The Solar System Could Collapse Because Of A Passing Star, Scientists Warn

Scientists have warned that if Neptune's orbit is disrupted by a passing star by just 0.1 percent, the planets in our solar system might collide.

The research, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggests that a "stellar flyby" - a relatively common occurrence in the universe - could be enough to cause planets to collide.

If Mercury and Jupiter's perihelion — the point at which the planets are closest to the Sun — occur at the same time, two scenarios are possible. Mercury's orbit could be disrupted, forcing it to leave the Solar System or collide with Venus, the Sun, or the Earth.

These changes will take millions of years to occur, but the researchers recreated the circumstance roughly three thousand times.

Over 2,000 of them ended with planets colliding or Uranus, Neptune, or Mercury being completely evacuated from the Solar System.

"The full role that stellar flybys play in the evolution of planetary systems is still being researched." "The consensus is that stellar flybys play an important role in planetary systems that form in a star cluster while the planetary system remains within the star cluster," says Garett Brown, a graduate student of computational physics at the University of Toronto's Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences (PES).

"Typically, this is the first 100 million years of planetary evolution." The occurrence rate of stellar flybys substantially falls after the star cluster evaporates, limiting their importance in the formation of planetary systems."

Furthermore, given that the Sun will undoubtedly expand and devour the Earth in five billion years, Brown believes that the potential of this disrupting our experience in the Solar System is "not a problem we need to be concerned about."

Research that has been peer-reviewed

This Star is older than the Universe

The oldest known star appears to be older than the cosmos itself, but a new study is helping to solve this apparent mystery.

An earlier study estimated that the so-called "Methuselah star" in the Milky Way galaxy is up to 16 billion years old. This is a concern because most scientists think that the Big Bang that created the universe occurred approximately 13.8 billion years ago. A team of astronomers has now calculated a new, less absurd age for the Methuselah star by combining data on its distance, brightness, composition, and structure.

"Put all of those constituents together, and you get an age of 14.5 billion years, with a remaining doubt that makes the star's age compatible with the age of the cosmos," said study lead author Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore in a statement.

Bond refers to an uncertainty of 800 million years, which indicates the star may be 13.7 billion years old – younger than the cosmos as it is currently understood, but only just.

A mysterious and swiftly moving star:

Bond and his colleagues studied the Methuselah star, also known as HD 140283, using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. HD 140283 has been known to scientists for more than a century, as it travels across the sky at a quite fast rate. According to astronomers, the star moves at roughly 800,000 mph (1.3 million km/h) and covers the width of the full moon in the sky every 1,500 years or so.

The star is simply passing through Earth's galactic neck of the woods and will eventually rocket back out to the Milky Way's halo, a population of early stars that surrounds the galaxy's well-known spiral disc. According to astronomers, the Methuselah star, which is just now forming into a red giant, was likely born in a dwarf galaxy that the young Milky Way devoured more than 12 billion years ago. The star's extended, looping orbit could be a leftover from that furious act of cannibalism.

The difference is determined by distance:

The astrophysicists were able to refine the distance to HD 140283 by employing the principle of parallax, which states that a change in an observer's location — in this case, Hubble's fluctuating position in Earth orbit — results as a shift in the false position of an object.

Methuselah is 190.1 light-years away, they discovered. With the star's distance more precisely determined, the team was able to calculate Methuselah's intrinsic brightness, which was required for measuring its age.

The researchers also used current theory to understand more about the burn rate, composition, and interior structure of the Methuselah star, which offered light on its likely age. For example, HD 140283 has a relatively high oxygen-to-iron ratio, which reduces the star's age from some previous estimates, according to astronomers.

Finally, astrophysicists calculated that HD 140283 was born 14.5 billion years ago, plus or minus 800 million years. Additional research could help reduce the age of the Methuselah star even further, making it demonstrably younger than the cosmos, according to scientists.

Scientists watched a star explode in real time for the first time ever

Astronomers have watched a giant star blow up in a fiery supernova for the first time ever — and the spectacle was even more explosive than the researchers anticipated. 

According to a new research published Jan. 6 in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists began observing the doomed star — a red supergiant called SN 2020tlf and located approximately 120 million light-years from Earth — more than 100 days before its last, cataclysmic collapse. 

During that time, the researchers witnessed the star erupt with dazzling bursts of light as massive globs of gas exploded from its surface.

A red supergiant star evolving into a Type II supernova, unleashing a powerful explosion of radiation and gas on its final breath before collapsing and exploding. (Photo courtesy of W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko)

These pre-supernova fireworks surprised the researchers because earlier observations of red supergiants on the verge of exploding showed no signs of violent emissions, they said.

"This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars do moments before they die," lead study author Wynn Jacobson-Galán, a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley said in a statement. "For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode!"

When big stars explode in popularity

In terms of volume, red supergiants are the biggest stars in the cosmos, measuring hundreds or even thousands of times the radius of the sun. (Despite their bulk, red supergiants are not the brightest or most massive stars in the universe.)

These huge stars, like our sun, generate energy by nuclear fusion of atoms in their cores. Red supergiants, on the other hand, can create considerably heavier elements than the hydrogen and helium that our sun burns. As supergiants burn increasingly heavy elements, their cores heat up and become more compressed. These stars eventually run out of energy by the time they begin fusing iron and nickel, their cores collapse, and they eject their gassy outer atmospheres into space in a catastrophic type II supernova explosion.

Scientists have spotted red supergiants before they go supernova and analysed the aftermath of these cosmic explosions, but they have never witnessed the entire process in real time until now.

The new study's authors began studying SN 2020tlf in the summer of 2020, when the star flashed with dazzling flashes of radiation, which they later interpreted as gas erupting off the star's surface. The researchers tracked the irritable star for 130 days using two telescopes in Hawaii: the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS1 telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. Finally, at the conclusion of that time, the star exploded.

The researchers saw evidence of a dense cloud of gas encircling the star at the moment of its explosion — likely the same gas that the star emitted in the preceding months. This shows that massive explosions began long before the star's core disintegrated in the fall of 2020.

"We've never confirmed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant star where we see it produce such a luminous emission, then collapse and combust, until now," study co-author Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at UC Berkeley, said in the statement.

According to the team's findings, red supergiants suffer considerable changes in their interior structures, culminating in chaotic eruptions of gas in their final months before crashing.

Reference(s): IOP

Scientists watched a star explode in real time for the first time ever

Astronomers have watched a giant star blow up in a fiery supernova for the first time ever — and the spectacle was even more explosive than the researchers anticipated. 

According to a new research published Jan. 6 in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists began observing the doomed star — a red supergiant called SN 2020tlf and located approximately 120 million light-years from Earth — more than 100 days before its last, cataclysmic collapse. 

During that time, the researchers witnessed the star erupt with dazzling bursts of light as massive globs of gas exploded from its surface.

A red supergiant star evolving into a Type II supernova, unleashing a powerful explosion of radiation and gas on its final breath before collapsing and exploding. (Photo courtesy of W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko)

These pre-supernova fireworks surprised the researchers because earlier observations of red supergiants on the verge of exploding showed no signs of violent emissions, they said.

"This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars do moments before they die," lead study author Wynn Jacobson-Galán, a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley said in a statement. "For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode!"

When big stars explode in popularity

In terms of volume, red supergiants are the biggest stars in the cosmos, measuring hundreds or even thousands of times the radius of the sun. (Despite their bulk, red supergiants are not the brightest or most massive stars in the universe.)

These huge stars, like our sun, generate energy by nuclear fusion of atoms in their cores. Red supergiants, on the other hand, can create considerably heavier elements than the hydrogen and helium that our sun burns. 

As supergiants burn increasingly heavy elements, their cores heat up and become more compressed. These stars eventually run out of energy by the time they begin fusing iron and nickel, their cores collapse, and they eject their gassy outer atmospheres into space in a catastrophic type II supernova explosion.

Scientists have spotted red supergiants before they go supernova and analysed the aftermath of these cosmic explosions, but they have never witnessed the entire process in real time until now.

The new study's authors began studying SN 2020tlf in the summer of 2020, when the star flashed with dazzling flashes of radiation, which they later interpreted as gas erupting off the star's surface. 

The researchers tracked the irritable star for 130 days using two telescopes in Hawaii: the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS1 telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. Finally, at the conclusion of that time, the star exploded.

The researchers saw evidence of a dense cloud of gas encircling the star at the moment of its explosion — likely the same gas that the star emitted in the preceding months. This shows that massive explosions began long before the star's core disintegrated in the fall of 2020.

"We've never confirmed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant star where we see it produce such a luminous emission, then collapse and combust, until now," study co-author Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at UC Berkeley, said in the statement.

According to the team's findings, red supergiants suffer considerable changes in their interior structures, culminating in chaotic eruptions of gas in their final months before crashing.

Reference(s): IOP

NASA Released An Incredible New Video Of A Star That Exploded With The Energy Of 100 Million Suns

On February 24, 1987, something unusual happened as astronomers Oscar Dhalde and Ian Shelton observed an unbelievable picture sitting on the top of a Chilean mountain: a new star in the night sky. That is something not happened frequently.

New video released by NASA shows a revolutionary astronomical moment in a whole new light. Most astronomers agree the explosion occurred because the star's core ran low on high-energy fuel, while some believe another star merged with the blue super-giant to generate the blast.

A photo of Supernova 1987A's remnants as seen by the Hubble space telescope. GSFC/NOAO/NASA/ESA/STIS Instrument Definition Team

In that moment, the fusion-powered core of the star began to fade. The cause could be any one of both as the star collapsed under its own gravity, exploded, created the power of 100 million suns in the process. We now call the object Supernova 1987A, or SN 1987A.

It is the first time when scientists were being able to record the supernova, and it was also the brightest one, seen for last hundred years.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory team said: "Supernova 1987A became one of the best opportunities ever for astronomers to study the phases before, during, and after the death of a star”.

This data that has been recorded gives astronomers an extra edge to study of how stars form and die. NASA recently honored the supernova's anniversary with a bunch of new multimedia, and a few of the images and an animation caught our eye.

This animation gives you some hint about that where in the night sky SN 1987A is located.

The remnants lurk inside the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that trails the Milky Way some 168,000 light-years from Earth.

It took really long for the light to reach us as this event technically happened 168,000 years in the past.

About once a month over the course of more than past many years, the Hubble space telescope has photographed SN 1987A and its traveling shock wave.

Starting around the year 2000, they saw the shockwave begin slamming into a 1-light-year-wide ring of gas and dust that the star threw off before its death, creating a brilliant, bubbling glow.

According to a pre-print study posted to arXiv.org, researchers now believe the high-speed blast wave is leaving the field of gas and dust, marking the beginning of a "major change" in its evolution, this new animation is of a computer model that shows SN 1987A's explosion and entire evolution through 2017, and in three dimensions.

The study on this model arXiv led by, an astrophysicist Salvatore Orlando at the INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo in Italy.

Hubble Telescope Spots Most Distant Star Ever Seen on Record, From 12 Billion Light Years Away

The light of a star that lived during the first billion years after the universe's beginning in the big bang has been detected by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope - the farthest individual star ever observed to date.

The discovery represents a significant step back in time from the previous single-star record holder, which was discovered by Hubble in 2018. That star lived around 4 billion years ago, or 30 percent of the universe's present age.

The newly discovered star is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, so we are viewing it when the cosmos was only 7% the age it is now. Clusters of stars nested within early galaxies are the tiniest things hitherto discovered at such a long distance.

“We almost didn’t believe it at first, it was so much farther than the previous most-distant, highest redshift star,” said astronomer Brian Welch of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, lead author of the paper describing the discovery in the journal Nature. Scientists use the word “redshift” because as the universe expands, light from distant objects is stretched or “shifted” to longer, redder wavelengths as it travels toward us.

“Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small smudges, with the light from millions of stars blending together,” said Welch. “The galaxy hosting this star has been magnified and distorted by gravitational lensing into a long crescent that we named the Sunrise Arc.”

Welch concluded that one feature of the galaxy is an extraordinarily magnified star he named Earendel, which means "dawn star" in Old English. The discovery has the potential to usher in a hitherto unknown era of very early star creation.

“Earendel existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials as the stars around us today,” Welch explained. “Studying Earendel will be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar with, but that led to everything we do know.”

“It’s like we’ve been reading a really interesting book, but we started with the second chapter, and now we will have a chance to see how it all got started,” Welch said.

When the Planets Align

According to the researchers, Earendel is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and millions of times brighter, rivalling the most massive stars known.

Even a dazzling, extremely high-mass star would be hard to detect at such a long distance without the natural magnification provided by WHL0137-08, a massive galaxy cluster located between us and Earendel. The galaxy cluster's bulk warps the fabric of space, forming a powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts and considerably amplifies light from distant objects behind it.

The star Earendel appears directly on, or quite close to, a ripple in the fabric of space due to a unique alignment with the magnifying galaxy cluster. This ripple, known as a "caustic" in optics, gives maximum magnification and brightness. On a sunny day, the rippling surface of a swimming pool creates patterns of dazzling light on the bottom of the pool. The surface ripples work as lenses, focusing sunlight to maximum brightness on the pool bottom.

Because of this caustic, the star Earendel stands out from the ambient brilliance of its parent galaxy. Its radiance is multiplied a thousand times or more. At the moment, astronomers are unable to tell if Earendel is a binary star, despite the fact that most big stars have at least one smaller partner star.

Webb's confirmation

Astronomers anticipate that Earendel will remain highly amplified for many years. NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope will observe it. Webb's exceptional sensitivity to infrared light is required to learn more about Earendel because the universe's expansion causes its light to be stretched (redshifted) to longer infrared wavelengths.

“With Webb we expect to confirm Earendel is indeed a star, as well as measure its brightness and temperature,” said co-author Dan Coe at Baltimore’s Space Telescope Science Institute, who made the discovery using the data collected.

These details will narrow down its type and stage in the stellar lifecycle, with scientists expecting it to be a “rare, massive metal-poor star,” Coe said.

Astronomers will be fascinated by Earendel's composition because it formed before the universe was filled with heavy elements created by successive generations of huge stars. If further research reveals that Earendel is only composed of primordial hydrogen and helium, it would be the first evidence for the legendary Population III stars, which are thought to be the very first stars born after the big bang. While the likelihood is remote, Welch concedes it is alluring.

“With Webb, we may see stars even farther than Earendel, which would be incredibly exciting,” Welch said. “We’ll go as far back as we can. I would love to see Webb break Earendel’s distance record.”

Credit: NASA, ESA, Brian Welch of JHU, and Dan Coe of STScI

Reference(s): Nature

Scientists Discover 'First of Its Kind' 3-Star System in Deep Space

A star ballet is taking place somewhere in the depths of our universe.

Three gigantic, brilliant stars are caught in a dance by their own gravitational forces and aglow in their shared radiance against the dark veil of space. Two fiery balls of gas are pirouetting closely around each other, completing their mutual orbit to the beat of an Earth day. At the same time, a third star steadily encircles the two, shining a light on their performance.

Details on the cosmic predicament can be found in a study published in the Royal Astronomical Society's Monthly Notices in June.

"As far as we know, it is the first of its kind ever found," Alejandro Vigna-Gomez, a co-author of the article and an astronomer at the University of Copenhagen, said in a statement Monday.

 

According to Vigna-Gomez, we know of many secondary star systems, but they are not just far farther away than this sparkling trio, but they are also often less massive. By a long shot.

The interior, close-quarter binary stars have a combined mass of around 12 times that of our sun, while the wide-field globe encircling them has a mass of 16 times that of our sun. To put this in context, it would take more than 330,000 Earths to equal one solar mass, which is 99.8% of the mass of our entire solar system. Simply simply, these incredible ballerinas are massive.

In the broader scheme of things, however, Vigna-Gomez was after far more than just detecting this remarkable starry pattern. The goal was to figure out how such a ferocious triplet – formally known as TIC 470710327 – came to be.

A ballerina has gone missing.

Vigna-Gomez and colleague Bin Liu, a theoretical astrophysicist also affiliated with the University of Copenhagen, first proposed numerous scenarios for the newly discovered three-star system's origins.

First and foremost, there was the notion that the larger, outer star originated first. However, after considerable analysis, the scientists recognised that such a stellar leviathan would have most likely thrown material inward, disrupting the double stars' formation. There would have been no need for a trio. Gaseous rubble would have rained down in all directions.

Second, the scientists investigated the possibility that the binary star dancers and third star spectator formed separately, far apart, and subsequently collided due to some force of gravity. Though this situation has not been completely ruled out, the experts believe it is not the greatest option. They are far more focused on the final and desired option. A little less collaborative.

What if two distinct binary star systems formed near one other, then one of those pairs fused into a huge star, the researchers wondered? If this is correct, the enormous combination star would be the one we see today, orbiting the smaller – but still large – stars within.

In other words, it's feasible that a fourth dancer was part of this cosmic ballet but was devoured by its own partner before the climactic scene. This was the most likely case, according to the team's latest research, which was based on tonnes of computer models and fascinatingly anchored in the discoveries of citizen scientists.

"But a model is not enough," Vigna-Gomez said, arguing that to prove his and Liu's suspicion with high certainty would require either using telescopes to study the tertiary system in better detail or statistically analyzing nearby star populations.

"We also encourage people in the scientific community to look at the data deeply," Liu said in a statement. "What we really want to know is whether this kind of system is common in our universe."

Reference(s): Royal Astronomical Society's Monthly Notices

Scientists watched a star explode in real time for the first time ever

Astronomers have watched a giant star blow up in a fiery supernova for the first time ever — and the spectacle was even more explosive than the researchers anticipated. 

According to a new research published Jan. 6 in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists began observing the doomed star — a red supergiant called SN 2020tlf and located approximately 120 million light-years from Earth — more than 100 days before its last, cataclysmic collapse. During that time, the researchers witnessed the star erupt with dazzling bursts of light as massive globs of gas exploded from its surface.

A red supergiant star evolving into a Type II supernova, unleashing a powerful explosion of radiation and gas on its final breath before collapsing and exploding. (Photo courtesy of W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko)

These pre-supernova fireworks surprised the researchers because earlier observations of red supergiants on the verge of exploding showed no signs of violent emissions, they said.

"This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars do moments before they die," lead study author Wynn Jacobson-Galán, a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley said in a statement. "For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode!"

When big stars explode in popularity

In terms of volume, red supergiants are the biggest stars in the cosmos, measuring hundreds or even thousands of times the radius of the sun. (Despite their bulk, red supergiants are not the brightest or most massive stars in the universe.)

These huge stars, like our sun, generate energy by nuclear fusion of atoms in their cores. Red supergiants, on the other hand, can create considerably heavier elements than the hydrogen and helium that our sun burns. As supergiants burn increasingly heavy elements, their cores heat up and become more compressed. These stars eventually run out of energy by the time they begin fusing iron and nickel, their cores collapse, and they eject their gassy outer atmospheres into space in a catastrophic type II supernova explosion.

Scientists have spotted red supergiants before they go supernova and analysed the aftermath of these cosmic explosions, but they have never witnessed the entire process in real time until now.

The new study's authors began studying SN 2020tlf in the summer of 2020, when the star flashed with dazzling flashes of radiation, which they later interpreted as gas erupting off the star's surface. The researchers tracked the irritable star for 130 days using two telescopes in Hawaii: the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS1 telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. Finally, at the conclusion of that time, the star exploded.

The researchers saw evidence of a dense cloud of gas encircling the star at the moment of its explosion — likely the same gas that the star emitted in the preceding months. This shows that massive explosions began long before the star's core disintegrated in the fall of 2020.

"We've never confirmed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant star where we see it produce such a luminous emission, then collapse and combust, until now," study co-author Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at UC Berkeley, said in the statement.

According to the team's findings, red supergiants suffer considerable changes in their interior structures, culminating in chaotic eruptions of gas in their final months before crashing.

Reference(s): IOP

This Star is older than the Universe

The oldest known star appears to be older than the cosmos itself, but a new study is helping to solve this apparent mystery.

An earlier study estimated that the so-called "Methuselah star" in the Milky Way galaxy is up to 16 billion years old. This is a concern because most scientists think that the Big Bang that created the universe occurred approximately 13.8 billion years ago. A team of astronomers has now calculated a new, less absurd age for the Methuselah star by combining data on its distance, brightness, composition, and structure.

"Put all of those constituents together, and you get an age of 14.5 billion years, with a remaining doubt that makes the star's age compatible with the age of the cosmos," said study lead author Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore in a statement.

Bond refers to an uncertainty of 800 million years, which indicates the star may be 13.7 billion years old – younger than the cosmos as it is currently understood, but only just.

A mysterious and swiftly moving star:

Bond and his colleagues studied the Methuselah star, also known as HD 140283, using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. HD 140283 has been known to scientists for more than a century, as it travels across the sky at a quite fast rate. According to astronomers, the star moves at roughly 800,000 mph (1.3 million km/h) and covers the width of the full moon in the sky every 1,500 years or so.

The star is simply passing through Earth's galactic neck of the woods and will eventually rocket back out to the Milky Way's halo, a population of early stars that surrounds the galaxy's well-known spiral disc. According to astronomers, the Methuselah star, which is just now forming into a red giant, was likely born in a dwarf galaxy that the young Milky Way devoured more than 12 billion years ago. The star's extended, looping orbit could be a leftover from that furious act of cannibalism.

The difference is determined by distance:

The astrophysicists were able to refine the distance to HD 140283 by employing the principle of parallax, which states that a change in an observer's location — in this case, Hubble's fluctuating position in Earth orbit — results as a shift in the false position of an object.

Methuselah is 190.1 light-years away, they discovered. With the star's distance more precisely determined, the team was able to calculate Methuselah's intrinsic brightness, which was required for measuring its age.

The researchers also used current theory to understand more about the burn rate, composition, and interior structure of the Methuselah star, which offered light on its likely age. For example, HD 140283 has a relatively high oxygen-to-iron ratio, which reduces the star's age from some previous estimates, according to astronomers.

Finally, astrophysicists calculated that HD 140283 was born 14.5 billion years ago, plus or minus 800 million years. Additional research could help reduce the age of the Methuselah star even further, making it demonstrably younger than the cosmos, according to scientists.

The Solar System Could Collapse Because Of A Passing Star, Scientists Warn

Scientists have warned that if Neptune's orbit is disrupted by a passing star by just 0.1 percent, the planets in our solar system might collide.

The research, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggests that a "stellar flyby" - a relatively common occurrence in the universe - could be enough to cause planets to collide.

If Mercury and Jupiter's perihelion — the point at which the planets are closest to the Sun — occur at the same time, two scenarios are possible. Mercury's orbit could be disrupted, forcing it to leave the Solar System or collide with Venus, the Sun, or the Earth.

These changes will take millions of years to occur, but the researchers recreated the circumstance roughly three thousand times.

Over 2,000 of them ended with planets colliding or Uranus, Neptune, or Mercury being completely evacuated from the Solar System.

"The full role that stellar flybys play in the evolution of planetary systems is still being researched." "The consensus is that stellar flybys play an important role in planetary systems that form in a star cluster while the planetary system remains within the star cluster," says Garett Brown, a graduate student of computational physics at the University of Toronto's Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences (PES).

"Typically, this is the first 100 million years of planetary evolution." The occurrence rate of stellar flybys substantially falls after the star cluster evaporates, limiting their importance in the formation of planetary systems."

Furthermore, given that the Sun will undoubtedly expand and devour the Earth in five billion years, Brown believes that the potential of this disrupting our experience in the Solar System is "not a problem we need to be concerned about."

Research that has been peer-reviewed

Astronomers are frightened by the NEW object just discovered in Space

A strange cataclysm in a nearby galaxy was observed in the sky above Hawaii last week, leaving astronomers all around the world baffled as to what caused the tremendously bright flash.

"I've never seen anything like this before in the local universe," astrophysicist Stephen Smartt of Queen's University in Hawaii stated. The discovery was first reported on June 16 in Astronomer's Telegram, an internet service for astronomers to immediately report new and noteworthy discoveries.

AT2018cow, or "cow" for short, was given to the object. Smartt saw it right away since it was so distinct from a typical explosive star. Most of these events take many weeks to reach their peak, but the object has gotten nearly ten times brighter than a typical supernova in just three days.

Other astronomers were quickly drawn to the item. The ATLAS sighting was followed the following week by nearly two dozen teams of astronomers using telescopes on at least four continents and in space.

These additional observations simply contributed to the object's mystique. It was extremely brilliant across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from X-rays to radio frequencies.

These are only the preliminary steps of the scientific process. AT2018's findings will require months more research and analysis before they can be properly released. However, this is a fun opportunity to see astronomers become enthusiastic about something weird and maybe new. [ ScienceAlert ]

Astronomer Have Spotted A Mysterious Object, Which Is 570 Billion Times Brighter than the Sun

It is so brilliant that it exceeds the physics' energy threshold. A huge ball of hot gas, brighter than hundreds of billions of suns, is billions of light years away. Something that brilliant is difficult to imagine. What then is it? Although they have a few possibilities, astronomers are not entirely certain.

They speculate that it could be a magnetar, an extremely rare sort of supernova that pushes the energy limits of physics. In other words, it could be the most intense supernova observed to date.

This object is so luminous that astronomers are having a really difficult time finding a way to describe it.  “If it really is a magnetar, it's as if nature took everything we know about magnetars and turned it up to 11,” said Krzysztof Stanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University and the team's co-principal investigator, comedically implying it is off the charts on a scale of 1 to 10.

The object was first spotted by the All Sky Automated Survey of Supernovae (ASAS-SN or “assassin”), which is a small network of telescopes used to detect bright objects in the universe.  

Although this object is ridiculously bright, it still can’t be seen by the naked eye because it is 3.8 billion light years away. ASAS-SN, since it began in 2014, has discovered nearly 250 supernovae, however this discovery, ASASSN-15lh, stands out because of its sheer magnitude.  It is 200 times more powerful than the average supernova, 570 billion times brighter than the sun, and 20 times brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy combined.

“We have to ask, how is that even possible?” said Stanek.  “It takes a lot of energy to shine that bright, and that energy has to come from somewhere.”

Todd Thompson, professor of astronomy at Ohio State, has one possible explanation.  The supernova could have generated an extremely rare type of star called a millisecond magnetar — a rapidly spinning and very dense star with a crazy strong magnetic field.

This is how crazy magnetars are: to shine as bright as it does, this magnetar would have to spin at least 1,000 times a second, and convert all of that rotational energy to light with pretty much 100 percent efficiency — making it the most extreme example of a magnetar that is physically possible.

“Given those constraints,” Thompson said, “will we ever see anything more luminous than this? If it truly is a magnetar, then the answer is basically no.”

Over the coming months, the Hubble Space Telescope will try to solve this mystery by giving astronomers time to see the host galaxy surrounding this object.  The team may find that this bright object lies in the very center of a large galaxy — meaning the object is not a magnetar at all — and the gas around it is actually evidence of a supermassive black hole.

If that is the case, then the bright light could be explained by a new kind of event, said study co-author Christopher Kochanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State.  It would be something that has never, ever been seen before at the center of a galaxy.

Whether it is a magnetar, a supermassive black hole, or something else entirely, the results are probably going to lead to new thinking about how objects form in the universe.

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