Remnants from a star that exploded thousands of years ago created a celestial abstract portrait, as captured in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the Pencil Nebula.
Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Astronomers long thought that a peculiar star system observed by the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite was a simple case of a star orbiting a black hole.
But now, two astronomers are challenging that claim, finding that the evidence suggests something far stranger: Possibly, a never-before-seen type of star made of invisible dark matter. Their research, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, was published April 18 on the preprint server arXiv.
The system itself consists of a sunlike star and, well, something else. The star weighs a little less than the sun (0.93 solar mass) and has roughly the same chemical abundance as the sun. Its mysterious companion is much more massive — around 11 solar masses. The objects orbit each other at a distance of 1.4 astronomical units, about the distance at which Mars orbits the sun, making a complete orbit every 188 days.
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been reading a lot of conversations about space since the james webb images were released particularly wrt to light speed and the fact that we are technically "looking into the past" because the light that actually reaches us is millions or billions of years old, and so we only see these places as they were when the light left, not as they are right now. cool & fine & very interesting
but i just saw someone (shoutout sylverthewordsmyth in the tiktok comment section) reframe this as "the future can see us" and despite this being a natural and logical extrapolation from us seeing the past, it has shaken me to my core. if there's anybody to look at us from far away, millions and billions of years in the future, they would look at us and see... us. they would look and see the same planet we live on right now, with the same continents and oceans. and it will be already long gone but to them it will be as alive as it is to us right now, the same way we see still see stars that have already gone out. i have to lay down
Saturn recorded from a french house with a 600$ camera
via reddit
Dreaming of going to space? – Astronaut Victor Glover has you covered.
In his first video from space, take a look at our home through the window of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon “Resilience” spacecraft. Victor arrived to the International Space Station alongside his fellow Crew-1 astronauts on Nov. 16, 2020.
Follow his Instagram account HERE to stay up-to-date on station life and for more behind-the-scenes content like this.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
Buzz Aldrin is a national treasure
via reddit
Cosmic Christmas Tree © sajjadahmed1
Capturing the Milky Way at Joshua Tree [OC] [4819 x 3855] by dahhello
★☆★ SPACE ★☆★