Lifeboat Foundation

An international team of astronomers has detected a new luminous quasar at a redshift of 7.02. The newly found quasi-stellar object (QSO), designated DELS J003836.10–152723.6, is the most luminous quasar known at a redshift of over 7.0. The discovery is reported in a paper published October 29 on the arXiv pre-print repository.

Powered by the most massive black holes, bright quasars at high redshift are important for astronomers as they are perceived as the brightest beacons highlighting the chemical evolution of the universe most effectively. They are the most luminous and most distant, compact objects in the observable universe and their spectrum can be used, for instance, to estimate the mass of supermassive black holes (SMBHs).

However, high-redshift QSOs are extremely rare and difficult to find. So far, only two quasars with redshifts over 7.0 have been identified. This limits our understanding of SMBH growth mechanism and reionization history.

Continue reading “Astronomers discover new luminous high-redshift quasar” »

History is full of forgotten heroes. Sometimes that’s because somebody else got credit for their work. Sometimes it’s because they were women in a male-dominated world. And sometimes it’s because a couple of continents *cough* Western society *cough* decided they didn’t want to include them in the history books. Meet Ibn al-Haytham — the guy who basically invented Science with a capital S.

In the beginning, there was light, and matter, and antimatter, in an expanding and cooling Universe. But something else happened before.

Scientists just further confirmed what has long been believed: that there’s a supermassive black hole scientists named Sagittarius A* at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. This mind-blowing 1.5-minute video zooms in from a wide view of the night sky into the tiny little area where the latest telescopic observations were just made.

In a paper published on October 31st, 2018, scientists at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) detailed how they used the GRAVITY interferometer and the four telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to create a virtual telescope that effectively has a diameter of 427 feet (130m).

Continue reading “Zoom Into the Black Hole at the Center of the Milky Way” »

There’s still a lot left to learn about black holes. One of the questions astronomers ask: How can black holes change our future?

It is literally a see-through galaxy.”

For one thing, it completely changes how we think galaxies owrk.

Based on observations by the European Souther Observatory’s GRAVITY instrument, this simulation shows gases swirling around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way — at just 30% the speed of light — “the first time material has been observed orbiting close to the point of no return.”

ESO/Gravity Consortium/L. Calçada

Perhaps the most important supernova of the modern era is SN 1987A, the closest supernova to Earth since the invention of the telescope. Scientists have been observing the explosion’s remnants since the 1987 event.

Scientists led by University of Toronto graduate student Yvette Cendes have presented a new report showing the 25 years of radio wave observations of the stellar corpse’s evolution from 1992 to 2017. You can watch those observations in the timelapse below.

After guiding us across the universe, astrophysicist and Space.com columnist Paul Sutter closes his basic astronomy series this week by looking at the arguments for and against the existence of quark stars.

In Episode 12 of the Facebook Watch series “Ask a Spaceman,” Sutter continues to explore the topic of these stars, finishing a miniseries that began with Episode 10 and Episode 11. Scientists haven’t observed quark stars yet, but the objects may exist. Such a star would be a leftover remnant of a star that exploded and would be packed even more densely than a neutron star; the quark star would have such strong gravity that fundamental particles in the core, such as protons and neutrons, would break down into their constituent parts, called quarks.

“Is there any astrophysical scenario at all that enables them [quark stars] to appear in our universe?” Sutter asks in the new episode. At first, he suggests there might be some things we categorized a dwarf stars that are more dense and massive than what physics would suggest. So, maybe we have seen quark stars, but we can’t tell the difference between a quark star and a neutron star — they look too much alike, Sutter says. [Supernova Fail: Giant Dying Star Collapses Straight into Black Hole].