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This week, scientists speculated that an interstellar object called 'Oumuamua' could be an alien probe to the way it was accelerating through our solar system as it blitzed past last year.
The Parker Solar Probe is 15 million miles from its surface, with 15 million miles from its surface. The Mars Curiosity rover just took a nice long drive along the Martian surface, its long after a computer malfunction in September. And Opportunity, the other rover on Mars, is still sadly quiet.
Here's what else you missed in this week.
Galactic fountain
This is one fountain you will not want to play in, but it's beautiful to behold.
More than a billion light-years from Earth, a black hole at the center of the giant elliptical Abell 2597 galaxy draws in cold molecular gas and sprays it back again in a jet or fountain-like fashion. Observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter / Submillimeter Array of Telescopes and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope were published in The Astrophysical Journal.
This process is doomed to repeat itself over and over. The cold gas falls into the black hole, igniting the black hole, and it launches jets of glowing plasma into space. But the plasma can not escape the gravity of the galaxy, so it rains back down into the black hole.
"Galaxy evolution can be pretty chaotic, and big galaxies like this one," said Timothy Davis of Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy. "For the first time we have been able to observe the full cycle of a supermbadive black hole fountain, which acts to regulate this process, prolonging the life of galaxies."
Black holes merge
We know that galaxies merge to form larger galaxies, but for the first time, astronomers actually have several galaxies as they came together. And they were able to see supermbadive black holes at the centers of those galaxies.
The research was published in the journal Nature this week.
"Seeing the peers of merging galaxy nuclei badociated with these huge black holes so close together was pretty amazing," said Michael Koss, a research scientist at Eureka Scientific. "In our study, we see two galaxy nuclei right when the images are taken in. You can not argue with it; it's a very 'clean' result, which does not depend on interpretation."
Archival images from the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as high-resolution images taken by the W. Keck Observatory's adaptive optics system, provided the stunning first look.
This is probably what will happen 4 billion years ago when our Milky Way galaxy merges with its Andromeda galaxy neighbor.
Death of a galaxy
A neighboring dwarf galaxy called the Small Magellanic Cloud is just a fraction of the size of the Milky Way – and it's losing the power it uses to form stars.
Fine details provided by radio images from the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope array, published in a Nature Astronomy study this week, show the galaxy's demise as it loses gas.
"Galaxies that stop making stars are slowly fading into oblivion," said Naomi McClure-Griffiths of the Australian National University's Astronomy Research and Astrophysics Research Center.
Eventually, astronomers believe, it will be eaten by the Milky Way.
Flock of stars
These stars are a bit of a wild duck. Meet the Wild Duck Cluster, where 2,900 stars live together.
Astronomers thought open clusters of stars would contain only stars that come from the same generation. But the Wild Duck cluster has bright stars in different colors, which suggests they are different ages. Blue stars are usually younger, and are usually older.
But in a new study, the researchers realized that the open cluster is playing a trick on them. The way they're rotating is causing them to appear as different ages and colors.
Their rotation causes their wavelength to appear in the face of the earth.
A star from a long, long time ago
Astronomers have found what could be one of the world's oldest stars, which means that it is made of materials that have been released from the Big Bang. The 13.5 billion-year-old star is tiny, with low mbad and low metal content, which could be indicative of the very first stars ever born.
The earliest stars would be full of elements like helium, hydrogen and lithium, producing heavier elements and spreading them throughout the universe as they exploded. This would allow for more stars and more.
This star was found to be an almost invisible secondary star in a binary star system. And if this old star can be observed, perhaps there are even older ones to be studied.
"This star is perhaps one in 10 million," said Kevin Schlaufman, a Johns Hopkins University badistant professor of physics and astronomy. "It tells us something very important about the first generations of stars."
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