Space & Astronomy news

https://www.space.com/tiny-black-hole-unicorn-closest-to-earth
Astronomers have apparently found the closest known black hole to Earth, a weirdly tiny object dubbed "The Unicorn" that lurks just 1,500 light-years from us.
'The Unicorn' lies a mere 1,500 light-years from us and is just three times more massive than the sun.

China wants to build a spaceship that's kilometers long
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-china-spaceship-kilometers.html
According to the project outline published by the Chinese foundation and cited by the South China Daily Mail (SCDM), the spacecraft elements will be built on Earth and then launched individually to orbit to be assembled in space. The same outline specifies that this spacecraft will be "a major strategic aerospace equipment for the future use of space resources, exploration of the mysteries of the universe and staying in long-term."

High-spatial-resolution interferometry enters the multi-wavelength era
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-high-spatial-resolution-interferometry-multi-wavelength-era.html
With the two detectors, they installed two telescopes to build an intensity interferometer with a baseline length of 80 cm. After measuring the distance between two laser sources separated by 4.2 mm at a distance of 1.43 km by telescopes, they proposed a phase fitting method to obtain the angular distance between the two laser sources. Surprisingly, the results surpassed the diffraction limit of a single telescope by about 40 times, proving that the chromatic intensity interferometry had a higher spatial resolution.

With the multi-wavelength setting, this technique expands the application of intensity interferometry to diverse fields such as the astronomical observation, space remote sensing, and space debris detection.

Strange radio waves emerge from direction of the galactic centre
https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2021/10/12/strange-radiowaves-galactic-centre-askap-j173608-2-321635.html
Astronomers have discovered unusual signals coming from the direction of the Milky Way’s centre. The radio waves fit no currently understood pattern of variable radio source and could suggest a new class of stellar object.

“The strangest property of this new signal is that it is has a very high polarisation. This means its light oscillates in only one direction, but that direction rotates with time,” said Ziteng Wang, lead author of the new study and a PhD student in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney.

“The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100, and the signal switches on and off apparently at random. We’ve never seen anything like it.”

Radio signals from distant stars suggest hidden planets
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-radio-distant-stars-hidden-planets.html

Nature of unknown gamma-ray sources revealed
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-nature-unknown-gamma-ray-sources-revealed.html



About six years ago, CfA astronomers working at the South Pole reported the first evidence for such curling, "B-mode polarization," at levels consistent with simple models of inflation, but subsequent measurements at different frequencies (or colors) of microwave light revealed the signal to be explainable by galactic dust.
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-latest-results-cosmic-microwave-background.html


Rocks on floor of Jezero Crater, Mars, show signs of sustained interactions with water
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-floor-jezero-crater-mars-sustained.html
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-rover-images-jezero-crater-ancient.html

Woman rocked awake by meteorite chunk crashing into her bedroom
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/meteorite-crashes-into-womans-bedroom-golden-bc-1.6207904

Space is fake.

>>7
No, space just makes sense.

That's because Newton's gravitational law explains the movement of the planets and also applies to movement here on Earth.

>>9
GPS wouldn't be as accurate if it only used Newton's gravity.

>>6
Sounds like the beginning of a B sci-fi movie.

>>7
sounds like a documentary on debunking moon landing