Nature Hub

        From :-  Sky & Telescope By :- Bob King Editted by : - Amal Udawatta     On August 12, 2019, under a waxing gibbous Moon, a Perseid earthgrazer (left of center) scratches a path in the sky above Tucson, Arizona. Eliot Herman Aristotle postulated that meteors occurred when dry and smoky exhalations rose from cracks in the ground and ascended into the sublunar realm, where they suddenly burst into flame. The reality is much more exciting. Sand-sized grains spalled from 4.5-billion-year-old interplanetary travelers strike Earth's atmosphere at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour, fast enough to heat them to incandescence and etch the heavens with fleeting streaks of glowing air. Every year, around mid-August, Earth crosses the orbit of 109P/Swift-Tuttle. Debris from the comet strikes Earth's atmosphere, producing a meteor shower. Occasionally, our planet cuts across narrow, denser filaments laid down by the comet. This year, we expect a p...

   From :- Sky & Telescope By :- AAS NOWA Edited by :- Amal Udawatta JWST image of the Infinity Galaxy. ASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, P. van Dokkum (Yale University) Researchers have discovered a rare ring-galaxy duo that appears to harbor a supermassive black hole formed through direct collapse — a process similar to what may have jump-started the growth of the first supermassive black holes in the universe. Researchers have discovered a rare ring-galaxy duo that appears to harbor a supermassive black hole formed through direct collapse. Searching for Oddballs A portion of the COSMOS-Web field. ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Gozaliasl, A. Koekemoer, M. Franco, and the COSMOS-Web team; CC BY 4.0 To find something remarkable, sometimes you have to go looking for it. As described in an article published today in the  Astrophysical Journal Letters , a research team led by Pieter van Dokkum (Yale University; Dragonfly Focused Research Organization) recently struck gold in their sea...

     From :- Sky & Telescope    By :- Camille M. Carlisle   Edited by :- Amal Udawatta This 2-panel mosaic by  S&T  Gallery contributor Mark Germani  shows the Andromeda Galaxy, which lies approximately 2.5 million light-years away. Each of the two panels that make up this image consist of 7 hours of data. Germani also incorporated a small amount of hydrogen-alpha data from one of his previous images of this galaxy, so as to highlight the hydrogen-rich star formation regions (in pinkish-red).     A new analysis of Hubble and Gaia data suggests that our galaxy might survive an upcoming encounter with the Andromeda Galaxy unscathed. The Milky Way and Andromeda are the behemoths of the Local Group, the mini cluster in which we reside. They’re joined by roughly 100 smaller galaxies, including two large sidekicks: M33 (Andromeda’s buddy, the Triangulum Galaxy) and the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s close companion...

    From :- Space.Com By :-  By  Robert Lea   Edited by :- Amal Udawatta (Image credit: Legacy Surveys / D. Lang (Perimeter Institute) / INAF / F. Onori) The brutal star-destroying tidal disruption event is only the second ever seen in interacting galaxies. Astronomers have taken a detailed look at a rare and incredibly violent cosmic event resulting from an unfortunate star venturing too close to a supermassive black hole. The team behind the research hopes it could reveal more about how such events, dubbed "tidal disruption events" or "TDEs," influence the evolution of their host galaxies. These brutal battles between stellar bodies and the immense gravity of black holes with masses millions or even billions of times that of the sun result in stars being shredded and fed to the  black holes . This cosmic cannibalism causes blasts of light that can outshine the combined light of every star in the host galaxy of the  TDE , alerting scientists to a gory...