A robot hand faster than yours

Unusual Celestial Event Was Black Hole Swallowing a Star

In what sounds like a one of a kind murder mystery, a dying star has fallen into a black hole and been ripped apart.

The event, which was observed on March 28, was originally thought to be a gamma ray burst from a collapsing star but researchers suspected something more sinister was at play. Their findings appear in a pair of papers published online by the journal Science.

Traditional gamma ray bursts involve a deluge of high-energy photons bursting through the air. They generally result from the explosion of a star or when two objects collide in space.

In this case the burst was unusually long, said Joshua Bloom, an associate professor of astronomy at Berkeley and the first author of one of the studies.

The burst also came from the center of a galaxy four billion light years away. Most galaxies are thought to have black holes at their center, a clue that tipped off Dr. Bloom and his colleagues. …

via Unusual Celestial Event Was Black Hole Swallowing a Star – NYTimes.com.

Mercury Is Looking Less Boring Than Scientists Thought

For years, many planetary scientists did not express much curiosity about Mercury, which looked gray and cratered — a slightly larger version of the Moon.

But data released Thursday from NASA’s Mercury Messenger spacecraft, which entered orbit around Mercury in March, is painting a more vibrant picture of the solar system’s innermost planet.

“Mercury ain’t the Moon,” Ralph L. McNutt Jr., the mission’s project scientist, said at a NASA news conference on Thursday.

Among the new findings: Some of Mercury’s topography is not seen anywhere else in the solar system — rimless pits, for instance — and its mineralogy is vastly different from the Moon’s, whose rocks have much less potassium. Scientists already knew that Mercury has a magnetic field, while the Moon does not.

The latest batch of data includes the clearest pictures yet of Mercury’s polar regions, plus readings of the elements in its crust, which have helped scientists rule out some theories about the planet’s origins. Mercury Messenger has also discovered that the planet’s magnetic field is stronger in its northern hemisphere than in its southern, which hints at something odd in the structure of its molten core.

The new information could reveal how Mercury formed and changed over the 4.5-billion-year history of the solar system, which in turn could help astronomers understand the panoply of Earth-size planets around other stars and the possibility of conditions friendly for life on them. NASA’s Kepler telescope has discovered dozens of possible Earth-size planets, but its observations can determine little beyond their size. …

via Mercury Is Looking Less Boring Than Scientists Thought – NYTimes.com.