51成人动漫

Tickets are still available for 鈥淏lack Holes鈥� showing on October 23 and for the November 6 showing of 鈥淓补谤迟丑辩耻补办别鈥� at the William M Thomas Planetarium. Links to the ticket sites for the regular Planetarium shows and for Mesmerica are posted on the William M Thomas Planetarium鈥檚 Shows webpage.

In tomorrow morning鈥檚 pre-dawn sky, you鈥檒l see a very thin right next to brilliant Venus. The moon will be to the right of Venus at a separation equal to the distance between . They鈥檒l easily fit within the same field of view of your binoculars. Both of them are on the right (west) side of Virgo.

The following night (October 20/21), the moon will be at new moon phase making it ideal conditions for viewing the peak of the . This meteor shower gets its name from the location from which the meteors appear to streak鈥攁bove the head of Orion to the left in what is usually pictured as the club he鈥檚 raising over his head. The meteors are formed from . Because of the inclination of Halley鈥檚 orbit (how much its orbit is tilted with respect to Earth鈥檚 orbit), the meteors appear to come from that direction in the sky. The size of tiny grains of sand, the dust bits hit our atmosphere at 41 miles/second, burning up many tens of miles above the surface. With a dark sky well outside of the city, you might see between 13 and 30 meteors per hour. In the suburbs of Bakersfield, it鈥檒l be half that number.

One interesting item in astronomy research news is the . The name indicates that the constellation it is in鈥攖he Chameleon near the south celestial pole and its coordinate position in the coordinate system used by astronomers called that is like the longitude/latitude system we use on Earth. are failed stars that bridge the gap between large jovian planets and small stars. Stars have enough mass to create the large enough temperatures and densities in their cores to undergo nuclear fusion. 

Observations with the James Webb Space Telescope and the ground-based Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile show that Cha 1107-7626 suddenly increased the rate it is gobbling up material from the surrounding gas cloud, now at the huge rate of 6 billion metric tons per second, and sustained that rate over at least a few months. Using spectra of the brown dwarf to get the composition of the gas, we see hydrocarbons and newly formed water vapor.

The sustained burst of accretion activity, the formation of hydrocarbons and water vapor, and  indications that the inflow of material is being guided by the object鈥檚 magnetic field is like what we see in the formation of some stars going through a 鈥淓Xor-type鈥� phase. Cha 1107-7626 is the lowest mass example of this. Archived data from a decade ago (before Webb) indicate that the body had a similar burst of activity. Observations of this forming brown dwarf and others will help us understand the different pathways in the formation of stars vs. the formation of planets.

Another interesting object is at the other end of the spectrum, a in a dying massive star. Gamma ray bursts can last anywhere from a fraction of a second to a few minutes. The very short ones are from the merger of neutron stars and the longer ones are thought to be the result of the . The object called 鈥淕RB 250702B鈥� was observed by to last an incredibly long 7 hours (a gamma ray b-u-u-r-r-s-s-t) and pulsed periodically. 

First discovered on July 2, 2025 (that鈥檚 the 鈥�250702鈥� part of its name), we originally thought it was nearby in our galaxy but later observations with the VLT, Hubble, and Webb showed it was in a galaxy billions of light years away. The various explanations that have been proposed all include a star getting torn apart as it spirals into a black hole of various sizes: from stellar-mass size to mid-size of a few thousand solar masses to a supermassive black hole with many millions of solar masses. The supermassive black hole scenario has been ruled out due to the object鈥檚 position in the outer parts of the galaxy and supermassive black holes are always at the centers of galaxies. 

The mid-size black hole idea has a problem with size scales because the fluctuations in the gamma ray brightness that are on top of the periodicity show the source has to be smaller in diameter. Nothing can change brightness faster than the time it takes for light to travel across the object, so 鈥攎ore rapid fluctuations mean a smaller object.

A stellar-mass black hole tearing apart a passing star is a possibility but . As the dying star puffed out to become a red giant, it engulfed the nearby black hole which spiraled into the core of the dying star, tearing apart the core to produce the powerful, long-lived jet we saw in gamma rays with Fermi. Hopefully, we鈥檒l find another super long-lived gamma ray burst that鈥檒l help us hone in on the correct explanation.

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Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at 51成人动漫

Author of the award-winning website