Outer Space Thread

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mikechamp
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"There's nothing to see here. Please, keep moving."
Asteroid Twice As Big As Empire State Building to Fly Past Earth Next Week

An asteroid that could be up to two times as wide as the height of the Empire State Building is going to fly past Earth next week—but our planet will be spared a collision.

The asteroid, known as 1999 RM45, is going to pass within just 1.8 million miles of Earth at around 7:52pm UTC on Tuesday March 2, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Studies (CNEOS). On an astronomical scale, this distance is tiny. In astronomical units (au)—a measure of distance astronomers use for mapping celestial objects—it is just under 0.02. The Sun is roughly 1 au away.

When the space rock passes by the Earth, scientists think it will be travelling at around 44,700 miles per hour—about 50 times faster than a handgun bullet. The close pass is estimated to be the nearest the asteroid will come to the Earth for decades to come. 1999 RM45 is not predicted to strike the Earth for the foreseeable future or at least until the year 2200, the limit at which NASA stops making data available.

The space rock is classified as a member of the Apollo asteroid group. An Apollo classification means that, at some point in its orbit, the asteroid will cross the path of Earth's own orbit.

https://www.newsweek.com/nasa-asteroid- ... ng-1571285

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Jocephus
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go birds
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was that the space station falling out of orbit

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GeddyWrox
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https://www.geekwire.com/2021/expert-sk ... r-mystery/
Was it a meteor? A broken-up satellite? Maybe a UFO? Leave it to an astronomer to identify what caused the light show that was visible over a wide stretch of the Pacific Northwest around 9 p.m. PT tonight.

Jonathan McDowell, an expert satellite-tracker at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, quickly figured out that the meteoric display was actually the breakup of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stage, left over from a launch that took place more than three weeks ago.

“The Falcon 9 second stage from the Mar 4 Starlink launch failed to make a deorbit burn and is now re-entering after 22 days in orbit,” McDowell tweeted.

It’s fitting that the re-entry of a rocket stage from a Starlink satellite launch provided a moment of marvelment from Seattle to Portland and beyond. After all, those satellites are manufactured at SpaceX’s facility in Redmond, Wash., and it’s conceivable that members of the Starlink team caught the show.

Not long after the orbital debris burned up — harmlessly, by all appearances — the internet was burning up with photos and videos of the fireworks show.

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Famous Mortimer
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Jocephus wrote:
March 26 21, 10:08 am
Meteor? I hardly knew her!

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GeddyWrox
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HEYOOOOOOOOO

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mikechamp
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If you care about black holes in anyway, then this article is for you:
Astronomers see back of a black hole for first time, proving Albert Einstein was right

Astronomers have managed to look behind a black hole for the first time and have proved that Albert Einstein was right about how these mysterious celestial behemoths behave.

An international team of researchers used high-powered X-ray telescopes to study a supermassive black hole 800 million light years away at the centre of a distant galaxy. The researchers saw the usual hallmarks of a black hole, but they also spotted light – in the form of X-rays – which was being emitted by the far side of the black hole.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/astronomers- ... 27796.html

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mikechamp
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Interested in supermassive black holes? If so, here's a long read on the topic... and no, it's not an article about Matt Carpenter.

(shots fired)

The mysterious origins of Universe's biggest black holes

They are the biggest black holes in the known Universe, billions of times more massive than our Sun, but little is known about how these monsters form and grow so big. New telescopes and techniques are giving us a new way of looking at these giants.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2021 ... -come-from

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mikechamp
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Get ready for close-up images of Mercury... by 2025.
BepiColombo: Europe's Mercury space mission in final stretch

Europe's first mission to Mercury arrives at its destination in the coming hours. It'll be the briefest of visits, however. The BepiColombo probe is moving too fast to go into orbit and will fly straight by the planet.

But the diminutive world's gravity will have slowed the craft just a little, and further passes in the coming years will eventually see Bepi take up a stable station around Mercury. That'll be late 2025; patience is required.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58754882

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mikechamp
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Are we receiving "cosmic burps"? If so, where is the cosmic "Excuse me"?
Mysterious radio waves coming from the heart of the Milky Way

Astronomers have detected mysterious radio waves coming from the center of the Milky Way, but so far they have no idea what's causing it, according to a new study published Tuesday in the Astrophysical Journal.

A team of scientists from across the world discovered the object using the CSIRO radio telescope in Western Australia. Ziteng Wang, the lead author of the study and a PhD student at the University of Sydney, said in a press release that they initially believed it could be a spinning dead star called a pulsar, but its signal didn't match what they expected from those types of celestial objects.

"The strangest property of this new signal is that it is has a very high polarisation," Wang said. "This means its light oscillates in only one direction, but that direction rotates with time. The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100, and the signal switches on and off apparently at random," Wang added. "We've never seen anything like it."

"The information we do have has some parallels with another emerging class of mysterious objects known as Galactic Centre Radio Transients, including one dubbed the 'cosmic burper,'" said Wang's co-supervisor, David Kaplan, a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/mysterious-r ... 05520.html

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