Flare On Proxima Centauri Breaks Records astrobiology.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from astrobiology.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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IMAGE: Artist s conception of the violent stellar flare from Proxima Centauri discovered by scientists in 2019 using nine telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum, including the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Powerful. view more
Credit: NRAO/S. Dagnello
Scientists have spotted the largest flare ever recorded from the sun s nearest neighbor, the star Proxima Centauri.
The research, which appears today in
The Astrophysical Journal Letters, was led by the University of Colorado Boulder and could help to shape the hunt for life beyond Earth s solar system.
CU Boulder astrophysicist Meredith MacGregor explained that Proxima Centauri is a small but mighty star. It sits just four light-years or more than 20 trillion miles from our own sun and hosts at least two planets, one of which may look something like Earth. It s also a red dwarf, the name for a class of stars that are unusually petite and dim.
University of Colorado Boulder
Artist’s conception of a violent flare erupting from the star Proxima Centauri. (Credit: NRAO/S. Dagnello)
Scientists have spotted the largest flare ever recorded from the sun’s nearest neighbor, the star Proxima Centauri.
The research, which appears today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, was led by CU Boulder and could help to shape the hunt for life beyond Earth’s solar system.
CU Boulder astrophysicist Meredith MacGregor explained that Proxima Centauri is a small but mighty star. It sits just four light-years or more than 20 trillion miles from our own sun and hosts at least two planets, one of which may look something like Earth. It’s also a “red dwarf,” the name for a class of stars that are unusually petite and dim.
Record-breaking flare from Sun s nearest neighbor eurekalert.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from eurekalert.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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The focus of this new image share from NASA a photo captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2012 is Hercules A.
The distant galaxy, also known as 3C 348, is the bright spot right in the middle of the below image. Those long, gorgeous trails of red are plasma jets that span roughly 1.5 million light-years of distance. It s because of the massive black hole that sits at the center of 3C 348.
Image: NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)
It s an elliptical galaxy that s roughly 1,000 times larger than our own Milky Way. Same goes for the black hole the galaxy formed around; it s also about 1,000 times larger than the one at the center of our Milky Way, at around 2.5 billion solar mass. (Many galaxies are believed to have formed around supermassive black holes.)