Free Republic

Toni Santana-Ros is an asteroid hunter. At nightfall, after the final scenes of fiery clouds and flamingo sunbeams fade to black, he peers up at the sky to watch space rocks swimming along our solar system's gravitational tides. Occasionally, he catches one on a crash course with our delicate blue orb. Last year, Santana-Ros, a planetary scientist at the University of Alicante in Spain, sprung into action when astronomers realized an asteroid named 2022 WJ1 was headed straight for the border of Canada and the United States. With barely four hours on the clock, he mustered his team to help...

An illustration depicting GRB21106A. The event itself is seen as a white jet in the center of the frame, stemming from the merger seen as a pale blue lighted disk on the bottom left, and the shockwave afterglow is seen as a larger, semi-circular lit-up region toward the middle right. This artist's conception shows the merger between a neutron star and another star (disk, lower left) which caused an explosion resulting in GRB 211106A (white jet, middle), and left behind one of the most luminous afterglows on record (semispherical shock wave midright). ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), M. Weiss (NRAO/AUI/NSF) ************************************************************************************** Astronomers presented...