NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) is readying for launch in late 2026. Roman will be able to survey the sky 1,000 times faster than Hubble. It will collect near-infrared imaging and spectroscopic data with Hubble-quality resolution and sensitivity over fields of view 200 times greater than the Hubble's. Roman's data will enrich all areas of astrophysics by enabling studies of nearly every class of astronomical object, phenomenon, and environment across the observable universe. Dr. Fox will discuss the details of the Roman mission, with a focus on its scientific goals. These exciting studies include the discovery of thousands of new planets and pinpointing the source of a mysterious force called Dark Energy that permeates our Universe.
I have been catching up on these lectures as they are fascinating. The LISA talk was also good as it gave a lot of background information as to the science behind this. Exciting times to come, even though it may be a decade before the mission is launched in to space.
A Giant Black Hole Destroyed a Star and Threw the Pieces into Space
I am sharing this 'as-is' the original fediverse post text is quoted below along with a link to the article.
A pair of X-ray telescopes have observed the messy aftermath of a star that came too close to a supermassive black hole 290 million light-years away. It's believed that the star had three times the mass of the Sun, so this was one of the largest tidal disruption events ever seen. Although the black hole consumed some of the star, most of its guts were thrown into the surrounding space, polluting the region with the chemicals that allowed astronomers to estimate its stellar mass.
Supermassive black holes exist in the centres of Galaxies, there is one at the centre of the Milky way galaxy which was photographed a few years ago. The photo below is from the Wikipedia article.
