Astronomers Measure Supermassive Black Hole, Our Solar System’s Lost Protoplanet, and More Science News
It’s been an eventful week in science. Astronauts on the ISS were briefly ordered to shelter in place after an air leak was discovered in a transfer tunnel, NASA officially declared its MAVEN space probe dead and scientists announced the creation of a “global mission” designed by AI. Also, researchers used the James Webb Space Telescope to directly measure the size of a distant black hole and the meteorite revealed clues about a long-ago protoplanet in our solar system. Find out here on this news and more from this week.
JWST measures the size of a distant black hole
Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers have measured the size of a supermassive black hole 10 billion light-years away. Dormant black holes are easier to see than active ones, as they are not surrounded by light from the hot gas and dust that surrounds them as they are pulled away. But thanks to the capabilities of JWST and gravitational lensing, or the object where the gravitational force of a massive object like a black hole orbits a black hole is able to measure the light hole at the center of the dark group MRG-M0138, a distant galaxy from the early universe.
The process amounts to “combining JWST’s sharp vision with nature’s magnifying glass,” said lead author Andrew Newman, of Carnegie Science. “By combining JWST data with gravitational lensing, we can peer inside the black hole’s influence zone, where gravity accelerates stars,” Newman said. “This is one of the best ways we have to measure a black hole, so we were excited to move it back to a much earlier time in cosmic history.”
It is the most distant black hole that astronomers have been able to directly measure so far, and the findings could help scientists better understand the formation of supermassive black holes and galaxies billions of years ago. The paper is published in a journal Science.
Evidence of a long lost land
Scientists say that a meteorite found in the Sahara Desert in Africa has evidence of a protoplanet that orbited our sun 4.5 billion years ago. The space rock they are studying is a rare angrite meteorite, from a volcanic rock that can be traced back to the first few million years of the solar system.
“The factors that make up the body of angry parents are fundamentally different in parts of Earth and Mars,” said Aaron Bell, assistant research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It points to a different and different evolutionary path to planet formation in the early history of our solar system.”
John KashubaAngrites are thought to be products of asteroids because of how little silica they contain, compared to the composition of Earth and other terrestrial planets where this compound is abundant. But in the asteroid called NWA 12774, researchers found a crystal of the aluminum-rich mineral, clinopyroxene, which they say shows it formed under far greater pressure than the asteroid’s origin would allow. The team says it needs at least 17.5 kilobars of pressure to make it, and the patterns of crystals inside the meteorite suggest it formed at a shallow depth rather than underground. For all that to happen, the parent body would need to be massive – with a radius of more than 1,118 miles.
According to the team, this object could be the size of the moon, or as big as Mars. “We only know it was there because a few pieces of it fell to Earth,” said Bell. “These meteorites preserve evidence of a completely different way in which the first planets formed.” The team’s findings have been published in a journal Earth and Planetary Science Books.
