Brianp Powell News Today

Astronomers have spotted something way the heck out there, but even their smartest computers can't figure out what it is. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey

An optical/near-infrared image of the sky around the TESS Input Catalog (TIC) object TIC 400799224 (the crosshair marks the location of the object

Still, say they were… and say we could hop aboard the Enterprise and make the entirely questionable decision to warp on over to a binary supermassive black hole system. What would it look like? Video of The Doubly Warped World of Binary Black Holes Simulation of two supermassive black holes orbiting each other. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell This is not just CGI, its a simulation based on solving the actual equations of the Theory Relativi...

Any object with mass warps space-time but this only really becomes apparent for very dense objects, like stars, galaxy clusters, and black holes. Last year for Black Hole Week, NASA released an incredible visualization of how the extreme gravity of a black hole distorts and redirects our view of the light coming from the accretion disk around it. For this years Black Hole Week, NASA has gone one better and released a stunning visualization of how this effect would appear if there were two orbi...

The Light-Bending Dance of Binary Black Holes New visualization traces how black holes distort, redirect light emanating from the maelstrom of hot gas. Image Credit: Email A pair of orbiting black holes millions of times the Sun’s mass perform a hypnotic pas de deux in a new NASA visualization. The movie traces how the black holes distort and redirect light emanating from the maelstrom of hot gas — called an accretion disk — that surrounds each one. Viewed from near the orbital plane, ea...

 E-Mail IMAGE: In this frame from the new visualization, a supermassive black hole weighing 200 million solar masses lies in the foreground. Its gravity distorts light from the accretion disk of a... view more  Credit: Credit: NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell A pair of orbiting black holes millions of times the Suns mass perform a hypnotic pas de deux in a new NASA visualization. The movie traces how the black holes distort and redirect light ema...

Key facts: The system, also called TIC 168789840, is the first known sextuple composed of three sets of eclipsing binaries, stellar pairs whose orbits tip into our line of sight so we observe the stars alternatively passing in front of each other. Each eclipse causes a dip in the system’s overall brightness. Astronomers designate the binaries by the letters A, B, and C. The stars in the A and C systems orbit each other roughly every day and a half, and the two binaries orbit each other about ...