Next week’s night sky:
On Wednesday, the Orionids Meteor Shower peaks! The remnants of Halley’s comet created this shower. The best time to watch these meteors is between midnight and dawn. Then, shower will reach rates of 10-20 meteors per hour. To find the shower, look to the southwest.
Friday is the first quarter moon. This is the best time to see the lunar terrain, as the low-angled sunlight dramatically lights the lunar surface..
Betelgeuse may not be so far away
New research suggests the red supergiant Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion may not be quite as large or far away as previously thought. However, it remains a prime candidate as a possible supernova creator.
Speculation about just when that fiery blast might be expected ramped up in the wake of the star’s pronounced dimming over the past year. But extensive observations suggest a different explanation: a cloud of gas obscured the star, dimming it
Researchers confirmed that pressure waves caused Betelgeuse’s pulsation by using hydrodynamic and seismic modeling,.
The research indicates Betelgeuse is burning helium in its core at the moment, which means it’s nowhere near exploding.
Based on the analysis of the pressure waves, research indicates Betelgeuse is not as large as researchers previously thought. The star’s radius would extend about two-thirds of the way to Jupiter, not all the way.
Based on those calculations, the researchers concluded Betelgeuse is about 530 light-years from Earth. This is a much shorter distance than the not the 700 light-years of earlier estimates.
To learn more, go here: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: New Mass and Distance Estimates for Betelgeuse through Combined Evolutionary, Asteroseismic, and Hydrodynamic Simulations with MESA.
The Ingredients of galaxy formation
What is galaxy formation? A stock answer for many cosmologists might be “the gravity-driven clustering of dark matter through cosmic time”, where dark matter is the mysterious invisible matter that is thought to make up most of the mass in the Universe. But now, researchers have a direct measurement of newborn galaxies.
To overcome the sensitivity problem, the researchers used a method known as a stacking analysis. They selected 7,653 galaxies whose distances from Earth are known from measurements of their redshifts made using optical telescopes.
They found that galaxies at that time contained about 2.5 times more of this gas relative to their stellar masses than do galaxies today. Given that atomic hydrogen is a key ingredient in the recipe for star formation, the discovery of an excess of this gas in distant galaxies helps explain the high star-formation rate at those early times. To learn more, go here: H i 21-centimeter emission from an ensemble of galaxies at an average redshift of one.
Black Hole spaghettified star (https://youtu.be/AKCp-1OGGP4)
Researchers managed to study in detail a rare blast of light from a supermassive black hole devouring a star. Undergoing a process known as “spaghettification,” the black hole’s titanic gravity pulled away, the doomed star’s atmosphere, stretched, and compressed it into thin streams.
The black hole heated up the material form the star, creating flares. But up to now, researchers have had trouble studying such events in detail because intervening clouds of gas and dust obscure them.
The research promises to shed more light on how matter behaves in the extreme-gravity environment of a supermassive black hole and may help astronomers interpret future observations of tidal disruption events. To learn more, go here: outflow powers the optical rise of the nearby, fast-evolving tidal disruption event AT2019qiz.
Do you have any cool astronomy research news from this week? Share it in the comments below!