Category: Mysteries of Space

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 in a gas-dust shroud, its diameter is two light-years. The white dwarf located in the center of the nebula is an excellent example of a planetary nebula – what a Sun-type star will turn into at the final stages of evolution.

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 emitting X-rays. Moreover, jets of relativistic particles escape from black holes. Black holes are the cores of two merging galaxies from the Abell 400 galaxy cluster, 300 million years distant from us.

These two supermassive black holes are bound by gravitational forces into a binary system. One of the signs of this is the observed type of jets, most likely due to the general movement of black holes through the hot gas of the cluster at a speed of 1200 km/s. Such spectacular mergers are quite common in densely populated clusters of galaxies in the distant universe.

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 invisible companion. It received the designation Ross 508 b.

The mass of Ross 508 b is four times the mass of our planet. Thus, we are talking about a super-earth. It makes a revolution around its star in 10.75 days and receives 40% more energy from its luminary than the Earth. This places Ross 508 b on the inner boundary of the habitable zone — a region where, provided a suitable atmosphere, liquid water can exist on the surface of a celestial body!

The exact orbital characteristics of Ross 508 b are still unknown. Initially, the planet could form at a greater distance from the star and only later migrate to the current orbit. They hope that new observations will be able to confirm or refute this hypothesis.

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 the adaptation of the vestibular apparatus to weightlessness, a violation of the interaction of other sensory systems of the body and the redistribution of blood in the body.

Unpleasant sensations and symptoms associated with space adaptation syndrome vary in severity. About 50% of astronauts experience moderate discomfort (nausea, headache, disorientation); approximately 10% have a severe reaction (vomiting, other symptoms that completely deprive a person of the opportunity to work normally during the habituation period).

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 the spectrum, of a strictly defined color). If you look at the spectrum of the aurora, you will see that in the visible region of the spectrum, the brightest bands are green and red (both belong to oxygen). The red glow is formed at altitudes of more than 200 km, where the gas density is lower. And the green glow is formed closer to the height of 100 km, where the gas density is higher. The fact that you see a “pink” color is already the result of mixing red and green colors. Purple color may also appear, but that’s another story – when at the level of 100 km and below, the solar wind hits nitrogen molecules.

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, что самая тяжелая черная дыра имеет и наибольшие размеры. Радиус черной дыры составляет около 790 астрономических единиц. Для сравнения, Плутон находится на расстоянии лишь около 39,5 а. е.
Даная черная дыра обнаружена в галактике Holmberg 15A и носит соответствующее название Holm 15A. Вероятно, Holm 15A сформировался в результате столкновения двух галактик раннего типа.

Уверен, есть те, кто хотят напомнить нам про черную дыру TON618, которая имеет массу 66 миллиардов солнц. Но масса данного объекта определена лишь приближенно. Разные исследования по-разному оценивают ее массу и пока нельзя сказать ничего точного. Поэтому TON618 пока вне рейтинга.

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 out to be in place of the Sun, we would still not be pulled into it, because black holes “work” differently. A hypothetical black hole would have the same mass as the Sun, but not the same size. The size of a black hole is determined by the point of no return or, officially, the event horizon. The distance from the event horizon to the center of a black hole is called the Schwarzschild radius. The only thing we need to do to survive (apart from the absence of light) is to be outside this radius and not approach it.

According to calculations, the larger the black hole, the larger this radius. A black hole with the mass of the Sun would have a Schwarzschild radius of 2954 meters. That is, if you do not approach such a black hole closer than three kilometers, then you still have a chance of survival. In order for the event horizon to reach Earth, the black hole must be 51 million times more massive than the Sun.

Nothing will happen to the Earth’s orbit either. Orbits in space do not depend much on the size of the object around which they pass. They depend on its mass. So if the mass does not change, then the orbit remains unchanged. That is why the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy did not swallow us and nearby stars.

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 planet, the lowest speed that must be given to an object to overcome the gravitational attraction of this celestial body will be about 2.41 times higher than on Earth. In this case, to launch into space just one ton of matter from Kepler-20b, the launch vehicle must be about 3 times larger than Saturn-5. To launch into orbit a telescope similar to the James Webb (which weighs 6.2 tons), approximately 55 thousand tons of fuel will be required. Finally, it will take about 400 thousand tons of fuel to launch Apollo 11 into orbit. Thus, the use of chemical rocket engines becomes impractical. At the same time, fuel volumes grow exponentially with the increase in the mass of the exoplanet, so that even one rocket will need a significant share of all the fuel on the planet to fly.

On planets even more massive than Kepler-20b, the use of chemical rocket engines in principle makes no sense. Such civilizations would not have satellite television, a lunar program or space telescopes. Perhaps it is for this reason that Earthlings have not yet been able to find traces of the activity of any other intelligent life in the Universe.

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 simulation in the Universe Sandbox (https://universesandbox.com /) or using other means of simulating celestial mechanics and correctly scoring the characteristics of the bodies.

The whole effect will be limited to the appearance of another wave component of motion in the population of the solar system, this system is stable in the future for billions of years. Is it possible to add this planet “naturally”, that is, to capture a successful series of gravitational captures flying through the solar system (primarily from Jupiter and the Sun), and even without a critical increase in the eccentricities of the orbits of the existing planets?

Apparently not: to “drag” the planet to the right distance (and even to the right aphelion point) it is still possible, whereas sharply reducing the eccentricity of the orbit at such large distances seems to be a completely impossible requirement.

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 the process of active absorption of matter. J0313-1806 is no exception. In its core there is a black hole with a mass of 1.6 billion solar. Every year it absorbs matter whose mass is equivalent to 25 stars like our Sun.

Such a significant mass of the black hole at the center of O0313-1806, with its such a small age, suggests that it could hardly have been formed as a result of a supernova outbreak. She simply wouldn’t have had enough time to grow to such a huge size. Apparently, another mechanism was involved here in the form of a direct collapse of a huge cloud of cold hydrogen gas.