A team of astronomers has targeted 70 nearby stars to look for such exoplanets, and have just announced a new one: YSES 2b, a giant planet orbiting a star just 360 light years away.
We ve seen some similar to this before, but in this case, this planet is special. For one thing, it s orbiting a star that will one day be very much like the Sun. For another, it s orbiting at least
16.5 billion kilometers from the star, a whopping 110 times farther from its star as Earth is from the Sun!
That s a very, very long way, and what it s doing that far out is a mystery.
Still, say they were… and say we could hop aboard the
Enterprise and make the entirely questionable decision to warp on over to a binary supermassive black hole system. What would it look like?
Video of The Doubly Warped World of Binary Black Holes
Simulation of two supermassive black holes orbiting each other. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell
This is not just CGI, it s a simulation based on solving the actual equations of the Theory Relativity, the laws that tell light how to behave in the presence of the immense gravity of black holes. Solving them for a single black hole is difficult though it s been done before but doing for two is far harder. Still, this is what it would look like if you were there.
Ingenuity is the first airfoil flying machine ever sent to a different planet. Unlike its parent rover Perseverance, under which it hitched a ride all the way to Mars, it’s not designed for science. Instead, it’s an engineering testbed, designed and built to try out different technologies for flight. This includes the twin carbon-fiber blades; the avionics that controls the flight, power, communications, and navigation; the landing legs, and even the solar panel on top that provides electricity to charge the lithium ion batteries that power Ingenuity.
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The Ingenuity helicopter (center) hovers over the surface of Mars in its first test flight, achieved on April 19, 2021. This raw (unprocessed) image was taken from the Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Or how about this: Standing on Earth s equator you d experience a sideways velocity due to Earth s spin of about 1,700 kilometers per hour. Standing on the equator of one of these brown dwarfs that you d be moving more like 375,000 kph!
Whoa. In fact, they re spinning so rapidly that the centrifugal force outward is nearly equal to their gravitational force inward. In other words, if they spun much faster
they d literally fly themselves apart.
I love everything about this story.
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Diagram showing relative masses and sizes of planets, brown dwarfs, and stars. The star shown would be an extremely low mass red dwarf, which can be roughly the same size as Jupiter though much denser. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Generically, such an object is called an active galaxy
. If one of those beams happens to be pointed at Earth, we can see lots of light from across almost the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to X-rays.
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Artwork depicting binary quasars, two actively galaxies orbiting one another. Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble/ESO/M. Kornmesser, adapted by Phil Plait
We know that there are extremely massive black holes out there which may have grown to such enormous size when two big galaxies merge. The black holes fall toward each other, eventually orbiting each other and then, after billions of years, they can merge together into one bigger black hole. This implies we should find binary supermassive black holes, or at least two that are close together (say, within a few thousand light years of each other). However very few are seen, mainly because they re hard to discover.