Space History

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.