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Nine hundred million years after the Big Bang, in the epoch of our universe's earliest galaxies, there was already a black hole 1 billion times the size of our sun. That black hole sucked in huge quantities of ionized gas, forming a galactic engine — known as a blazar — that blasted a superhot jet of bright matter into space. On Earth, we can still detect the light from that explosion more than 12 billion years later. Astronomers had previously discovered evidence of primeval supermassive black holes in slightly younger "radio-loud active galactic nuclei," or RL AGNs. RL AGNs are...

According to the provided article, asteroid 99942 Apophis has a 1 in 40 chance of hitting earth in 2029. If it misses in 2029, it would have an even higher chance of hitting in 2036. According to NASA and other reputable sources the asteroid is of 370 meters in diameter which is about the size of the Eiffel Tower. When you plug this into a simulation like the asteroid collision map, you can see that its large magnitude can cause some pretty serious damages depending on the location it impacts. According to the simulation, some of these effects are earthquakes,...

In 1781, an oboe player discovered the first new planet since antiquity. The History Guy recalls a solar system shattering event that represented an era of scientific inquiry. It is history that deserves to be remembered.

A new paper describes how the researchers connected the moving dots to find the new TNOs, and also says this new approach could help look for the hypothetical Planet Nine and other undiscovered worlds. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. It studies galaxies and supernovas and precisely tracks their movements. This survey has been active since 2013, using the 4-meter Blanco Telescope located at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. The...

Astronomers have finally found something they have spent decades searching for: a teardrop-shaped star that pulsates on only one side. Citizen scientists helped the discovery team find the strangely lopsided star, which is known as HD74423, in data gathered by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The star is about 1.7 times the mass of Earth's sun, and scientists determined that HD74423's weird pulsing is caused by a second, smaller star. "I've been looking for a star like this for nearly 40 years, and now we have finally found one," study co-author Don Kurtz, an astronomer at the University of...

The problem with Polaris is that no one can agree on how big or distant it is. Astrophysicists have a few ways to calculate the mass, age and distance of a star like Polaris. One method is a stellar evolution model...Researchers can study the brightness, color and rate of pulsation of the star and use that data to figure out how big and bright it is and what stage of life it's in. These models are especially precise for cepheids, because their rate of pulsing is directly related to their luminosity, or brightness. That makes it easy to calculate the...

The paper, titled Distinct oxygen isotope compositions of the Earth and Moon, may challenge the current understanding of the formation of the Moon. Previous research led to scientists to develop the Giant Impact Hypothesis suggesting the Moon was formed from debris following a giant collision between early-Earth and a proto-planet named Theia. The Earth and Moon are geochemically similar. Samples returned from the Moon from the Apollo missions showed a near-identical composition in oxygen isotopes. Although the Giant Impact Hypothesis can nicely explain many of the geochemical similarities between Earth and Moon, the extreme similarity in oxygen isotopes has been...

UFOs may be fodder for comedians and science fiction but there was no joking Monday when a group of pilots and officials demanded the US government reopen an investigation into unidentified flying objects. The 19 former pilots and government officials, who say they have seen UFOs themselves or been involved in probes of strange flying objects, told reporters their questions can no longer be dismissed more than 30 years after the US case was closed."We want the US government to stop perpetuating the myth that all UFOs can be explained away in down-to-earth, conventional terms," said Fife Symington, former governor...

The event destroyed a village found in the Abu Hureyra dig site in Syria... The impact is also believed to have contributed to the extinction of many large animals, including mammoths as well as North American horses and camels. Experts believe the explosion helped bring about the demise of the North American Clovis culture and usher in an episode of climatic cooling. The Abu Hureyra site is located on the edge of a vast region known as the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) strewnfield, which incorporates around 30 sites across Europe, the Americas and parts of the Middle East. The strewnfield...

Still, excitement is building among both professional and amateur astronomers about the upcoming flyby of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 – the biggest asteroid due to fly by Earth this year – coming closest on April 29, 2020. This space rock is probably at least a mile wide (1.8 km) and maybe 2 1/2 times that big (4.1 km). Closest approach is April 29 around 5:56 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (09:56 UTC; translate UTC to your time). No access to a telescope? No problem. The Virtual Telescope Project in Rome will host a free, online public viewing of the asteroid on...

SETI@home is shutting down. In an announcement posted yesterday, the project stated that they will no longer send data to SETI@home clients starting on March 31st, 2020 as they have reached a "point of diminishing returns" and have analyzed all the data that they need.

Two asteroids projected to come zooming past planet Earth on 2 March have had NASA on alert, with its Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) tracking the wayward space rocks that possess orbits intersecting Earth’s trajectory. The first asteroid to venture into Earth’s vicinity has been dubbed 2020 DZ3. With an orbit that goes through the paths of Mercury and Venus, according to CNEOS’ database, the asteroid has built up a speed of over 48,000 miles per hour and boasts an estimated diameter of about 154 feet (47 Meters). This asteroid’s next near-Earth approach is calculated to happen on 28...

BOCA CHICA – An explosion at the SpaceX site in Boca Chica occurred Friday night while testing its Starship SN1. It was posted by LabPadre. It reportedly happened around 10 p.m. According to Valerie Bates, marketing director for the City of Port Isabel, says it was an accidental cryogenic explosion. No injuries were reported and no chemicals were released. Anyone who may have been affected by the explosion is asked to call 956-943-2727.

The Japanese space agency JAXA sent the Hayabusa probe to Itokawa, which collected soil samples and brought them safely back to Earth—for the first time in the history of space travel. This valuable cargo arrived in 2010 and since then, the samples have been the subject of intensive research. A team from Japan and Jena has now succeeded in coaxing a previously undiscovered secret from some of these tiny sample particles: the surface of the dust grains is covered with tiny wafer-thin crystals of iron. This observation surprised Prof. Falko Langenhorst and Dr. Dennis Harries of Friedrich Schiller University in...

Freeman J. Dyson, a mathematical prodigy who left his mark on subatomic physics before turning to messier subjects like Earth’s environmental future and the morality of war, died on Friday at a hospital near Princeton, N.J. He was 96. His daughter Mia Dyson confirmed the death. As a young graduate student at Cornell in 1949, Dr. Dyson wrote a landmark paper — worthy, some colleagues thought, of a Nobel Prize — that deepened the understanding of how light interacts with matter to produce the palpable world. The theory the paper advanced, called quantum electrodynamics, or QED, ranks among the great...

Astronomers have spotted a cosmic blast that dwarfs all others. A gargantuan explosion tore through the heart of a distant galaxy cluster, releasing about five times more energy than the previous record holder, a new study reports. "In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain," study lead author Simona Giacintucci, of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "A key difference is that you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into...

Scientists say that meteors hit earth 17 times a day. However, we don't even notice because these meteors are either too small or hit in uninhabited areas in the world. The reason that damages are unlikely and almost never occur from these daily impacts is that most of the world is uninhabited and no one is near the impact location to experience or report the impact and its location. However, the impacts that are recorded are often added to a list for scientists and enthusiasts to study. For example, a website called asteroid collision location map is a source that...

A visiting mini-moon is circling Earth, according to astronomers who discovered the cosmic squatter in our planet's orbit.The tiny asteroid, dubbed 2020 CD3, was spotted by astronomers in Tucson, Arizona, on Feb. 15. "BIG NEWS," Kacper Wierzchos, a researcher with the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Lab, tweeted Tuesday. "Earth has a new temporarily captured object/Possible mini-moon called 2020 CD3. On the night of Feb. 15, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Teddy Pruyne and I found a 20th magnitude object."Wierzchos said that the object measures about 6 feet to 11 feet across and that...

Day by day, new images appear showing an ever clearer view of a world we inexplicably love. Call it a dwarf planet. Call it a planet. It’s the unknown, and we can’t help but be drawn there. Pluto made history when it was discovered in 1930. In 2015, it’s doing it all over again. Check out the new geology peeping into view.I’m reminded of the early explorers who shoved off in wooden ships in search of land across the water. After a long and often perilous journey, the mists would finally clear and the dark outline of land take form...

Although major killer asteroids are extremely rare, minor asteroids called meteors often impact earth going unnoticed. Most of the time they burn up in the atmosphere. However, if they do not these smaller scale asteroids can weigh anywhere from 20 pounds to upwards of hundreds or thousands of pounds. Maybe even more! Fortunately, these smaller scale asteroids do not usually collide with highly populated areas and mainly impact the earths large swaths of uninhabited areas. Most of these collisions go unreported or unnoticed. However, reported collisions are usually added to a list. For example, a map simulation from an asteroid...