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Strange interstellar object 'Oumuamua is tiny and very reflective
After no small amount of mystery, we're starting to understand more about 'Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object to visit the Solar System. A newly published study indicates that the object can't be that large, for one thing. As the Spitzer Space Telescope's infrared detection couldn't catch the cigar-shaped entity, that makes it relatively small. It's likely less than half a mile (2,600 feet) at its longest. It also can't have a diameter larger than 1,440 feet, and that figure could be as small as 320 feet.
First observed interstellar object is a speedy, cigar-shaped asteroid
Last month, astronomers running the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii spotted an intriguing object moving through our solar system and it became clear pretty quickly that the object, whether it was a comet or an asteroid, had come from outside of our solar system. Now, in a paper published this week in the journal Nature, researchers have described the interstellar visitor, dubbed 'Oumuamua, including its peculiarities as well as its similarities to objects originating in our own solar system.
Stars can turn into black holes without a supernova
As a rule, astronomers believe that stars have to explode in a supernova before they collapse into black holes. That violent death is always the cue, right? Not necessarily. Researchers have spotted a massive star 22 million light years away, N6946-BH1, that appears to have skipped the supernova step entirely -- it brightened slightly and just disappeared. Checks have ruled out a dimmed star or dust. And this probably isn't a one-off incident, either. Ohio State University's Christopher Kochanek tells NASA that 10 to 30 percent of massive stars might die in failed supernovae.
NASA takes a Super-Earth's temperature
NASA researchers recently trained the Spitzer Space Telescope at a nearby Super-Earth, 55 Cancri e, and, for the first time, have managed to map its temperature as the exoplanet orbits its host star. The map reveals that the planet suffers from extreme temperature swings, depending on its orbit. Since 55 Cancri e circles so closely to its star (completing orbits in just 18 hours), it behaves much like the Earth's moon. That is, one side of the planet continually faces the star and is therefore far hotter than the opposite side -- 4400 degrees F and 2060 degrees F, respectively.
NASA space telescope discovers Earth's closest rocky neighbor
NASA researchers working with the Spitzer Space Telescope announced on Thursday that they had indeed found the closest rocky exoplanet to our own. It's a tiny burg called HD 219134b that's just 21 light years from Earth in the Cassiopeia constellation, near the North Star. It was first spotted with the 3.6-meter Galileo National Telescope in the Canary Islands before being confirmed with the Spitzer. Even though the planet is larger than Earth, researchers only noticed it as it transited across the face of its parent star (astronomers look for the star to dim then brighten again as evidence of an orbiting planet). Unfortunately, there's basically zero chance that we'll find aliens there as 134b orbits far too close to sustain life.
NASA captures over half the galaxy's stars in new infrared panorama
Keeping a steady hand when snapping panoramic pictures is a valuable skill, but NASA's upstaged your photographic prowess with something a tad more impressive. Using over 2 million infrared pictures shot with the Spitzer Space Telescope over the course of a decade, the agency's created what's being called the clearest infrared panorama of our galaxy ever made. This is the first time all photographs from a project dubbed the Galactic Legacy Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (or GLIMPSE360) have been combined into a single image. Although the final product only shows three percent of the sky, it contains over half of all stars in the Milky Way.
Herschel telescope detects some of the youngest stars ever seen
Astronomers at the Herschel space observatory have discovered some of the youngest stars ever seen, NASA reports. With observations from the Herschel telescope as well as the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) in Chile, researchers were able to detect 15 protostars -- the biggest group of such young stars in a single star-forming region. This discovery came during a survey of a stellar formation located in the constellation Orion, with Herschel detecting the bodies in far-infrared-light and the APEX ground telescope verifying the stars' presence with radio wave observations. This discovery is especially exciting not just because protostars are especially difficult to detect due to the dense layers of gas and dust that surround them, but also because it indicates that astronomers are getting closer to charting the complete life cycle of a star, starting at the moment of its birth.
