury to travel the same distance, researchers wrote in a new paper published online Sept. 22 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics (opens in new tab).
“This requires a mind-blowing velocity of about 30% of the speed of light,” study lead author Maciek Wielgus, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, said in a statement (opens in new tab). That’s around 201.2 million mph (323.8 million km/h), or around 3,000 times faster than Earth moves around the sun.
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Researchers first spotted the orbiting blob in 2017 using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile. The ALMA telescope, which is made up of 66 antennae, is one of eight telescopes that make up the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) network, which produced the first direct image of Sagittarius A* in May this year.
Researchers were calibrating ALMA to focus on Sagittarius A* for the EHT project when they detected an unusual X-ray flare coming from the space surrounding the black hole.
The electromagnetic radiation from the flare, which was also visible in infrared and radio, was highly polarized, or twisted, and showed signs of synchrotron acceleration — in which an object is subject to an acceleration perpendicular to its velocity. This type of acceleration occurs when charged particles are propelled forward by a strong magnetic field, like how artificial particle accelerators supercharge electrons, according to ScienceAlert (opens in new tab).
The only explanation for this type of acceleration is that the flare originated from the black hole’s magnetically arrested disk — a ring of matter surrounding a black hole that is being held in place by a strong magnetic field, which counterbalances the forces of gravity pulling the matter into the cosmic void. Researchers, therefore, deduced that the only possible origin of the flare was a supercharged gas blob trapped within this disk.
Different research groups have detected similar signals from hot spots rapidly orbiting other black holes, according to the statement. However, this is the first time that a flare emitted by a hot spot have been observed in radio as well as infrared and X-ray, the researchers wrote in the paper.
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The researchers think that the radio waves they detected could mean that the hot spot is slowing down and losing some of its energy, according to the statement. This could potentially signal that the gas blob will eventually slow down enough for the black hole’s gravity to overcome the magnetic shielding surrounding it and finally pull the gas into its infinite maw.
The researchers hope that this new information can be used to help track additional hot spots around other black holes.
“In the future, we should be able to track hot spots across frequencies using coordinated multiwavelength observations,” study co-author Ivan Marti-Vidal, a radio astronomer at The University of Valencia in Spain, said in the statement. “The success of such an endeavor would be a true milestone for our understanding of the physics of flares in the galactic center.”
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While the new study improves our understanding of the Milky Way’s black hole heart, researchers said there is still a lot more to learn about Sagittarius A*.
Until now, telescopes have struggled to focus in on the supermassive structure because it frequently flares up, shooting out electromagnetic radiation that interferes with delicate sensors. But the new James Webb Space Telescope will play a key role in future research into Sagittarius A* because it will be able to see past this interference.
“Hopefully, one day, we will be comfortable saying that we ‘know’ what is going on in Sagittarius A*,” Wielgus said. But that day is not today.
Originally published on Live Science.