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☆ The Eta Aquarids meteor shower is about to peak, giving you the chance to see up to 40 shooting stars an hour. Here's how to watch.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-28 | by ( Marianne Guenot | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

The Eta Aquarids meteor shower is due to peak May 5, offering up to 40 shooting stars per hour. If you're heading out to see the display, here are NASA's top tips for getting the best look. The meteor shower is active this year from between April 15 to May 27, but it is expected to peak on May 5. NASAThe Eta Aquarids are one of the few showers that favor the Southern Hemisphere. So you will have to wait over 20 years to see another Eta Aquarids outburst," he added.

☆ Second ‘Impossible’ Ring Found Around Distant Dwarf Planet
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-27 | by ( Kenneth Chang | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Like the first ring around Quaoar, announced by a team of astronomers in February, the second ring lies beyond what is known as the Roche limit. Thus, a ring within the Roche limit would tend to remain a ring, while a ring of debris outside the Roche limit would usually coalesce into a moon. For Quaoar, the Roche limit is calculated to be 1,100 miles. The second ring, at a distance of 1,500 miles from the center of Quaoar, is closer than the ring announced in February, which has a radius of about 2,500 miles. The observations also revealed the second ring.

☆ Scientists capture first direct image of a supermassive black hole, 6.5 billion times the size of the sun, spewing out jets of plasma
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-27 | by ( Marianne Guenot | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

The jets were captured being released from a black hole 6.5 billion times the size of our sun. The image is the first to connect the jets to the edge of the supermassive black hole. The black hole, located at the center of the M87 galaxy 55 million light-years away, is around 6.5 billion times bigger than our sun. Black holes don't only swallow matter, they sometimes shoot it outMost galaxies, including our own, swirl around a supermassive black hole. Material swirling around a black hole needs to lose speed and energy before it can fall inwards.

☆ New image reveals violent events near a supermassive black hole
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Will Dunham | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

[1/2] This image shows the jet and shadow of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy together for the first time. The supermassive black hole pictured resides at the center of a relatively nearby galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, about 54 million light-years from Earth. This black hole, with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun, was the subject of the first image of such an object ever obtained, released in 2019, with another black hole pictured last year. Seeing the entire scene in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole can be insightful. The EHT project has yielded the images of the two supermassive black holes.

☆ Black hole image captures jet of material launching into space
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Ashley Strickland | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

But a black hole can also send powerful jets of material blasting across space and beyond its home galaxy. Previous observations have shown the jet and black hole separately, including the first direct image of a black hole, released in 2019. Astronomers believe that more material is falling toward the black hole in the new image, which is why the ring looks bigger. Studying black holesRecently, astronomers also used machine learning to release a cleaner, sharper version of the original M87 black hole image from 2019. The central region is darker and larger, surrounded by a bright ring as hot gas falls into the black hole.

☆ A Fresh View of an Increasingly Familiar Black Hole
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

By observing its subject at slightly longer radio wavelengths, the team was able to bring into visibility the cooler outer regions of the black hole’s fiery accretion disk, from which the jet seems to emanate. “We know that jets are ejected from the region surrounding black holes,” Dr. Lu said in a statement issued by the European Southern Observatory. “But we still do not fully understand how this actually happens. To study this directly we need to observe the origin of the jet as close as possible to the black hole.”In the meantime, the Event Horizon Telescope team is gathering resources for more observations, with the goal of making a black-hole movie. We will be able to film how the matter falls into a black hole and eventually manages to escape.”

☆ Solving the mystery of the most powerful objects in the universe
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Ashley Strickland | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

CNN —Astronomers first discovered quasars, considered to be the brightest and most powerful objects in the universe, 60 years ago — but they didn’t understand their origin. Now, scientists think they have unlocked the mystery behind what ignites these celestial objects. Astronomers observed 48 different galaxies that contain quasars and compared them to more than 100 galaxies without them. When two galaxies merge, massive amounts of gas are pushed toward the supermassive black holes located at their centers. “Quasars play a key role in our understanding of the history of the Universe, and possibly also the future of the Milky Way.”

☆ SpaceX Starship’s explosion is not the failure it appears to be, experts say
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-22 | by ( Ashley Strickland | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

CNN —Rocket launches are like opening a box of chocolates, only riskier — you never know what you’re going to get. When a rocket is set to leap off the launchpad, there’s a good chance of seeing a stunning liftoff or a spectacular failure. The lead-up to this week’s launch of SpaceX’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, was a dramatic roller coaster. The rocket blasted off from the launchpad in South Texas and roared 24.2 miles (39 kilometers) over the Gulf of Mexico. Now, researchers have a new theory about why the Vikings abruptly departed in the mid-15th century: rising sea levels.

☆ He Lets His Clothes Do the Peacocking for Him
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-21 | by ( Ruth La Ferla | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

His silence seems coy, especially since he did not deny rampant media speculation about his romance with the star. His cozy fantasy is but one expression of the protective shell he developed as a boy. “I went to a very sporty, conservative school,” said Mr. Cowan, who grew up near Cambridge in the British countryside, the son of scientists. “Growing up, I wanted to be an entomologist,” Mr. Cowan said. “I soon realized that you could create your own insects through fashion.”

☆ Humans have to get in the way of AI to make it more responsible
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-17 | by ( Emilia David | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Humans are key to responsible AI. Calls to pause AI development centered around the need to make sure we were building responsible AI. But some Big Tech companies laid off responsible AI employees as part of the great cost-cutting sweeping the industry, possibly undermining the greatest tool against unfettered, unchecked AI. Those moves come right as society has come to understand what can happen if AI escapes its guardrails, making AI ethics more important than ever. Here's why humans will help bring responsible AI to fruition.

☆ Webb telescope captures glowing starburst as galaxies collide
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-17 | by ( Ashley Strickland | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +2 min

CNN —A brilliant starburst feature shines in the latest image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. The space observatory captured a bright burst of star formation triggered by two spiral galaxies crashing into one another. The colliding galaxies, known collectively as Arp 220, generated an infrared glow that contains the light of more than 1 trillion suns. This brilliant luminosity creates the diffraction spikes, or starburst feature witnessed by Webb. The new Webb image also reveals tails, or material streaming away from the galaxies due to gravity, in blue, to indicate activity as the galaxies continue to collide.

☆ Google-parent stock drops on fears it could lose search market share to AI-powered rivals
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-17 | by ( Samantha Kelly | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +4 min

CNN —Shares of Google-parent Alphabet fell more than 3% in early trading Monday after a report sparked concerns that its core search engine could lose market share to AI-powered rivals, including Microsoft’s Bing. In an effort to address the heightened competition, Google is said to be developing a new AI-powered search engine called Project “Magi,” according to the Times. Google’s search engine has dominated the market for two decades. That’s particularly true when it comes to search engines, a product that many use to find accurate and reliable information. “This is going to impact every product across every company and so that’s, that’s why I think it’s a very, very profound technology,” he said.

☆ First photo of a black hole resembles 'skinny' doughnut
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-14 | by ( Ashley Strickland | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

CNN —The first photo ever taken of a black hole looks a little sharper now. The central region is darker and larger, surrounded by a bright ring as hot gas falls into the black hole in the new image. The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, called EHT, is a global network of telescopes that captured the first photograph of a black hole. Computers using PRIMO analyzed more than 30,000 high-resolution simulated images of black holes to pick out common structural details. But if heated materials in the form of plasma surround the black hole and emit light, the event horizon could be visible.

☆ Artificial intelligence may have just given astronomers a better idea of what black holes really look like
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-14 | by ( Aaron Mcdade | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Researchers released a new, clearer image of what they believe the M87 black hole looks like. They developed a machine learning algorithm to provide clearer images of the black hole first released in 2019. The algorithm used data from thousands of simulated black holes to fill in gaps of data that created the 2019 images. The new images, published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could provide important information for scientists studying the M87 black hole and others in the future, researchers said. "Since we cannot study black holes up-close, the detail of an image plays a critical role in our ability to understand its behavior."

☆ Compact galaxy's discovery shows Webb telescope's 'amazing' power
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-14 | by ( Will Dunham | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

The discovery is another example of how observations by Webb, which was launched in 2021 and began collecting data last year, are transforming our knowledge of the nature of the early universe. The orbiting infrared observatory was designed to be far more sensitive than its Hubble Space Telescope predecessor. This galaxy, Kelly said, is "absolutely tiny" in relative terms. "Nonetheless, we found that it was forming about two stars each year, which is similar to the rate at which the Milky Way is forming stars," Kelly added. "The combined power of the James Webb Space Telescope and the galaxy's magnification due to gravitational lensing allows us to study this galaxy in detail," Williams said.

☆ That Famous Black Hole Just Got Even Darker
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-13 | by ( Dennis Overbye | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Four years ago, astronomers released the first ever image of a black hole: a reddish, puffy doughnut of light surrounding an empty, dark hole in the center of the giant galaxy M87, which lies 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. The image made visible what astronomers, and the rest of us, had only been able to imagine: a celestial entity so massive that its gravity warped space-time, drawing matter, energy and even light into its bottomless vortex. The image was released on April 10, 2019, by an astronomy squad called the Event Horizon Telescope, so named for the boundary of no return around a black hole. The new image, they say, will sharpen constraints on how well the black hole in M87 fits with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which first predicted the existence of black holes. Dr. Medeiros and her colleagues published the new image on Thursday in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

☆ Scientists unveil new and improved 'skinny donut' black hole image
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-13 | by ( Will Dunham | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

WASHINGTON, April 13 (Reuters) - The 2019 release of the first image of a black hole was hailed as a significant scientific achievement. There is also a larger "brightness depression" at the center - basically the donut hole - caused by light and other matter disappearing into the black hole. This supermassive black hole resides in a galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, about 54 million light-years from Earth. The M87 black hole image stems from data collected by seven radio telescopes at five locations on Earth that essentially create a planet-sized observational dish. "The image we report in the new paper is the most accurate representation of the black hole image that we can obtain with our globe-wide telescope."

☆ The Juice mission will soon launch to Jupiter’s icy ocean worlds
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-13 | by ( Ashley Strickland | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +8 min

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission, or Juice, was expected to lift off Thursday at 8:15 a.m. European Space AgencyGanymede, Callisto and Europa are ice-covered worlds that may contain subsurface oceans that are potentially habitable for life. European Space Agency“With Juice, we want to confirm there’s liquid water in these moons, confirm their heat sources. Testing and modeling of Jupiter’s radiation belts allowed engineers to prepare for what Juice will encounter. Given the eventual distance between the spacecraft and Earth, it will take 45 minutes to send a one-way signal to Juice.

☆ Webb telescope takes striking image of planet Uranus
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-07 | by ( Taylor Nicioli | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +4 min

CNN —The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a new stunning image of ice giant Uranus, with almost all its faint dusty rings on display. Uranus has 13 known rings, with 11 of them visible in the new Webb image. A November Hubble image of Uranus (left) captured the planet's bright polar cap, while the recent Webb image displayed more detail, with a subtle enhanced brightness at the cap's center. With the exact mechanism behind the haze unknown, scientists are studying the polar cap using telescope images such as this new Webb image. In this new Webb image, similar to other recent images by the Hubble Space Telescope, storm clouds can be seen at the edge of the polar cap.

☆ New James Webb telescope photo of a galaxy cluster 6 billion light years away shows a trippy phenomenon where gravity warps spacetime
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-02 | by ( Hannah Getahun | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

New cosmic photos of galactic "arcs and streaks" in space were released on Tuesday by NASA's James Webb Telescope. The galaxies are bending space and time in a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. The SDSS J1226+2149 galaxy cluster shown in this newest photo is around 6.3 billion light years away, in the constellation Coma Berenices, according to the ESA. The James Webb Space Telescope's first deep field infrared image, released July 11, 2022. The light from the MACS0647-JD system is bent and magnified by the massive gravity of galaxy cluster MACS0647.

☆ An 'ultramassive' black hole has been discovered that's 33 billion times the mass of the sun
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-29 | by ( Marianne Guenot | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

They estimate this black hole is 30 billion times bigger than our sun. That would make it one of the biggest black holes ever discovered. This black hole may remain one of the biggest holes ever discovered because physicists think black holes can't grow much bigger than that, Nightingale said. The technique could unveil 'inactive' black holesThe discovery of this black hole pushes back the limits of cosmology, Nightingale told the BBC. "How do you form a black hole this big in just 13 billion years of the universe's existence?"

☆ The solar system was hit with a gamma-ray burst so bright, it blinded scientists' equipment in space
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-29 | by ( Chris Panella | Jessica Orwig | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Our solar system was hit by a gamma-ray burst so bright, it blinded space equipment and telescopes. A gamma-ray burst that recently hit our solar system was so bright, it temporarily blinded gamma-ray instruments in space, according to a NASA release. Scientists say the gamma-ray burst (GRB), the most powerful type of explosion in the universe, was 70 times brighter than any previously recorded event. What is a gamma-ray burst? Because it blinded space instruments, they couldn't accurately record it, so scientists weren't sure how bright the burst was when it first reached our planet.

☆ Adam Driver asked NASA how it plans to save Earth from world-ending asteroids
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-23 | by ( Morgan Mcfall-Johnsen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Don't worry about such a large asteroid — an extinction-level space rock — approaching Earth anytime soon, NASA astronomer Kelly Fast was quick to clarify. NASA is studying and tracking down near-Earth asteroidsFast added that NASA's approach to any asteroid would depend on the asteroid's size and composition. Another NASA mission, called Osiris-Rex, landed on the surface of an asteroid in 2020 and scooped up its rocky space dust. Even though Driver and Fast didn't discuss that mission, the actor seemed impressed with NASA's efforts. "Thank you for your work in keeping the planet safe from world-ending asteroids plummeting into our planet," Driver said.

☆ Scientists explain alien comet 'Oumuamua's strange acceleration
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-23 | by ( Will Dunham | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

A new study has offered a more sober explanation - that 'Oumuamua's speed-up was due to the release of hydrogen gas as the comet warmed up in the sunlight. "The key finding is that 'Oumuamua may have started as a water-rich icy planetesimal broadly similar to solar system comets. "We don't know its place of origin but it was probably traveling through interstellar space for less than 100 million years. It had a reddish color consistent with the colors of many small bodies in the solar system. A second interstellar object, the comet 2I/Borisov, was discovered visiting our solar system in 2019.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a video of a tornado churning on the sun. The fiery formation of boiling solar plasma grew to an estimated height of 14 Earths. SDO/NASAThe magnetic structure that caused this tornado is actually a lot bigger than what we're seeing. As these move around the sun, they create magnetic fields that erupt through the solar surface. The sun is getting more activeA video from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the massive hole in the sun's atmosphere.

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