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The Spitzer telescope took a truly chilling picture
The ominous image of the Snail nebula taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope clearly shows the infrared radiation of the Snail nebula (NGC 7293). This nebula is well studied, although it is located at a great distance from our planet. It is 700 light-years away, it is located in the constellation Aquarius. It is enveloped…
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What is happening in the center of the active galaxy 3C 75?
The two bright sources in the center are two supermassive black holes that orbit around a common center of mass and give energy to a powerful radio source 3C 75. These supermassive black holes are separated by only 25 thousand years. They are immersed in a cloud of gas heated to several million degrees and…
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Astronomers have discovered an interesting exoplanet
Astronomers have discovered an interesting exoplanet: it orbits the red dwarf Ross 508, which is relatively close to the Solar System. Its radius and mass are five times smaller than the radius and mass of the Sun. During measurements of the radial velocity of Ross 508, astronomers discovered deviations caused by the gravity of its…
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Along with seasickness, there is also space sickness, which, obviously, only astronauts suffer from
Space sickness is a condition experienced by about half of all astronauts when adapting to weightlessness. According to the symptoms, the condition is similar to seasickness: decreased appetite, dizziness, headache, increased salivation, nausea, vomiting sometimes occurs, spatial illusions. All these effects usually go away on the first day. The astronaut’s unhealthy state arises due to…
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Where does the color of the Northern Lights come from?
The color of the radiance is formed due to the fact that particles of the solar wind hit the molecules of our air. Air consists of nitrogen and oxygen. These molecules are excited and then quite quickly (seconds) give off the excitation energy in the form of radiation of a strictly defined wavelength (stripes in…
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New record: An ultramassive black hole with a new record mass has been discovered
Найденная черная дыра весит как 40 миллиардов солнц (предыдущие рекорды принадлежат черным дырам с массой 20 и 17 миллиардов солнц). Измерения массы были проведены напрямую по динамике звезд в ее окрестностях (самый точный и достоверный метод). Расстояние до «рекордной» черной дыры составляет около 700 миллионов световых лет, что довольно значительно даже по космическим меркам. Логично,…
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What will happen to the Earth if a black hole forms in place of the Sun?
For starters, the Sun will never become a black hole. This threatens only massive stars, to which the Sun does not belong. In the future, our star will expand and turn into a red giant, and then, most likely, will form a beautiful planetary nebula. If a black hole with a solar mass suddenly turned…
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Super-Earths are the most likely candidates for the existence of extraterrestrial life
Super-earths are the most likely candidates for the existence of extraterrestrial life, but hypothetical alien civilizations living on super-earths cannot leave their planets due to the large force of gravity. For example, take the exoplanet Kepler-20b. It is about 70% larger than Earth in size, and almost 10 times larger in mass. On such a…
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Can another planet fit between Mars and Earth?
A simple instantaneous addition of an Earth-mass planet with an orbit located somewhere in the middle between the orbits of Earth and Mars, moving in the plane of the ecliptic in the same direction with the first cosmic (for its distance) speed will not change anything. It is easy to verify this by conducting a…
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Astronomers announced the discovery of the oldest known quasar, it received the designation J0313-1806
Its redshift is z=7.642. This means that we see J0313-1806 as it was at the time when the universe was 670 million years old. Quasars can emit a thousand times more energy than galaxies like the Milky Way. The source of all activity is accretion disks and jets of supermassive black holes that are in…
