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NASA's Psyche Spacecraft Captured a Time-Lapse Video of its Mars Flyby

NASA's Psyche mission used a gravity assist maneuver at Mars to gain velocity and adjust its trajectory to its eventual target. The asteroid 16 Psyche is a metal-rich asteroid that may be the remnant rocky core of a protoplanet. The flyby not only shepherded the spacecraft on to its target, it was also an opportunity to test Psyche's science instruments and cameras. NASA has released a timelapse of the flyby. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/3OBsaMq via IFTTT
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Astronomers Are Still Trying to Understand How a Galaxy's Spiral Arms Form

Spiral galaxies, including grand spirals like the Whirlpool galaxy, are plentiful. But it's still a mystery how their spiral arms form and persist for hundreds of millions of years, and why some galaxies have one, two, or three or more arms. New research based on Euclid data finds links between galaxy mass, star formation rate, and number of arms, and hints at their formation. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/dmzFX8f via IFTTT
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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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