When it comes to black holes, does size really matter? Would you be afraid if astronomers discovered one of the tiniest black holes ever? Would you change your mind if they told you it was also the closest black hole to the Earth ever found? How close? Ah, all of sudden, size DOES matter!
Tharindu Jayasinghe is a doctoral student in astronomy at The Ohio State University and part of a team of researchers looking for tiny black holes – a new class of black holes discovered in 2019 at The Ohio State University. They were scanning data on a red giant star in the constellation Monoceros – so named because it resembles the mythical steed – when they noticed something was causing the light from the red giant to periodically change in intensity and appearance. The changes were so drastic that they signaled the orbiting object was massive enough to change its shape – a phenomenon called tidal distortion – but not large enough to block it completely from view. Knowing what they kno
still bright at magnitudes at 8.1 and 9.9, respectively, but a brand new nova in Scorpius has just joined the scene. Add in Comet ATLAS (C/2020 R4), now at magnitude 9.5, and you know in your heart a dawn observing session is in your future.
Amateur astronomer Paul Camilleri of Northern Territory, Australia and the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) independently discovered the new object early on April 12th at visual magnitude 9.5. Formally named V1710 Scorpii, it brightened quickly to 8.5 before fading slightly, now simmering around 9.5 as of early April 15th. Oscillations like these are common, so the nova might continue to fade or re-brighten just as suddenly.
March 2, 2021
Anna Payne
Unraveling an explosive mystery 570 million light-years away from Earth is an accomplishment belonging to the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy graduate student
Anna Payne. Her discovery of a blackhole at the center of an alluring active galaxy has earned her American Astronomical Society’s (
AAS) Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award.
A giant star being slowly devoured as it orbits the galaxy’s central black hole. (Image credit:
NASA)
Payne’s detection appears to reclassify what astronomers originally thought were supernova that fueled periodic flares every 114 days at the core of what’s been dubbed the “Old Faithful” galaxy.
VLA Helps Astronomers Make New Discoveries About Star-Shredding Events
Credit: Sophia Dagnello, NRAO/AUI/NSF
Black holes that are millions or billions of times more massive than the Sun lurk at the cores of large galaxies and can have profound effects on their surroundings. One of the more exciting of those effects comes when a star ventures too close to the black hole and falls victim to that monster’s powerful gravitational pull. The star is shredded by tidal forces in a process colorfully termed
spaghettification.
When that happens, some of the star’s material is pulled into a disk that orbits the black hole, heating rapidly and launching jets of fast-moving particles outward in two opposite directions. This produces an outburst that can be observed with a variety of telescopes, including radio, visible, ultraviolet, and X-ray instruments.
TESS reveals triple-binary eclipsing star system & Sun-like star with extremely close exoplanets
January 29, 2021
The first-discovered triple-binary sextuple star system and a Sun-like star with five exoplanets orbiting within the distance of Mercury are just two recent examples of the extraordinary systems being investigated and discovered by scientist using data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS.
The joint NASA-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) mission is the cornerstone of two recently presented discoveries that characterize two tantalizing systems and their benefit to understanding stellar system formation.
A sextuplly-eclipsing sextuple system
Finding a system with six stars is rare to begin with. Finding such a system with three sets of binaries, all of which are eclipsing binaries when viewed from Earth is even more rare.