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Astronomical News

Neither of these two categories of possible exomoons has been detected to date, but at least they now have labels - moonmoons (aka sub-moons) and ploonets.
Meet the Ploonets! Runaway Moons with Delusions of Planethood Get Astronomy's Cutest Name Ever

What do you call a runaway exomoon with delusions of planethood? You call it a "ploonet," of course.

Scientists had previously proposed the endearing term "moonmoons" to describe moons that may orbit other moons in distant solar systems. Now, another team of researchers has coined the melodious nickname "ploonet" for moons of giant planets orbiting hot stars; under certain circumstances, these moons abandon those orbits, becoming satellites of the host star.

The former moon is then "unbound" and has an orbit like a planet's — ergo, a ploonet. [Top 10 Amazing Moon Facts]

Ploonets — and all exomoons, for that matter — have yet to be detected. But ploonets may produce light signatures that planet-hunting telescopes could identify, researchers reported in a new study. Their findings were published June 27 in the preprint journal arXiv and have not been peer-reviewed. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/65909-runaway-exomoons-ploonets.html

Earlier Story Describing Moonmoons / Sub-moons: https://www.livescience.com/63819-moonmoons-could-exist.html
 
In a possible first, a giant, faraway planet may have been caught in the act of growing moons.

Seen in an image from the ALMA Observatory in Chile, the young planet orbits a small star roughly 370 light-years away, and it appears to be swaddled in a dusty, gassy disk—the exact type of structure scientists think produced Jupiter’s many moons billions of years ago.

nrao19cb11_Isella_ALMAimage_07092019.png


“It’s certainly plausible that giant planets could have giant moon-forming disks around them,” says Stanford University’s Bruce Macintosh of the observation, published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “It’s an intriguing and quite possible result.”

Astronomers have seen many similar dusty clouds surrounding stars. Called circumstellar disks, these structures are the milieu in which planets form—although the exact process by which worlds emerge from the dust is unknown. In some cases, astronomers think they can see newborn planets plowing lanes into these circumstellar disks .

Isella and his colleagues studied one dust-encircled star system, called PDS 70, using data gathered in 2017 by ALMA, an array of 66 radio dishes sprinkled over a patch of the Atacama desert. The star system includes a Jupiter-size planet called PDS 70b, which has vacuumed up a gap in the dusty shroud surrounding its small, six-million-year-old home star. Another planet, called PDS 70c, traces a path near the inner edge of the gap, at roughly the same distance from its star as Neptune is from the sun.

Initially, the hazy area around PDS 70c looked like a faint arm of gas. But this year, when the team reprocessed the ALMA data using a slightly different method, the irregularities resolved into a dust ring. Isella and his colleagues interpret the newly processed image as depicting a circumplanetary debris disk.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/...seen-forming-first-circumplanetary-disk-alma/

maximus otter
 
A celebration of the 16th anniversary of the Spitzer Space Telescope with some breathtaking images.

Sixteen Images for Spitzer's Sweet 16

NASA launched its Spitzer Space Telescope into orbit around the Sun on Aug. 25, 2003. Since then, the observatory has been lifting the veil on the wonders of the cosmos, from our own solar system to faraway galaxies, using infrared light.
Managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, Spitzer enabled scientists to confirm the presence of seven rocky, Earth-size planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. The telescope has also provided weather maps of hot, gaseous exoplanets and revealed a hidden ring around Saturn. It has illuminated hidden collections of dust in a wide variety of locations, including cosmic nebulas (clouds of gas and dust in space), where young stars form, and swirling galaxies. Spitzer has additionally investigated some of the universe's oldest galaxies and stared at the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
etc

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news....ZQGzDUhKssfXR3UN2S9W0ThuZWuqaVo50OMpWVlZHC6kI
 
Design for the first "Space Hotel" revealed.

A 190 metre diameter wheel, containing 24 accommodation pods around its perimeter, will revolve to provide a semblance of gravity. Facilities are planned to be comparable to a cruise liner.
Quoted timescale target of 2025 seems highly optimistic though!

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9846549/worlds-first-space-hotel-revealed/
The design has been around for a long time. However, the cost and logistics may make it 2050 rather than 2025.
 
The concept art for this article is deceptive. The Earth appears to be a nice, calm, sphere floating at the bottom of the window in each image; in reality the Earth would be spinning around at approximately one RPM. making the space tourists nauseous. This is something Kubrick got right in his movie; the Earth can be seen through the windows spinning around like fun..

NINTCHDBPICT000518256018.jpg

NINTCHDBPICT000518255891.jpg
 
Water found for first time on potentially habitable planet
By Pallab GhoshScience correspondent, BBC News
  • 1 hour ago
Astronomers have for the first time discovered water in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting within the habitable zone of a distant star.
The finding makes the world - which is called K2-18b - a plausible candidate in the search for alien life.
Within 10 years, new space telescopes might be able to determine whether K2-18b's atmosphere contains gases that could be produced by living organisms.
etc
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49648746
 
This new initiative is aimed at analyzing the processes by which whole galaxies can - or cannot - sustain their star formation. It's interesting to see how astronomy is beginning to undertake research focused on the granularity level of entire galaxies.

Something Is Killing the Universe's Most Extreme Galaxies

In the most extreme regions of the universe, galaxies are being killed. Their star formation is being shut down and astronomers want to know why.

The first ever Canadian-led large project on one of the world's leading telescopes is hoping to do just that. The new program, called the Virgo Environment Traced in Carbon Monoxide survey (VERTICO), is investigating, in brilliant detail, how galaxies are killed by their environment. ...


Galaxy clusters

Where galaxies live in the universe and how they interact with their surroundings (the intergalactic medium that surrounds them) and each other are major influences on their ability to form stars. But precisely how this so-called environment dictates the life and death of galaxies remains a mystery.

Galaxy clusters are the most massive and most extreme environments in the universe, containing many hundreds or even thousands of galaxies. Where you have mass, you also have gravity and the huge gravitational forces present in clusters accelerates galaxies to great speeds, often thousands of kilometres-per-second, and superheats the plasma in between galaxies to temperatures so high that it glows with X-ray light.

In the dense, inhospitable interiors of these clusters, galaxies interact strongly with their surroundings and with each other. It is these interactions that can kill off — or quench — their star formation.

Understanding which quenching mechanisms shut off star formation and how they do it is the main focus of the VERTICO collaboration's research. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/whats-killing-universe-extreme-galaxies.html
 
Giant planet around tiny star 'should not exist'

Astronomers have discovered a giant planet that, they say, should not exist, according to current theories.
The Jupiter-like world is unusually large compared with its host star, contradicting a widely held idea about the way planets form.
The star, which lies 284 trillion km away, is an M-type red dwarf - the most common type in our galaxy.
An international team of astronomers has reported its findings in the journal Science.
(c) BBC. '19
 
The two main theories about planet formation are Core Accretion and Disk Instability. Most planets around red dwarfs are supposed to form via core accretion, resulting in lots of little planets. This planet seems to have formed by disk instability, so formed much more quickly. If this planet had continued to grow, it could have become a red dwarf star itself, making this into a binary system.
PlanetFormation-600px.jpg
 
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Astronomers spot three supermassive black holes on collision course

Date: 30 September 2019
Source: Astronomy Now

Astronomers have spotted three galaxies hosting three supermassive black holes that are in the process of colliding.

“We were only looking for pairs of black holes at the time, and yet, through our selection technique, we stumbled upon this amazing system,” said Ryan Pfeifle of George Mason University, the first author of a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal describing the observations. “This is the strongest evidence yet found for such a triple system of actively feeding supermassive black holes.”

https://astronomynow.com/2019/09/30...supermassive-black-holes-on-collision-course/
 
Asteroid larger than a bus to fly closer to Earth than the Moon tomorrow, Nasa warns

Source: The Sun Website
Updated: 2 Oct 2019, 15:12

A HUGE asteroid is about to pass so close to our planet that it will actually be closer to us than the Moon.

The "potentially hazardous" space rock is called 2019 SP3 and it will be zooming past Earth tomorrow.

Nasa has estimated that the asteroid could be up to 33 metres long and has classified it as potentially hazardous.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/10049076/nasa-alert-large-asteroid-close-approach/
 
GALAXY NEXT TO US IS ‘VIOLENT’ AND COMING TO EAT THE MILKY WAY, SCIENTISTS SAY

Source: The Independent
Date: 2 October, 2019

The vast Andromeda galaxy, next to ours, has a violent past that will culminate in it eating our Milky Way, astronomers say.

The galaxy's powerful past has seen it eat several smaller galaxies just as it will go on to swallow ours, researchers say.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-...eda-space-history-collision-end-a9133306.html
 
GALAXY NEXT TO US IS ‘VIOLENT’ AND COMING TO EAT THE MILKY WAY, SCIENTISTS SAY

Source: The Independent
Date: 2 October, 2019

The vast Andromeda galaxy, next to ours, has a violent past that will culminate in it eating our Milky Way, astronomers say.

The galaxy's powerful past has seen it eat several smaller galaxies just as it will go on to swallow ours, researchers say.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-...eda-space-history-collision-end-a9133306.html
That title is 'exciting' hype.
 
On the website Astronomy Picture of the Day, they got a HD photo of sprites for today.
They certainly look different from lightning.
 
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