Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 6/21/2020

Next week’s night sky:

The  Boötid meteor shower is active! This shower only rarely produces significant numbers of meteors, usually only at most 1-2 per hour. However, on those rare occasions, when it is extremely active, viewers can see up to one hundred meteors per hour! For observers in the middle of the United States, the best time to watch will be right after nightfall. Because most meteor showers occur at around 2 in the morning, this is an amazing opportunity for most casual watchers to try and see a meteor! In order to see a meteor, first, look northwest just above the horizon. Then lie still, and focus on the stars. A meteor will look like a large point of light streaking across the sky and is quite unmistakable.

Interesting news:

Super-Earths were found orbiting a red dwarf only eleven light-years from Earth, quite near considering that these planets could be habitable. (A super-Earth is a rocky planet with a higher mass than the Earth, but less than the gas giants). This is particularly interesting for two reasons. First, the new planet will likely have a thick, possibly life-supporting atmosphere. The reason for this is because the super-earth orbits a less active star, meaning it is less likely to get its atmosphere blown off into space. Second, the brightness of the star that it circles is constant, meaning that it will be quite easy to detect the atmosphere of this planet. (source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200625144833.htm) 

A periodic extragalactic radio burst was detected by the CHIME telescope. The most important thing about this detection is that it is periodic, meaning that this is not just a random one-time event. The researchers think that it is more probable that it is periodically blocked, instead of just being a random occurrence.  The period of this burst is 16.35 days or a possibly higher frequency that is not detected. This period normally rules out objects such as neutron stars, whose periods are around 1 second. However, in this scenario, researchers have come up with a second scenario: the star wobbles and its beam sweeps earth every sixteen days. (source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.10275.pdf)

Ripples in the fabric of space have told us that there was a collision between a black hole an object too massive to be a neutron star, but not massive enough to be a black hole. The only explanation is that we have just witnessed the lightest black hole ever or the heaviest neutron star. Researchers are leaning towards the idea that it was a small black hole, but we do not have enough evidence to know for sure. This raises other questions, such as how such a small black hole came to be and how it paired up with such a big black hole. Unfortunately, we did not record enough data from the collision to extract more information, so scientists think that this object will remain a mystery. (source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ligo-virgo-detected-collision-black-hole-mystery-object) 

Any other interesting research that you know about? Let me know in the comments!