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Home > News > Today's News
A hundred million years ago, a triple-star system was traveling through the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy when it made a wrong turn. The trio wandered too close to the galaxy's giant black hole, which ate one of the stars and hurled the other two out of the Milky Way. This story may sound like a fairy tale, but astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope say it is the most likely scenario for a so-called hypervelocity star known as HE 0437-5439, one of the fastest ever detected. It's blazing across space at a speed of 1.6 million miles an hour and is cruising high above the galaxy's disk, about 200,000 light-years from the center. For comparison, the Milky Way's disk is approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter.
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In the past decade, robotic telescopes have turned astronomers' attention to many strange exploding stars -- one-offs that may or may not point to new and unusual physics. But supernova (SN) 2005E, discovered five years ago by the University of California, Berkeley's Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT), is one of eight known "calcium-rich supernovae" that seem to stand out as horses of a different color. These calcium-rich supernovae may be a true suborder and not just one of a kind.
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Researcher at the University of Sheffield in the UK have discovered the most massive star ever found, using the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope. The star, R136a1, weighs up to 265 times the mass of the Sun, a figure that doubles the previously accepted limit of solar mass.
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The Neanderthal, the enigmatic Stone Age man who appears to have vanished without a trace 30,000 years ago, lives on in us modern humans. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig decoded the Neanderthal genome and compared it with the Homo Sapiens genome. In the process, the researchers explored a series of questions: What does the Neanderthal genome divulge about us modern humans? Which human capacities and characteristics hark back to Stone Age man? Why did our closest relative become extinct? One thing is now certain: the Neanderthal and modern man mixed - and we are far more closely related than we previously believed. Contrary to the assumption of many researchers, it would appear that some Neanderthals and early modern humans interbred. According to the researchers' calculations, up to four percent of the DNA of many humans living today originate from the Neanderthal.
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A team of astronomers at the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland has spotted violent eruptions from a pair of interacting stars that orbit around each other every 25 minutes. The stars, separated by a distance equivalent to just half that between the Earth and Moon, are both helium-rich white dwarfs -- the compact remnants that are the end state of stars like our Sun. The double system, known as KL Dra, is in the constellation Draco. The new observations were made using the fully robotic Liverpool Telescope located in the Canary Islands and the orbiting Swift observatory. The binary stars are close enough to each other to enable the more massive partner to drag helium off of the smaller one, causing a violent flare-up every two months.
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Astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory have identified the first known quasar acting as a gravitational lens that magnifies an even more distant galaxy. Hundreds of cases of gravitationally lensed distant quasars with foreground galaxies are known. But, until now, the reverse process - a background galaxy being lensed by a massive foreground quasar - had never been detected. The discovery may provide astronomers with a new technique to study quasars.
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NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, completed its first survey of the entire sky today, July 17, 2010. The mission has generated more than one million images so far. WISE is filling in the blanks on the infrared properties of everything in the universe from nearby asteroids to distant quasars. In six months, WISE has discovered more than 90 new Near-Earth Objects. The infrared telescope is also good at spotting comets that orbit far from Earth and has discovered more than a dozen of these too. WISE's infrared vision also gives it a unique ability to pick up the glow of cool stars called brown dwarfs.
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A blast of the brightest X-rays ever detected from beyond our Milky Way galaxy's neighborhood temporarily blinded the X-ray eye on NASA's Swift space observatory earlier this summer, astronomers now report. The X-rays traveled through space for 5-billion years before slamming into and overwhelming Swift's X-ray Telescope on June 21, 2010. The blindingly bright blast came from a gamma-ray burst, a violent eruption of energy from the explosion of a massive star morphing into a new black hole.
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Our sun may be an only child, but most of the stars in the galaxy are actually twins. The sibling stars circle around each other at varying distances, bound by the hands of gravity. How twin stars form is an ongoing question in astronomy. Do they start out like fraternal twins developing from two separate clouds, or "eggs?" Or do they begin life in one cloud that splits into two, like identical twins born from one egg -- like two peas on a pod? New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope are acting like sonograms to reveal the early birth process of snug twin stars.
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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed a cosmic cloud next to M17 that is shaped like a flying dragon. Though appearances deceive, stars are forming in this dark cloud about as fast as in the neighboring, dazzling M17 nebula, which is illuminated by giant stars. But no similar stellar behemoths have yet emerged in this dark cloud (dubbed M17 SWex) to set the dragon's dusty innards aglow. The strange absence of bright stars in this star forming cloud speaks to the mysteries surrounding the birth of the heftiest stars in the universe.
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