News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
The planet-scale array of observatories most famous for creating the first-ever image of a black hole is heading back to work. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is gearing up for its 2022 campaign, which includes seven days of remote observations. The telescope network will focus on dramatic objects around the universe including black holes, galaxies … Read more
A new ultra-powerful scan of the Great Pyramid of Giza using cosmic rays could reveal the identities of two mysterious voids inside. The largest of the two voids is located just above the grand gallery – a passageway that leads to what may be the chamber of the pharaoh Khufu – and is about 98 feet (30 meters) long … Read more
A burned-out stellar core produced a shockwave that pushed particles to their theoretical speed limit, scientists have reported. Astronomers used a gamma-ray observatory in Namibia called the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) to show how an eruption creates a shock wave that accelerates material around it super-fast speeds. The research focused on RS Ophiuchi, a … Read more
A rare star that repeatedly explodes appears to be also generating the most energetic form of light in the Universe. Analysis of an eruption from the binary system RS Ophiuchi has revealed that the shock wave expanding out into space acts as a particle accelerator that generates gamma radiation. This suggests the conditions that generate … Read more
The first major attempt to replicate striking evidence of the ‘cosmic dawn’—the appearance of the Universe’s first stars 180 million years after the Big Bang—has muddled the picture. Four years after radio astronomers reported finding a signature of the cosmic dawn, radio astronomer Ravi Subrahmanyan and his collaborators describe how they floated an antenna on … Read more
Two huge black holes are locked together by gravity as they inevitably spiral towards a collision, researchers have found in a new study. Researchers in a new study have spotted two supermassive black holes that whip around each other every two Earth years, on average, with respective masses each of hundreds of millions of times … Read more
We thought black holes rotated in the same plane as their orbit. One that is tilted by at least 40 degrees suggests our understanding of their behaviour needs an update Space 24 February 2022 By Alex Wilkins Artist impression of the X-ray binary system containing a black hole (small black dot at the centre of … Read more
We thought black holes rotated in the same plane as their orbit. One that is tilted by at least 40 degrees suggests our understanding of their behaviour needs an update Space 24 February 2022 By Alex Wilkins Artist impression of the X-ray binary system containing a black hole (small black dot at the centre of … Read more
By studying light from hundreds of thousands of stars in the Milky Way, scientists have revealed where the pieces that make up our galaxy came from. In a new study, scientists broke the light coming from 600,000 stars into spectra that determine the stars’ chemical composition. In doing this, they were able to reveal which … Read more
These are strange times indeed! During the Super Bowl this past week, fans were zapped with a mind-warping new trailer for Marvel Studios’ upcoming “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” (May 6) and the far-out preview perfectly captures the Sorcerer Supreme’s trippy dimensional-hopping insanity. Stepping in for “Doctor Strange” helmer Scott Derrickson, who did … Read more