Next week’s night sky:
Wednesday marks the end of Mars’s forward retrograde motion. If you train a camera on Mars all night, you will notice that it stops moving forward and starts going backward! This effect happens because Mars’s orbit is slower than ours. You can observe this effect when you are neck to neck with another car on the highway, and then pull ahead. Next Thursday is a third-quarter moon. Look extremely closely at the terminator between night and day to see the fine details in the cratered lunar surface.
Researchers discover colliding black holes
Within a year of its first breakthrough, the LIGO observatory has done it again. This observatory detected two shattering discoveries: a new type of black hole, and a new collision between these new black holes.
Researchers identified a unique set of gravitational waves coming from this collision of black holes. The waves came from about 7 billion light-years away, making them the most distant gravitational-wave signal ever detected. More importantly, the researchers think these gravitational waves point to the merger of two black holes that formed a never-before-confirmed mid-sized black hole.
This could be the first direct evidence for a special breed of black hole called an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH). Astronomers think IMBHs fill a gap between stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes. The strange thing is that any star that could form a black hole between 65 to 120 solar masses, doesn’t explode as a supernova. That means there shouldn’t be any black holes born from collapsing stars in that mass range.
Because the other alternative explanations of this event are less possible, it seems that our understanding of the death of stars may be wrong. This discovery is already sheathing light on the mysteries of the cosmos, and will probably do so for a long time. To learn more about this discovery, go here: Properties and Astrophysical Implications of the 150 M ⊙ Binary Black Hole Merger GW190521.
Dual Quasars
Researchers believe that all large galaxies, including our galaxy have supermassive black holes in their cores. Researchers believe that these black holes keep the galaxies together and make them spin. Some galaxies are relatively calm. Others create huge amounts of energy, and outshine their host galaxies by pulling in gas and heating it up. Such active galaxies are known as quasars.
Galaxy mergers across the cosmos are too not rare, but how rare are quasars?
Observations by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii indicate that they are extremely rare. Just 0.3 percent of all known quasars feature two supermassive black holes in ongoing galactic collisions! Researcher call these galaxies luminous dual quasars.
These dual quasars are important because they represent an important phase in galaxy evolution. Because there are so few of them, researchers must search as best as they can to find out all they can about dual quasars. To learn more, go here: Astronomers find dual quasars are exceedingly rare – Astronomy Now.
Triple dust rings
Planets orbiting single stars are quite common, and many planetary systems have been found around double stars. But researchers have not confirmed even one exoplanet orbiting three stars.
The observations revealed three huge dust rings were orbing the central star.
Researchers were surprised to see the strong misalignment of the inner ring. Computer simulations suggest that the interactions of the three stars, strangely enough, cannot explain the misaligned rings.
The researchers think that the presence of a planet between these rings is needed to explain why the disk was torn apart. They think that the possible planet has likely carved a dust gap and broken the disk at the location of the current inner and outer rings.
Either way, ongoing observations of GW Orionis will shed light on planetary formation in complex gravitational environments. To learn more, go here: GW Ori: Interactions between a Triple-star System and Its Circumtriple Disk in Action.
Do you have any cool astronomy research news from this week? Share it in the comments below!