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Astronomers Catch a "Dark Comet" Red-Handed

Our ability to track and visualize small rocks in space is still improving. And occasionally we’ll find a space rock that will remind us of that fact. One such rock is detailed in a new paper, led by Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and recently published in Nature Astronomy, where the research team discovered what they thought was a normal, run of the mill asteroid, was actually a “dark comet”. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/cJGfbMO via IFTTT
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Astronomers Determine that Exoplanets Around Barnard's Star are Extremely Uninhabitable

Scientists have painted the most detailed portrait yet of the planetary system orbiting Barnard’s Star. Unfortunately, the picture is not encouraging, as all four planets appear to be "extremely uninhabitable." from Universe Today https://ift.tt/B735bR1 via IFTTT
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Meet Our Newest Stellar Neighbours That Hid in the Glare of Other Stars

Astronomers have found four new white dwarfs within about 65 light years. Even though the sky has been studied thoroughly, these escaped detection. That's because they're tight binaries with red dwarf partners, and the much brighter red dwarfs hide the white dwarfs. The binaries used to share common envelopes. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/0PJIKhq via IFTTT
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A Star Orbiting Our Galaxy's Supermassive Black Hole Tests the Limits of Relativity

A Sun-like star orbits the supermassive black hole in our Milky Way so closely that it comes within the distance of Neptune's orbit of the Sun. It has a top speed of more than 8% of light speed. With such extreme motion the star gives astronomers the opportunity to test the limits of general relativity. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/7N8EZeP via IFTTT
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Chandrasekhar and the Limits of Physics, Part 1: Triumph

The story of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who as a teenager on an ocean voyage worked out that white dwarf stars have a maximum mass of 1.4 Suns. A tour of degeneracy pressure, the relativistic insight everyone else missed, and the number that would define his life. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/8XaKJ0h via IFTTT
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The Case of the Sun's Missing Silver

Astronomers have solved a decades old puzzle about the Sun's missing silver, not by finding something new, but by modelling something old far more accurately. A revised, more realistic model of the Sun's atmosphere reveals it actually contains 55 per cent more silver than previously calculated, finally matching what meteorites have been telling us all along. It's a quiet reminder that some of the biggest revelations in astronomy come not from new data, but from asking familiar questions with sharper tools. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/PfgY7wc via IFTTT
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The First Breath of Another World

Astronomers have detected an atmosphere around a rocky planet in another star's habitable zone for the very first time. It’s a milestone that brings us a step closer to answering whether life could exist beyond our Solar System. Predicted by a mathematical model before it was ever observed, and confirmed using a rare planetary alignment 48 light years away, this discovery does more than identify one intriguing world, it provides us with a whole new way to search for others like it. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/PSgyxID via IFTTT
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