Created using still images taken by the Cassini spacecraft during it’s flyby of Jupiter and while at Saturn. Shown is Io and Europa over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.
Andromeda is a bit bigger than us. So when that happens, Andromeda’s black hole is gonna consume our black hole in a vicious act of galactic canabalism.
Which is an actual term used in astronomy apparently.
Galactic cannibalism is one of my favourite astronomical terms, but it doesn’t beat the term used for the stretching out into a long thin tube that occurs when something falls into a black hole (spaghettification) or the term used for a rock thought to be a meteorite but which later turns out to be an ordinary terrestrial rock (meteowrong).
Our nearest neighbor could be nearly perfect for the search for life on other planets.
A pale red dot not far from our sun may be orbited by a pale blue dot much different than Earth.
In a shocking find, astronomers Wednesday announced their discovery of an Earth-sized planet orbiting the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, just 4.2 light-years away. This warm world, cataloged as Proxima b, sits smack in the middle of its habitable zone — the sweetest of sweet spots — where liquid surface water could exist.
But Proxima Centauri is not like our sun. It’s a cool, low-mass star known as a red dwarf. So the planet only qualifies as potentially habitable because it circles its sun in an orbit tighter than Mercury’s.
“The first hints of a possible planet were spotted back in 2013, but the detection was not convincing,” says Queen Mary University of London astronomer Guillem Anglada-Escudéf, who led the discovery team. “Since then we have worked hard to get further observations off the ground.”
Anglada-Escudéf’s group, called Pale Red Dot in homage to Carl Sagan, is an international team of several dozen astronomers who have collectively spent years searching for Earth’s nearest neighbor.
Incredibly, the planet’s ghostly signal was hidden in the data for decades. Pale Red Dot noticed a weak signal reoccurring every 11.2 days. They used this potential find to secure support from the European Southern Observatory, and then they set out on an unprecedented confirmation campaign.
For months earlier this year, they kept a near-constant vigil on Proxima Centauri using ESO’s 3.6-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. Their radial velocity technique, which detects tiny wobbles as the planet pulls on its star, provided the stunning confirmation.
An analysis of this new data, as well as a simultaneous analysis of decades-old observations, was revealed Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“You take the old data and the new data, and you combine everything together, and then the significance of the detection goes sky high — very, very significant,” says Anglada-Escudéf.
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