“Matching the density of the two planets produces a model that has a bit over 10 percent of the planet’s mass composed of water. This, however, means that about half the planet’s volume is water. … Due to the planet’s mass, the pressure of the atmosphere would be immense and could create a layer of supercritical water between the atmosphere and the ocean.”
“[A] team of European researchers decided to model an event that should be relatively uncommon: the two black holes didn’t start out in a mutual orbit but happened to pass close enough to gravitationally latch onto each other. … The models that produced a chirp that best matched the GW190521 signal saw a single pass that drew the black holes closer, followed by a single rapid curve into the collision.”
“[T]he earliest image indicates that it was roughly 100,000 Kelvin, which suggests we were looking at it just six hours after it exploded. The latest lensed image shows that the debris had already cooled to 10,000 K over the eight days between the two different images.”
“Bubbles of hydrogen-ripping galaxy light began to grow, carving holes in the cold, quiet bulk of the intergalactic gas. Over a billion years, the bubbles filled the cosmos and nearly every hydrogen atom was torn in two, leaving protons and electrons to wander the Universe separately again.”
“Knowing that these two impacts generated events allowed for a direct comparison between the estimates and the impact location. And it turns out the estimates are quite good. One event was estimated at 3,530 ± 360 km away, and it turned out to be 3,460 km from the lander, a difference of just 70 km.”
“If we assume there’s a ring produced every orbit, the 17 present rings indicate about 130 years of ring production. Since they now extend out about a light-year, we can infer that they’re moving away from the binary stars at about 2,600 kilometers every second.”
“Before DART, Dimorphos’ orbit took 11 hours and 55 minutes; post-impact, it’s down to 11 hours and 23 minutes. … NASA estimates that the orbit is now ‘tens of meters’ closer to Didymos.”
“Cosmic strings appear to be a generic prediction of our (admittedly fuzzy) understanding of the early Universe. We may not know exactly what went down all those billions of years ago, but we’re fairly certain that it involved phase transitions and that those phase transitions should support the existence of topological defects like cosmic strings.”
“[Betelgeuse’s] trademark pulsation has also stopped—hopefully temporarily—perhaps because the interior convection cells ‘are sloshing around like an imbalanced washing machine tub’ as the photosphere begins the slow process of rebuilding itself.”
“That left the much rarer Type Ia supernova as the strongest candidate, events that generally occur once or twice each century in a given galaxy. These supernovas are the source of most of the iron in the universe, and such an event is the best match for the Hypatia stone’s unusual chemical makeup.”
“[I]n this case, the unseen companion was producing copious amounts of radiation that was heating the star. This process essentially produces a star with a ‘daytime’ side bathed in radiation, so it’s more energetic and brighter, and a ‘nighttime’ side that emits the star’s intrinsic brightness.”
“Dupree and her colleagues suggested that as the star expanded in one of its usual cycles, a portion of the surface accelerated much more rapidly, thanks to a convection cell that had traveled from the interior of the star to its surface. Those two events combined pushed out sufficient material far enough from the star that it cooled down, forming stardust. That dust could account for the dimming.”
“Dust grains had smashed into Juno at about 10,000 miles (or 16,000 kilometers) per hour, chipping off submillimeter pieces. … The spray of debris was coming from Juno’s expansive solar panels — the biggest and most sensitive unintended dust detector ever built.”
“This latest detection is a neutrino that began its journey in a faraway, as yet-unnamed-galaxy in the constellation Delphinus, born from the death throes of a shredded star.”
“The researchers started rolling d20s: they set primordial black holes to an arbitrary low number and then concluded that capturing a black hole is about as likely as capturing a wandering planet.”