INFORMATION

We know that stars can engulf planets because stars that swell up to become red giants overwhelm any close-in planets. The Sun will do this to Venus, Mercury, and possibly Earth in a few billion years. But research shows that it can happen when low-mass stars first enter the main sequence. Lithium gives it away. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/6WHlIdX via IFTTT

This ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week captures all the glory of the star-forming region N159. It's in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and is dwarfed by its much larger neighbour, the Tarantula Nebula. But N159 is gorgeous, too, so captivating that it's been featured as a Picture of the Week several times. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/uLZzI7p via IFTTT

Our planet's liquid iron outer core is slowly giving up its secrets to a trio of satellites launched by ESA in 2013. Called Swarm, the three probes have been studying Earth's magnetic field at the source. In the process, they've revealed startling changes in a molten layer region 2,200 kilometers beneath the Pacific Ocean. In 2010, material in that area of Earth's outer core changed direction. Insteading of moving slowly westward, it's now headed east and picking up speed. Scientists are working to figure out why by using the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm data and additional information from ESA's CryoSat mission and ground-based instruments. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/KSqpGsF via IFTTT

The LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA (LVK) detector network has a new trick up its sleeve to improve the instruments’ sensitivity to gravitational waves: it’s called Astrophysical Calibration and it plays a role similar to auto-tune in music production. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/tYpeoCd via IFTTT

Physicists have thought for decades that microscopic black holes can theoretically emerge not from exploding stars but from delicate "critical states" in which space and time organise themselves into a crystal like structure. Now, for the first time, researchers from TU Wien and Goethe University Frankfurt have derived an exact mathematical formula describing this bizarre phenomenon using a surprising trick involving infinitely many dimensions! from Universe Today https://ift.tt/f5ex9pg via IFTTT

The JWST has shown us some strange things about supermassive black holes (SMBH) in the early Universe. Many of them are far more massive than we think they should be. Now astronomers working with the JWST have found one that seems to have formed before its galaxy did. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/hRPNKUB via IFTTT