Free Republic

...Scientists have been keeping a close watch on those changes, both to ensure there’s nothing unexplainable by our current understanding, but also to compare 3I/ATLAS to both previous interstellar visitors as well as comets in our own solar system. A recent paper from European researchers describes how the changes in a particular material ratio in 3I/ATLAS’ coma fit with our current understanding of cometary geology.That ratio is the nickel to iron (Ni/FE) abundance ratio. It has been measured for two decades, including on twenty in-system comets as well as 2I/Borisov, the last known interstellar visitor our solar system had. However,...

Microlensing strikes again. Astronomers have been using the technique to detect everything from rogue planets to the most distant star ever seen. Now, astronomers have officially found another elusive object that has long been theorized, and that Universe Today first reported on back in 2009 but has never directly detected – a rogue black hole. That detection comes at the end of a 6-year observational campaign, with dozens of authors collaborating on a paper recently published in arXiv (meaning it has not yet been peer-reviewed). Those six years of painstakingly gathered data all started back in 2011, when a star...