Space

Giant black holes were supposed to be bit players in the early cosmic story. But recent James Webb Space Telescope observations are finding an unexpected abundance of the beasts.

Magnetars are some of the most extreme objects we know about, with magnetic fields so strong that chemistry becomes impossible in their vicinity. They're neutron stars with a superfluid interior that includes charged particles, so it's easy to understand how a magnetic dynamo is maintained to support that magnetic field. But it's a little harder to fully understand what starts the dynamo off in the first place.

The leading idea, which benefits from its simplicity, is that the magnetar inherits its magnetic field from the star that exploded in a supernova to create it. The original magnetic field, when crushed down to match the tiny size of the resulting neutron star, would provide a massive kick to start the magnetar off. There's just one problem with this idea: we haven't spotted any of the highly magnetized precursor stars that this hypothesis requires.

It turns out that we have been observing one for years. It just looked like something completely different, and it took a more careful analysis, published today in Science, to understand what we've been observing.

I love the show One Strange Rock, I know Will Smith has pretty much lost his noodle, but c'mon, couldn't there be a different host and still listen to the astronauts? Has @astropettit made it here yet? Are there any other shows that offer a look from the astronauts point of view?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3184736

NASA Live

All times U.S. Eastern Daylight Time, which equates to UTC-4.

NEXT LIVE EVENTS

Monday, August 14

11 a.m. – News conference with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, NASA climate experts, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on the latest climate data findings

12:10 p.m. – ISS Expedition 69 in-flight educational event for Kingfisher High School in Kingfisher, Oklahoma with NASA flight engineers Frank Rubio and Steve Bowen

1:50 p.m. – ISS Expedition 69 in-flight educational event for Odyssey Academy in Galveston, Texas with NASA flight engineers Frank Rubio and Steve Bowen

3:30 p.m. – NASA Science Live discusses the summer of record-breaking temperatures

edit: OP link is old but should be informative about micromoons, check this instead: https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/moon/micro-moon.html

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New observations of a faraway rocky world that might have its own magnetic field could help astronomers understand the seemingly haphazard magnetic fields swaddling our solar system’s planets.

This was a really well written article describing what we know about Neptune.

Static fire starts at 2:23.

Been Studying alternatives to Dark Matter and the rabbit hole has led me to MOG/STVG by John Moffat. The video I'm sharing is a long and great interview by Curt Jaimungal with Moffat. There are plenty of MOND-like alternatives to Dark Matter and all may be proven wrong should science make further progress discovering Dark Matter. But I feel a great motivator is competition and I think MOG/STVG puts up some interesting competition.

Voyager Space, one of several US companies formulating concepts for new commercial space stations, has established a joint venture with Airbus to co-develop an Earth-orbiting research outpost called Starlab.

The Starlab station is designed to accommodate a permanent crew of four people, plus a few more on a short-term basis. NASA anticipates requiring capacity for at least two astronauts permanently in low-Earth orbit in the 2030s after the decommissioning of the ISS, which currently supports a permanent crew of seven.

Voyager says the Starlab station could be ready for launch in 2028. The entire station will launch on a single heavy-lift rocket. Kuta said the Starlab team will announce a launch provider for the space station in the next couple of months.

What are the risks, by the numbers? How many asteroids hit Earth and how many can we expect to zip past us?

This is El Gordo, a NIRCam medium deep field of a galaxy cluster contains hundreds of galaxies that existed when the universe was 6.2 billion years old.

The reddish distorted "fish-hook" like galaxy, called El Anzuelo, is a far galaxy, which its light took 10.6 billion years to reach us. Its distinctive red color is due to a combination of reddening from dust within the galaxy itself and cosmological redshift due to its extreme distance.

Full image

Raw B&W images of El Gordo (El Anzuelo is on the top, a bit to the right)

Comparison with Hubble's image

NASA press release