Next week’s night sky:
On Tuesday, September 9, Saturn will appear to stand still. Usually, planets appear to move across the night sky and change places in reference to other stars. However, on this day, Saturn will move with the stars. This will make the planet a lot easier to find! Just look for the bright planet in the southern sky, then remember the pattern the stars make around it. Anytime during the night, you will be able to find that pattern and find Saturn!October 1 is the full moon. This will be a great chance to look more closely at the beautiful Lunar surface!
Top astronomy photo 2020
This year’s top astronomy photo is of the Andromeda galaxy, the closest galaxy to the milky way.
An exoplanet with an orbit of pi.
In a cosmic stroke of luck, researchers have found an Earth-size exoplanet with a period of 3.14-days. Orbiting around its star at 181,000 miles per hour, the planet’s surface temperature is 350 degrees Fahrenheit). This is just about right for baking an actual pie, says MIT.
Catalogued as K2-315b, the planet represents the 315th solar system discovered in the K2 data, just one away from yet another pi tie-in. Its radius is 95 percent that of Earth’s and while it is thought to be a terrestrial world, its close-in orbit and the resulting high temperatures make it an unlikely host for life. To learn more, go here: Researchers find exoplanet with pi-like 3.14-day orbit – Astronomy Now
The Music of the Milky Way
The center of our Milky Way galaxy is too far for us to visit in person, but we can still explore it. Telescopes give us a chance to see what the universe looks like. By translating digital data (captured by telescopes in space into images, astronomers create visual representations that would otherwise be invisible to us.
Sonification is the process that translates data into sound, and a new project brings the center of the Milky Way to listeners for the first time. The translation begins on the left side of the image and moves to the right, with the sounds representing the position and brightness of the sources. The light of objects located towards the top of the image is heard as higher pitches while the intensity of the light controls the volume. Stars and compact sources are converted to individual notes while extended clouds of gas and dust produce an evolving drone.
This type of data analysis can be quite helpful in finding patterns in data!
A wobbly black hole
After releasing the first image of a supermassive black hole’s shadow last year, researchers combing through data collected by the Event Horizon Telescope project between 2009 and 2013 found the shadow is actually wobbling and has rotated significantly over the past decade.
The wobble is an indicator of the dynamical flow of material racing around the black hole in an accretion disc, heated to billions of degrees as it spirals inward. Being able to directly observe processes at work in the accretion disk near the black hole may shed light on how relativistic jets and other high energy-phenomena are generated.
The dynamics of the wobbling seen with M87 will allow researchers to constrain the accretion flow. That’s important because in some circumstances this allows researchers to test predictions from general relativity. To learn more, go here: Discovery of oscillations above 200 keV in a black hole X-ray binary with Insight-HXMT
Do you have any cool astronomy research news from this week? Share it in the comments below!