*** The Official Astronomy & Universe Thread ***

Installing the package of science instruments of the James Webb Space Telescope into the telescope structure.


These science instruments are known as the Integrated Science Instrument Module, or ISIM, and it's the collection of cameras, spectrographs and fine guidance systems that help record the light collected by Webb's giant golden mirror.
 
Now you can listen to the sounds of the Milky Way galaxy's oldest stars. University of Birmingham researchers have detected the acoustic oscillations of Milky Way stars that are about 13 billion years old.

They've used asteroseismology, the measuring of the tiny pulses in brightness triggered by sound caught inside those stars to capture the sound.

Listen here:

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/la...ogists-listen-to-relics-of-the-milky-way.aspx

(Works on Chrome)
 
How supermassive black holes were formed:


X-ray Echoes Map a Black Hole’s Disk:


Some 3.9 billion years ago in the heart of a distant galaxy, the tidal pull of a monster black hole shredded a star that wandered too close. X-rays produced in this event first reached Earth on March 28, 2011, when they were detected by NASA's Swift satellite. Within days, scientists concluded that the outburst, now known as Swift J1644+57, represented both the tidal disruption of a star and the sudden flare-up of a previously inactive black hole.

Now astronomers using archival observations from Swift, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton observatory and the Japan-led Suzaku satellite have identified the reflections of X-ray flares erupting during the event. Led by Erin Kara, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the University of Maryland, College Park, the team has used these light echoes, or reverberations, to map the flow of gas near a newly awakened black hole for the first time.

Swift J1644+57 is one of only three tidal disruptions that have produced high-energy X-rays, and to date it remains the only event caught at the peak of this emission. While astronomers don't yet understand what causes flares near the black hole, when one occurs they can detect its echo a couple of minutes later as its light washes over structures in the developing accretion disk. The technique, called X-ray reverberation mapping, has been used before to explore stable disks around black holes, but this is time it has been applied to a newly formed disk produced by a tidal disruption.

Swift J1644+57's accretion disk was thicker, more turbulent and more chaotic than stable disks, which have had time to settle down into an orderly routine. One surprise is that high-energy X-rays arise from the innermost regions of the disk instead of a narrow jet of accelerated particles, as originally thought.

The researchers estimate the black hole has a mass about a million times that of the sun. They expect future improvements in understanding and modeling accretion flows will allow them to measure the black hole's spin using this data.
Click to expand...
 
To Jupiter...

Timelapse videos of the vivid auroras in Jupiter’s atmosphere created using observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope:



NASA's Juno spacecraft crosses the boundary of Jupiter's immense magnetic field:

 
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