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Space and Astronomy News for the 15th of March 2025
As always, lots of news about astronomy and space this week.
New moons discovered around Saturn. Heaps of them.
The Solar System planet with the most spectacular set of rings, the gas giant Saturn, has long been known to have a large number of moons. This number essentially doubled this week with the announcement of the discovery of a further 128 moon orbiting Saturn.
These are small, only a few kms across and oddly shaped. They're not large enough to form themselves into a spherical shape under their own gravity. We also might have problems coming up with new names for them all. Read more in our article here.
The world's largest digital camera installed in a remarkable telescope
The 3,200 megapixel LSST Camera, weighing over 3 tonnes, has been installed on the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Vera. C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
Apart from its size, the LSST Camera is part of one of the most ambitious scientific facilities every constructed by humans. The aim of the Vera. C. Rubin Observatory is not just to photograph and observe the southern night sky, but to capture a complete photographic record every few nights.
This means that rather than spending years gradually photographing and observing different objects in various parts of the sky, this new LSST Camera will capture a virtual movie of the sky over a 10 year period. By comparing the sky night to night, it will be able image a range of Transient Phenomena - new comets, supernovae, black hole binaries; gamma-ray bursts and X-ray flashes which are thought to be from the death of massive stars. It's likely to spot new comets, and no doubt find many more interstellar objects passing through the Solar System such as Oumuamua and Comet Barisov.
Full testing of the Vera. C. Rubin Observatory is expected to commence soon and images to be released to the public shortly afterwards. Read more about the LSST here.
A super massive blackhole found in the middle of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
The galaxy next door is also packing a super massive black hole - and it likes to throw stars into intergalactic space!
Large Magellanic Cloud or LMC - visible in our southern night skies as a misty patch several times the size of the Full Moon
Last year we mentioned in a BINTEL blog article that the Large Magellanic Cloud or LMC is no longer considered the largest satellite galaxy of our home, the Milky Way. You can read about this here.
Rather than orbiting the Milky Way, it's just passing by. While the LMC will not spend the next few billion years orbiting the Milky Way and instead chart its own course, the encounter has left the smaller LMC quite scarred and disrupted.
Now astronomers are suggesting that the LMC has a super massive black hole at its centre much like Milky Way does. It's thought that most largish galaxies contain these, but there's never been one directly observed or identified in the LMC. (While we can't "see" a black hole as, by definition light can't escape its event horizon, we can observe the effects on stars, and interstellar gas clouds that such massive objects and their gravity cause. This was how the super massive black hole in the centre of the Milk Way, Sgr A*, was discovered.)
What's been observed in the LMC are hyper velocity stars. There are stars that are travelling through the LMC at such high speeds they will eventually fly away from the galaxy and beyond. They've effectively reached "escape velocity" for the LMC. A probable mechanism for these fast stars is a nearby encounter with a massive object.
These stars accelerated towards the black hole, but their path and distance from it was far enough away to stop the stars from going into orbit, or even descending towards the blackhole's event horizon. NASA uses similar fly-by techniques to speed up spacecraft headed into the Solar System by performing flybys of the Earth, Moon, Venus and even Mars!
An artist's impression of a star being yeeted out of the LMC by the galaxy's supermassive blackhole at its centre. Image via: CfA/Melissa Weiss
"It is astounding to realize that we have another supermassive black hole just down the block, cosmically speaking," said Jesse Han of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), who led the new study. "Black holes are so stealthy that this one has been practically under our noses this whole time."
The LMC's central black hole is around 600,000 times the mass of the Sun. The Milky Way's own central massive black hold is around 4,000,000 the mass of the Sun.
More on this fascinating topic here.
Cheers,
Earl White
BINTEL
15th March 2025
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