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When a supermassive black hole tears a star apart (imagined here), it produces copious light and maybe neutrinos, too. DESY/Science Communication Lab
Rare cosmic neutrino traced to star-swallowing black hole
Feb. 22, 2021 , 11:00 AM
Neutrinos are everywhere trillions of the virtually massless particles pass through your body every second but they’re notoriously hard to pin down, especially the rare high-energy ones from deep space. Only about a dozen of these cosmic neutrinos are detected annually, and scientists had connected only one to its source. Now, IceCube, the kilometer-wide neutrino detector nestled deep beneath the South Pole, has traced another one back to its far-flung birthplace: a supermassive black hole tearing a star to pieces in a galaxy 750 million light-years away.
March 3, 2021
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s most complex infrared telescope. In February 2021, It successfully passed its final functional performance tests, moving it closer to its launch in October.
During its final full systems test, technicians powered on all of the James Webb Space Telescope’s various electrical components installed on the observatory, and cycled through their planned operations to ensure each was functioning, and communicating with each other. Image via NASA/ Chris Gunn.
Significant progress was made in the development of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope – also known as JWST or simply the Webb – last month, February 2021, marking the success of its final functional performance tests. The two testing milestones – the comprehensive systems test and the ground segment test – confirmed the observatory’s internal electronics are operating as intended. They also verified that it and its four science instruments can send and receive
PHOENIX – A team led by University of Arizona astronomers has discovered the most distant quasar found to date. Researchers hope the quasar, which is more than 13 billion light-years
Advertisement: Quasars are one of the brightest sources of light in the universe and are the nucleus of an enormous galaxy. At the center of the quasar’s galaxy is a black hole that constantly emits matter. J0313-1806 is not only significant for its distance, but it also contains a black hole so heavy that the discovery is making scientists question their hypotheses of how black holes form. “This particular quasar has a black hole of one and a half billion times the mass of the sun, and it is from a time the universe was so young that it barely had time to form these objects,” Fan said. “We’re looking at a big object in a baby universe. So, the question is, how long does it take for these objects to form?”