Category: Planets

This behavior suggests that the star is approaching the end of its life and in the next 100 thousand years it will either explode as a supernova or directly collapse into a black hole.

The huge red supergiant VY of the Big Dog is located at a distance of about 3.9 thousand light-years from Earth. It is 300 thousand times brighter than our Sun, 17 times more massive and 1,420 times larger. Light takes about 6 Earth hours to go around the VY of the Big Dog, and if you put the giant in the center of the Solar System, then this bloated monster would extend beyond the orbit of Jupiter. As Hubble’s observations have shown, VY Big Dog is surrounded by relatively compact nodes of matter that are still quite close to the supergiant and erupted only 100-200 years ago – just at a time when the brightness of the star dropped almost 6 times, making it invisible to the naked eye.

The star began its life as a super-hot, bright blue supergiant, whose mass was 35-40 times the mass of the Sun. After a few million years, when the rate of combustion of thermonuclear hydrogen in its core changed, the VY of the Big Dog passed into the phase of a red supergiant. Gorenje. According to astronomers, there is a possibility that in the future, instead of exploding as a supernova, it may immediately collapse into a black hole.

Recently, scientists have discovered a comet with the largest nucleus in history. It is constantly flying towards the Sun and by 2031 it will reach the orbit of Saturn. It turned out to be Bernardinelli – Bernstein ‘s C/2014 UN271 . The diameter of its core is about 128 km, which is three times the size of Moscow within the MKAD at its widest point. C/2014 UN271 weighs 500 trillion tons, which is 100 thousand times more than ordinary comets of the Solar System.

Even a comet of the size of C/2014 UN271 will not be able to completely destroy our planet. This will require 20 thousand. times more energy. Therefore, the Earth will basically remain whole. However, the destruction will still be gigantic. In scale, they are thousands of times greater than the consequences of an asteroid impact about 66 million years ago, which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

A new super-Earth has been discovered around the nearest star

The new exoplanet, dubbed GJ 740 b, is located about 36 light-years from Earth. This super-earth is at least 2.96 times more massive than our planet. Recall that the “super-earth” is called an exoplanet having a mass exceeding the mass of the Earth, but significantly less than the mass of gas giants.

GJ 740 orbits its star every 2.377 days at a distance of approximately 0.029 A.E. Recall, one A.E. is equivalent to the distance from Earth to the Sun, or approximately 150 million kilometers. According to the authors, such a distance takes the planet beyond the habitable zone of its host star. The estimated equilibrium temperature for 740 and was approximately 555 °C.

Since the radius of 740 and is unknown, it is currently impossible to determine its composition. On the other hand, its mass and short period of circulation suggest that it is a rocky object.

International researchers have discovered the unique planet Gliese 486b in the constellation Virgo. The planet has a mass 2.8 times the mass of the Earth, it has an atmosphere whose composition can be studied. Gliese 486b orbits a local red dwarf at a distance of 2.5 million kilometers. At the same time, it is constantly facing the parent star with one side, which is why the daytime hemisphere is heated to 430 degrees Celsius.

According to scientists, the change in the atmosphere of Gliese 486b will be of great importance for deciding whether to look for signs of life around red dwarfs. It is planned to use a spectrograph to study the atmosphere.

In July 2020, a group of European scientists using the German eROSITA X—ray telescope recorded an unusually bright explosion of a white dwarf – it generated a huge fireball with a temperature 60 times higher than the temperature of the Sun.

White dwarfs are extremely dense stars that have lost a significant part of the gaseous matter. Being in a binary system, a white dwarf pumps out hydrogen from its “neighbor”, which accumulates on the surface of the star. Sometimes because of this, strong energy emissions are produced, which are called new, and one of them was observed by European scientists in July 2020.

The explosion was so powerful that it was illuminated in the eROSITA image — the telescope was calibrated to work with lower-strength radiation, but astronomers managed to compensate for this error. Scientists have determined that the white dwarf is relatively large, and its mass is comparable to the mass of the Sun. The temperature of the explosion reached 327 thousand. Who is 60 times higher than the sun.

The mission of the InSight Mars probe will end this year due to power problems, said Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s Directorate for Scientific Missions.

“NASA’s InSight Mars lander is gradually losing power. It is expected that he will finish conducting scientific research this summer. By December, experts expect that the device will stop working, thereby completing the mission, which has so far recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes,” Zurbuchen wrote on Twitter.

He added that the information gathered during the study of Martian earthquakes allowed scientists to study the depth and composition of the crust, mantle and core of the Red Planet. The device also collected important meteorological data and investigated the remnants of the magnetic field of Mars that existed in the distant past.

If the Earth were under the action of tidal capture, then there would be intense heat on one side, and intense cold on the other. In either case, the existence of higher forms of protein life would be impossible. Nevertheless, in the twilight zone, as shown in another answer, the temperature would be average, i.e. acceptable.

Also in this case, strong air currents would be observed. In the case of a temperature drop, there is always a pressure drop that causes wind. It, in turn, causes temperature equalization. Creatures living in the twilight zone would have evolved and, in order not to become blown away by the wind, would have become very heavy and with long prehensile claws. Well, that is, they would be unlike us.

Space debris falls to Earth from time to time. Large objects that move in sufficiently low orbits may eventually enter the atmosphere. Their speed slows down, they fall and partially burn up. And already individual fragments reach the surface of our planet.

So Lottie Williams suffered from the wreckage of one of the stages of the Delta-2 launch vehicle in 1997 in Oklahoma. A piece of metal hit her right in the shoulder. The woman was very surprised by such a miracle. A few days later, she became a real news star.

But it was just a chip. Was there more? Yes. The largest artificial object that has fallen to Earth over the past five centuries is the Mir orbital station, which was flooded in the Pacific Ocean in 2001. It looks very much like the Titanic.

Despite the fact that brown dwarfs emit very little energy compared to ordinary stars, astronomers have managed to identify quite a few such objects to date. However, their findings in star systems are still rare. The more interesting is the recent discovery made by a team of European astronomers. They managed to find four previously unknown brown dwarfs at once, which are stellar companions.

Astronomers have selected 25 stars showing significant differences in their own motion between different astrometric catalogs. Next, they examined them using the SPHERE instrument installed on the Very Large ESO Telescope.

In total, the researchers managed to find ten previously unknown stellar companions. Six are luminaries, four are brown dwarfs. They received the designation HIP 21152 B, HIP 29724 B, HD 60584 B and HIP 63734 B.

All newly found brown dwarfs revolve around young luminaries whose age does not exceed a billion years. Their masses range from 0.012 to 0.063 solar masses, orbits pass at a distance of 6.3 to 30 au from their parent stars.

On May 5, the most powerful Mars earthquake was recorded on Mars for all the years of observations. Its magnitude reached 5 points on the Richter scale, which became a record after a push in August last year with an amplitude of 4.2 points.

A little later we will post an audio recording of the marsquake recorded using the InSight device.