Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 9/27/2020

Next week’s night sky:

On Monday, October 5, Mars is the closest it will get to earth. This won’t happen again until 2035!

The Draconids Meteor Shower will peak overnight on Wednesday, October 7. This shower can deliver up to 15 meteors per hour, or a meteor every 4 minutes. Check out the map below to see where to look.

Salty Lakes under the surface of Mars

Two years ago, researchers discovered a possible lake on Mars, buried under the surface of Mars.

Now, new research adds more weight to that possibility, suggesting there is not just one but several mistakes.

Researchers used new high-tech telescopes and satellites to analyze the surface of Mars.

By running their analysis on sounding data collected by the spacecraft over the previously-identified bright area and comparing it to surrounding regions, the team could see major differences in their characteristics that suggested the presence of liquid water, strengthening the evidence that the original bright patch is indeed a salty lake.

Although we currently don’t have the technology needed to drill through the surface of Mars, researchers hope to send a probe by 2024.

To learn more, go here: Multiple subglacial water bodies below the south pole of Mars unveiled by new MARSIS data

A galactic web

Astronomers have long struggled to understand how supermassive black holes could have formed in the early universe. They know these cosmic structures would have needed to grow extremely fast to achieve their supermassive status so quickly. But exactly where they found huge amounts of matter to gorge on remains unclear. 

The six newly discovered old-school galaxies reside within a vast web of gas.

After analyzing the data, the researchers determined they were seeing these galaxies as they existed just 900 million years after the Big Bang when the universe was little more than 6 percent its current age. This is the first time such a close grouping of galaxies has been found within the first billion years of the universe.

Researchers know there is a limit to how fast a black hole can grow: the Eddington limit. But while that plays a part in the formation of supermassive black holes in the early universe, the real question scientists struggle with is tracking down where early black holes sourced their meals in the first place.  T

The key likely has to do with the universe’s vast cosmic web. 

But that just pushes the question farther back. How did these filaments first get their gas? Astronomers think that answer might be related to another long-standing astronomical mystery: dark matter. 

By studying these galaxies, researchers hope to learn more about the cosmic web and dark matter.

To learn more, go here: Web of the giant: Spectroscopic confirmation of a large-scale structure around the z=6.31 quasar SDSS J1030+0524

Total matter in the universe

Researchers have precisely measured the total amount of matter making up the cosmos. They decided that dark energy, the mysterious force speeding up the expansion of the universe, accounts for 69 percent of the total mass-energy budget, with normal and dark matter contributing the remaining 31.5 (+/- 1.3) percent.

Around 80 percent of the latter is made up of dark matter.
The remaining 20 percent made up of the particles, atoms, and molecules familiar to human beings as gas, dust, planets, stars, and galaxies.

To come with an accurate measure of the mass in the universe, the researchers developed a tool known as GalWeight to measure the mass of a galaxy cluster using the orbits of its member galaxies. They then compiled a catalog of galaxy clusters based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and compared the number of clusters with the results of numerical simulations.

This measurement will help researchers all over understand the forces behind our universe.

To learn more, go here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/aba619

Do you have any cool astronomy research news from this week? Share it in the comments below!