The closest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, has released a record-breaking flare – and thanks to a network of nine telescopes on the ground and in space, astronomers were able to capture the extreme event.
The discovery is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Proxima Centauri is about one-eighth the mass of the Sun and is classified as a red dwarf. Stars are prone to the occasional flare, but the one seen by five of the nine telescopes on May 1, 2019, was among the most extreme witnessed.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) witnessed a brightening of the star by a factor of about a thousand in a matter of seconds observing the star in microwaves. The Hubble space telescope observing it in far-ultraviolet saw something even more extreme at those wavelengths.
Dr. NIU Chenhui from the team led by Dr. LI Di and Dr. ZHU Weiwei from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered three new FRBs with high dispersion measure from the massive data of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST).
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IMAGE: Matthew Kerr, Ph.D., a research physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, was part of an international team of astronomers and astrophysicists recognized by the 2020 American Association for the. view more
Credit: Matthew Kerr; U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
WASHINGTON Imagine living in a large city. New York City, Los Angeles, or Washington. One morning you hear a siren off in the distance. You know the direction and that it was far away since it was just loud enough to hear. You wonder if it s an emergency. What type of siren was it? Police, Fire, EMS? But you never hear it again. Time passes, then one night you hear another siren, then another, eventually hearing sirens all the time. So what does this have to do with science?
By By Paul Cage, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Corporate Communications WASHINGTON, – Imagine living in a large city. New York City, Los Angeles, or Washington. One morning you hear a siren off in the distance. You know the direction and that it was far away since it was just loud enough to hear. You wonder if it’s an emergency. What type of siren was it? Police, Fire, EMS? But you never hear it again. Time passes, then one night you hear another siren, then another, eventually hearing sirens all the time. So what does this have to do with science?