An artist’s impression of quasar J0313-1806 showing the supermassive black hole and the extremely high velocity wind. The quasar, seen just 670 million years after the Big Bang, is 1000 times more luminous than the Milky Way, and is powered by the earliest known supermassive black hole, which weighs in at more than 1.6 billion times the mass of the Sun. Image credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva
Artist impression of a black hole accretion Image credit: Credit John A. Paice “It could be that these events, although extremely rare, are so energetic that they are key processes to how the centres of galaxies change over time.” Dr Philip Wiseman, University of Southampton
This image of the dusty debris disk surrounding the young star Fomalhaut is from Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). It reveals three nested belts extending out to 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star. The inner belts – which had never been seen before – were revealed by Webb for the first time. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, A. Gáspár (University of Arizona). Image processing: A. Pagan (STScI)
Jupiter is now in the morning sky, rising about 4 a.m. on the border of Pisces and Aries, occulted in daylight by the Moon as seen from Scotland on May 17th.
Duncan Lunan recounts the history of space exploration to Jupiter right up to today and the JUICE mission
The Lyrid meteor shower from the 1861 Comet Thatcher (not due back till 2283) peak on the night of 22nd-23rd April, and as the Moon sets early in the night there’s a better chance of seeing them.
“In April 1990, during Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture, the 90s Gallery in Otago Street marked the 29th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight in space with an exhibition by the Scottish space artists Ed Buckley and Tom Campbell from Glasgow “
“With these first observations, we have just barely scratched the surface of what is to come with the completion of this program, next year.” – Santosh Harish, a postdoctoral research associate at RIT.
A full list of nonfiction on astronomy and spaceflight by Scottish writers would be a major undertaking.
New observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have provided the first confirmation that the water in our Solar System may come from the same place as the water in disks surrounding protostars elsewhere in the Universe: the interstellar medium. Image credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)
