<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.aau3181">K. Ulaczyk / J. Skowron / OGLE / Astronomical Observatory, University of Warsaw</a></span></p><p class="caption">Warsaw Telescope and Milky Way Cepheids discovered by the OGLE survey.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><ul class="summary-list"><li>Two giant bubbles of radiation - each up to 1,400 light-years across - are <a href="https://www.businessinsider.co.za/meerkat-telescope-ska-square-kilometre-array-telescope-gaint-bubbles-radiation-2019-9">expanding outward from the center of the Milky Way</a>.</li><li>A new study describes these never-before-seen bubbles, spotted for the first time by <a href="https://www.businessinsider.co.za/on-friday-sa-unveils-the-r44-billion-meerkat-telescope-heres-what-its-for-2018-7">South Africa's new MeerKAT telescope</a>.</li><li>Astronomers suspect the <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=5&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjfxdDyrc7kAhVlzlkKHVZeDkwQxfQBMAR6BAgFEAc&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.businessinsider.in%2Fmilky-ways-quiet-wimpy-black-hole-is-getting-hungrier-and-brighter%2Farticleshow%2F71098006.cms&amp;usg=AOvVaw1jpdkd5yLYbuEVutMJ8sz6">supermassive black hole</a> at the center of our galaxy entered into a "feeding frenzy" a few million years ago, swallowing massive lumps of gas and matter, and the bubbles are the black hole's consequent belch of radiation. </li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/?hprecirc-bullet">Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories</a>.</li></ul><p><span style="color: #222222;">The region at the center of our galaxy is still full of mysteries, but astronomers have just found a clue to its past: Huge, radio-emitting bubbles, extending 700 light-years either side of the galactic plane.</span></p><p>They could be, the researchers believe, the result of a huge eruption from our galaxy's supermassive <a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/black-holes" target="_blank" title="black hole" rel="noopener">black hole</a>, Sagittarius A*. Millions of years ago that eruption would have punched into the interstellar medium in opposite directions from the supermassive black hole.</p><p>If "galactic bubbles" sound a bit familiar, it's important to clarify that these are <em>not</em> the <a href="https://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/constellations/pages/bubbles.html">huge gamma-ray bubbles</a> discovered by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in 2010, nicknamed "Fermi bubbles," spanning above and below the galactic plane for a total distance of 50,000 light-years.</p><p>These latest bubbles, described <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1532-5">in a new study</a> in the journal Nature, are something new, and astronomers haven't seen them before. But they are amongst the biggest structures at the center of our galaxy, and they reveal new information about the dynamics of our galactic nucleus.</p><p>"The center of our galaxy is relatively calm when compared to other galaxies with very active central <a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/black-holes" target="_blank" title="black holes" rel="noopener">black holes</a>," <a href="http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-09-11-towering-balloon-features-discovered-near-centre-milky-way">astrophysicist Ian Heywood of the University of Oxford said</a>.</p><p>"Even so, the Milky Way's central black hole can become uncharacteristically active, flaring up as it periodically devours massive clumps of dust and gas. It's possible that one such feeding frenzy triggered powerful outbursts that inflated this previously unseen feature," Heywood added.</p><h2>An accidental discovery by a South African telescope</h2><p>Hints of the structures <a href="https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984Natur.310..557Y/abstract">first emerged in the 1980s</a>, when astronomer and physicist Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University and colleagues discovered something strange in the galactic center: long, thin, highly organised and highly magnetized filaments of gas, tens of light-years long and just one light-year wide, emitting <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation">synchrotron</a> radio waves.</p><p>These strange structures hadn't been observed anywhere else, and their origin <a href="https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2017-35">remained a mystery</a> for decades.</p><p>But something changed. The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory's <a href="http://www.ska.ac.za/science-engineering/meerkat/">MeerKAT telescope</a> was built, consisting of 64 interconnected radio antennae that offer "unprecedented" sensitivity in radio wavelengths, perfectly positioned in the Southern Hemisphere to take deep images of the galactic center.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MeerKAT_Radio_Telescope.jpg">Morganoshell/Wikimedia Commons</a></span></p><p class="caption">A photograph of the MeerKAT Radio Telescope, taken March 2016.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>The international team turned the telescope on the heart of the Milky Way. And, for the first time, they were able to see the structures of these radio bubbles, faint but detectable, amidst the incredibly radio-bright glare in the region.</p><p>The event that caused it could be responsible for accelerating the electrons that resulted in the synchrotron emission observed in the filaments in the galactic center.</p><p>"The radio bubbles discovered with MeerKAT now shed light on the origin of the filaments," <a href="http://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2019/09/milky-way/">Yusef-Zadeh said</a>. "Almost all of the more than 100 filaments are confined by the radio bubbles."</p><h2>'A staggeringly powerful event ... near our galaxy's central black hole'</h2><p>The entire hourglass-shaped structure extends 1,400 light-years, and is unusually symmetrical. This symmetry provides some clues as to what created them; the size, constrained by the speed of light, puts an upper limit of a few million years on their age.</p><p>"The shape and symmetry of what we have observed strongly suggests that a staggeringly powerful event happened a few million years ago very near our galaxy's central black hole," astronomer William Cotton from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory said.</p><p>This eruption was possibly triggered by vast amounts of interstellar gas falling in on the black hole, or a massive burst of star formation which sent shockwaves careening through the galactic center.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole#mediaviewer/File:PIA16695-BlackHole-Corona-20130227.jpg">NASA/JPL/Caltech</a></span></p><p class="caption">Artist's impression of a black hole.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>"In effect, this inflated energetic bubbles in the hot, ionized gas near the galactic center, energizing it and generating radio waves which we could eventually detect here on Earth," Cotton added.</p><p>Although the radio bubbles are smaller and less energetic than the Fermi bubbles - it's possible that similar events created both sets of bubbles, the researchers said.</p><p>It's even possible that both sets of bubbles were created by a linked series of events. Perhaps future observations across a range of wavelengths can tell us more.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/event-horizon-telescope-black-hole-snaps-first-image-messier-87-2019-4">Here's how astronomers took the first image of a black hole that's located 55 million light years away</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

The black hole at the center of our galaxy just belched two giant bubbles of radiation

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/video/ligo20160211v10">SXS/LIGO</a></span></p><p class="caption">Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime that are caused by violent processes like the merging of black holes.</p></div><p></p></div></div>In September, physicists made a monumental discovery that opened up a new window to the universe.</p><p>Using a group of equipment called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the researchers <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/what-are-gravitational-waves-and-why-are-they-important-2016-2">detected ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves</a>, something Einstein's general theory of relativity predicted a century ago.</p><p>These gravitational waves should allow scientists to directly study some of the most violent processes out there and probe general relativity by observing how gravity behaves in extreme conditions.</p><p>But on that same day - less than half a second after LIGO made its monumental discovery - the Fermi Telescope, a space observatory orbiting the Earth, picked up a <a href="http://phys.org/news/2016-04-fermi-telescope-poised-pin-gravitational.html">brief, faint signal from the same region of space</a>. The chances of that being coincidental hover around 0.2%. And if it wasn't a coincidence, it could open the door to a whole new world of physics.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>YouTube/ScienceAtNASA</span></p><p class="caption">The Fermi Telescope is a space observatory performing gamma ray astronomy.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><h2><strong>A flash of gamma rays</strong></h2><p>On September 14, Fermi observed what's known as a gamma ray burst, a flash of the most energetic type of light in the electromagnetic spectrum, radiating from the same neighborhood as the black hole merger.</p><p>According to what we know about black holes, this shouldn't have happened: Light shouldn't be able to escape from two betrothed black holes since any gas surrounding them would be swallowed up by one before they merged.</p><p>But in order to produce a gamma ray burst, there must have been some gas left over.</p><p>"Gamma-rays arising from a black hole merger would be a landmark finding because black holes are expected to merge 'cleanly', without producing any sort of light," <a href="http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.cgi?aid=12216">NASA explained in a press release.</a></p><p>To figure out what this gamma ray burst means, then, physicists will need to observe more of them. And, like this one, the bursts will have to be linked with gravitational waves from black hole mergers.</p><h2><strong>How to spot a gravitational wave</strong></h2><p>LIGO is just one key way scientists hope to hunt for gravitational waves. It currently consists of two detectors, one in Louisiana and the other in Washington. The detectors use a laser beam, split between a pair identical arms which form an L-shape, to detect almost imperceptible differences in length caused by a gravitational wave passing through and warping the fabric of spacetime where the detector sits.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/blueshift/index.php/2015/11/16/doing-astronomy-with-our-eyes-closed/">LIGO Laboratory/NSF</a></span></p><p class="caption">One of LIGO's L-shaped detectors that was used to detect gravitational waves.</p></div><p></p></div></div>But there's a problem with the gravitational wave observatories we have now: They possess relatively blurry vision, according to NASA. So when LIGO spotted the black hole collision, it was only able to determine its location within an area spanning 600 square degrees of the sky. That's the equivalent of looking for a needle in a haystack the size of the United States, <a href="http://www.gizmag.com/gravitational-waves-gamma-ray-detection-fermi/42875/">Gizmag</a> reports!</p><p>Using the gamma ray burst could help physicists narrow this search area by two thirds to just 200 square degrees of the sky.</p><p>At the very least, these gamma ray bursts could help physicists put a finger on the source of the gravitational waves that they detect.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/einsten-ligo-measures-gravitational-waves-2016-2">Einstein's wildest prediction from 100 years ago is turning out to be true</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="huMm10MDE65AaqssTMIirX0Ti2U5bUfO" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

NASA has detected a burst of light that might be linked to one of the most monumental space discoveries ever made

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Large collisions in space, like those between <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/black-holes">black holes</a> or neutron stars, create ripples in space-time called <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/gravitational-waves" target="_blank" rel="noopener">gravitational waves</a>. The phenomenon was first predicted by <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/albert-einstein/">Albert Einstein</a>.</li><li><strong>The <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/ligo">Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory</a></strong> (LIGO) recently sensed gravitational waves from a collision of two neutron stars - the second such event ever detected.</li><li>But these <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/neutron-stars">neutron stars</a> were more massive than scientists thought possible, and nobody picked up light or radiation from the aftermath of their collision.</li><li>That could indicate a new a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/waves-from-black-hole-swallowing-neutron-star-2019-8">new type of collision</a> in deep space, in which neutron stars meet and immediately collapse into a black hole.</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/?hprecirc-bullet">Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.</a></li></ul><p>Scientists may have stumbled upon a previously unknown class of massive collision in the universe. </p><p>On Monday, researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) <a href="https://www.ligo.org/detections/GW190425.php">announced</a> that they had yet again detected ripples in space-time. They think these particular disturbances in the fabric of the universe - which were observed in April 2019 - came from the collision of two neutron stars, the super-dense remnants of dead stars.</p><p>That would make this the second neutron-star collision ever detected, but it was quite different from the earlier one.</p><p>After the first collision was detected in 2017, telescopes turned to its location in the sky. Scientists studied the collision's aftermath in visible light, radio waves, X-rays, and gamma rays. But this time, they didn't find any signs of the collision other than its ripples in space-time.</p><p>That has led astrophysicists to wonder whether they've discovered an entirely new class of cataclysmic event in deep space - one in which neutron stars meet and immediately collapse into a black hole, leaving no trace behind.</p><h2>Einstein's predictions led scientists to violent new events in space</h2><p>Ripples in space-time are called gravitational waves. They usually come from distant collisions between massive objects, like black holes and neutron stars. Albert Einstein first predicted the phenomenon, but he didn't think gravitational waves would ever be detected. They seemed too weak to pick up on Earth amid all the noise and vibrations.</p><p>For 100 years, it seemed Einstein was right.</p><p>But in the late 1990s, LIGO's machines in Washington and Louisiana were built in an attempt to pick up the signals Einstein thought we'd never detect.</p><p>Finally, in September 2015, after 13 years of silence, LIGO detected its <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gravitational-waves-detected-first-time-ligo-2016-2">first gravitational waves</a>: signals from the merger of two black holes some 1.3 billion light-years away. The discovery opened a new field of astronomy and earned a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/2017-nobel-prize-in-physics-gravitational-waves-kip-thorne-rainer-weiss-barry-barish-2017-10">Nobel prize in physics</a> for three researchers who helped conceive of LIGO.</p><p>Since then, LIGO and its Italian companion Virgo have identified two other types of collisions. The observatories registered gravitational waves from <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/neutron-stars-crash-ligo-gravitational-waves-periodic-elements-2017-10">two neutron stars merging</a> for the first time in October 2017. In August 2019, LIGO and Virgo detected what scientists believe was <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/waves-from-black-hole-swallowing-neutron-star-2019-8">a black hole swallowing a neutron star</a>.</p><p>The waves LIGO picked up in April most likely came from another collision of two neutron stars, about 520 million light-years away. That's about four times more distant than the 2017 event.</p><p>Virgo did not detect the latest gravitational waves (probably because of the distance); only the more sensitive LIGO detector in Louisiana picked them up. Its companion machine in Washington was temporarily offline for maintenance.</p><p>As a result, scientists didn't get much data beyond the neutron stars' distance and mass. They calculated that the neutron stars were 3.4 times the mass of the sun - far more massive than scientists thought possible. </p><p>Something else was weird, too: Scientists didn't see any gamma rays, the radiation signals that are supposed to arrive just seconds after gravitational waves from a neutron-star merger. </p><h2>A new class of massive space collision?</h2><p>Scientists expect neutron stars to collide in high-energy explosions, causing heavy elements to form and emitting bright light and gamma-ray radiation. This explosion is known as "kilonova" because it's about 1,000 times brighter than a nova (the bright flash emitted by newborn stars). </p><p>But the gamma rays were mysteriously missing following the collision, and no telescopes spotted a bright light, either. </p><p>"We're in that uncertain position of not knowing if we didn't observe a kilonova because there really wasn't one, or if we simply didn't observe it because it was too far away," Martin Hendry, a LIGO scientist and astrophysicist at the University of Glasgow, told Business Insider.</p><p>Scientists think a possible explanation could be that the colliding neutron stars were so massive that they collapsed immediately into a black hole, as astrophysicist Ethan Siegel proposed in a <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/01/08/did-ligo-just-discover-two-fundamentally-different-types-of-neutron-star-mergers/#6e6950de2861">Forbes</a> article. </p><p>"Perhaps, above a certain mass threshold, higher-mass neutron-star mergers simply interact and go directly to a black hole, swallowing up all of the matter associated with both stars, producing no heavy elements and emitting no further observable signal at all," Siegel wrote.</p><p>If true, that could mean collisions between low-mass neutron stars - which produce kilonovae - have dramatically different results than collisions between massive neutron stars, which might not explode at all. </p><p>In that case, the newly observed neutron-star merger would represent an entirely new class of catastrophic collision.</p><p>"For a long, long time we had a sample size of zero, and now we've got a sample size of two," Hendry said. "So there's the tantalizing question as to whether they really are two distinct classes or whether it's just that, as we observe more and more, we'll kind of fill in a continuum." </p><h2>Hundreds of Earths' worth of gold and platinum</h2><p>When the 2017 neutron-star collision was confirmed, the discovery solved a long-standing mystery about the origins of most of the universe's heavy elements. </p><p>Scientists discovered that the explosion had forged roughly 50 Earth masses' worth of silver, 100 Earth masses of gold, and 500 Earth masses of platinum. The gold alone <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-gold-created-in-neutron-star-collision-2017-10">was worth about $100 octillion</a> at 2017 market price, or $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 written out.</p><p>A bit of nuclear alchemy called the rapid process, or r-process, is responsible for creating these metals.</p><p>It goes like this: As neutron stars move toward each other, a tiny bit of their material gets shot into space at incredible speeds. Those neutrons are very hot and crowded, so they smash together while moving outward, forming giant atomic cores. Very big atoms are highly unstable, so they almost immediately break apart and decay into smaller atoms - stuff like platinum, gold, silver, and even iodine.</p><p>However, if the neutron stars in the most recent collision collapsed directly into a black hole as some astronomers suspect, there would have been no r-process, and the crash would not have forged gold or platinum, Hendry said.</p><h2>Astronomers could detect new collisions every day by the mid-2020s</h2><p>To detect more gravitational-wave events with more precision, researchers are fitting the LIGO and Virgo detectors with a series of technical upgrades. In December 2019, they <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ligo-gravitational-wave-detector-more-powerful-squeezing-light-2019-12">installed a device that squeezes light</a>, allowing LIGO to make 50% more detections.</p><p>"We're really looking, by the middle of this decade, at having an event every day or so," Hendry said. </p><p>Most of the gravitational waves observed so far have come from collisions between two black holes. But the ability to make more detections could mean that scientists wind up finding dozens of neutron-star mergers each year.</p><p>An <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/earth-gravitational-wave-detector-ligo-virgo-upgrade-einstein-2019-10">upcoming Japanese observatory</a>, the Kamioka Gravitational-wave Detector (KAGRA), will also help scientists narrow down the source of gravitational waves to smaller points in the sky.</p><p>KAGRA was built underground and will use cryogenically cooled mirrors to help protect sensitive instruments from picking up false signals. The detector is slated to come online by April 30, but scientists will then need to fine-tune its instruments before it can fully join the gravitational-wave hunt later this year.</p><p>Another observatory, LIGO India, is expected to join the global network in 2025.</p><p>Together, these new and upgraded detection tools could help scientists determine whether there are indeed various classes of catastrophic neutron-star collisions in space.</p><p>"What we need to do is observe a whole bunch of neutron-star events," Hendry said. "It's too soon to say with only our second neutron-star merger, but once we have a few dozen or so, we can start really looking at the statistics."</p>

Scientists detected ripples in space and time from a potentially new class of collision in the universe. Their observatory cracked a 100-year-old mystery posed by Einstein.

<p>Thanks to a $50 million radio telescope array in the Australian outback, astronomers can now explore an extra-superhuman view of space.</p><p>And so can you.</p><p>On the clearest of nights, and in the darkest areas away from the haze of human electrical light, you might gaze up at the night sky in Australia and take in a scene like this:</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>OK - so that's a bit of a stretch, since powerful telescopes that are more sensitive than our eyes assembled this map of the sky. But it was photographed in the rainbow of visible wavelengths, or colors, of light that humans can see.</p><p>However, there's a whole other view of space that we mere mortals can't see, and astronomers have been piecing it together - telescope by telescope, spacecraft by spacecraft, map by map - over the decades to unlock the universe's deepest secrets.</p><p>Below is a representation of the full spread of wavelengths of light, and the instruments scientists use to record them.</p><p>Visible light is just a tiny sliver of reality that's out there:</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>Here's the same view of the sky in longer-wavelength light called infrared:</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>And in microwave, an even longer wavelength of light:</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>Working upward from visible light, in ever-shorter wavelengths, here's a telescope's view of the X-ray universe:</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>And another telescope's view of the shortest-wavelength, highest-energy light - gamma rays:</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>Although astronomers have recorded the night sky at its longest wavelengths - radio waves - they've never imaged it with as much precision or depth until the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope came along.</p><p>Located near Geraldton in Western Australia, one of its most recent experiments - called the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM) - has imaged space in the radio wave equivalent of not three primary colors (red, blue, and green), but 20.</p><p>"That's much better than we humans can manage, and it even beats the very best in the animal kingdom, the mantis shrimp, which can see 12 different primary colours," Natasha Hurley-Walker, an astronomer at Curtin University and the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said in <a href="http://www.icrar.org/gleam/">a press release</a>.</p><p>Astronomers say the new GLEAM data will help them study <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/what-milky-way-galaxy-looks-like-2016-9">galactic collisions</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/eta-carinae-winds-highest-resolution-image-2016-10">exploding stars</a>, and the behaviors of <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/black-holes-hide-behind-star-exhaust-2016-9">supermassive black holes</a>.</p><p>The rainbow-colored view, which is simulated, is pretty breathtaking and reveals all sorts of previously invisible objects:</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>Combined, all of these maps of space offer astronomers a truly awesome view of the universe:</p><p><div><div style="position:relative;padding-bottom:52%"></div></div></p><p>Explore, zoom in on, and play with the GLEAM data map below, which is best viewed on a desktop computer, or hop over to the full-screen <a href="http://gleamoscope.icrar.org/gleamoscope/trunk/src/">GLEAMoscope website</a>.</p><p><div></div></p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/watch-solar-flare-that-caused-radio-blackouts-erupt-2016-6">Watch a solar flare capable of radio blackouts on Earth erupt into space</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="Vtajg1NDE6E0PPjh9oDyAPWN_BwaEo3l" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

Here's how space would look if you had superhuman vision

<p>Most gamma rays come from black holes and other galactic phenomenon, but there's a mysterious source that we are just figuring out: Earth-based thunderstorms.</p>
<p>Researchers think these radioactive waves are coming from a newly discovered phenomena called "dark lightning."</p>
<p>The Fermi space telescope was searching for space-based <keyword id="31246" type="TECHNOLOGY" weightage="60" keywordseo="radiation">radiation</keyword> when it was struck by some jettisoned from Earth:</p>
<p class="float_right"><div class="image-container" style="width:620px"><div class="image"></div><p class="source"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN0wGga5e0I">YouTube/ScienceAtNASA</a></p></div></p>
<p class="float_right"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Scientists think these gamma ray bursts are "dark lighting" that had been guided to the craft by the Earth's magnetic fields. Scientists think that dark lighting exists for the same reason that light lightning does — to equalize the negative and positive charges that build up in <keyword id="43950" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="storm">storm</keyword> clouds and on the Earth. </span></p>
<p class="float_right"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lightning does this by using slow electrons to ferry current between the ground and the clouds, or between differentially charged areas within a thundercloud. These particles light up because of the current they carry. <br /></span></p>
<p class="float_right"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Dark lightning, on the other hand, uses higher energy charged particles. When those electrically charged particles in the thundercloud interact with molecules of air, they spit out gamma rays. These gamma rays make electrons and their anti-matter twins positrons. These particles keep hitting more molecules of air and spitting out more and more gamma rays, similar to how nuclear fission creates a nuclear explosion. <br /></span></p>
<p class="float_right"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the diagram below the charged particle is the little yellow and the molecule in the air is the blue ball. They come in contact, shooting out gamma rays — the pink thing:</span></p>
<p><div class="image-container float_right" style="width:620px"><div class="image"></div><p class="source"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN0wGga5e0I">YouTube/ScienceAtNASA</a></p></div></p>
<p>The particles spread out and up after they dissipate the charge differential in the cloud in a quick burst:</p>
<p><div class="image-container float_right" style="width:620px"><div class="image"></div><p class="source"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN0wGga5e0I">YouTube/ScienceAtNASA</a></p></div></p>
<p>These radiation bursts are similar to regular lighting, but because they are made of gamma waves instead of regular light waves, they are mostly invisible. They have been detected everywhere on Earth that thunderstorms happen:</p>
<p><div class="image-container float_right" style="width:620px"><div class="image"></div><p class="source"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN0wGga5e0I">YouTube/ScienceAtNASA</a></p></div></p>
<p>Sometimes packets of the gamma rays are bent by the magnetic fields of the Earth, bundle-ing them together.</p>
<p class="float_right"><div class="image-container" style="width:620px"><div class="image"></div><p class="source"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN0wGga5e0I">YouTube/ScienceAtNASA</a></p></div></p>
<p>One of these bundles, traveling along a magnetic field line, is what hit the Fermi telescope. These bursts can also hit planes, possibly <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/dark-lighting-radiation-plane-2013-4">bombarding the passengers with radiation, but probably not to a harmful degree</a>.</p>
<p class="float_right"><div class="image-container" style="width:620px"><div class="image"></div><p class="source">YouTube/ScienceAtNASA</p></div></p>
<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN0wGga5e0I">See the whole Science@NASA video:</a></p>
<p></p>

'Dark Lightning' Is The Invisible Twin Of The Lightning We Know

<h2><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full"><div><div class="image"></div><p></p></div></div>BI Answers: What is the most powerful thing in the universe?</h2>
<p>The most mind-boggling explosion you can imagine doesn't come close to what the universe can create. When stars 150 times the size of our sun explode, they produce the brightest light sources in the universe and release as much energy in a few seconds as our Sun will produce over its entire 10-billion year lifetime.</p>
<p>That's about the same amount of energy in ten trillion trillion billion megaton bombs!</p>
<p>These explosions generate beams of high-energy radiation, called gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which are considered by astronomers to be the most powerful thing in the universe. What's more, these GRBs could be killing our chances of ever discovering life on other planets.</p>
<p>Hopeful scientists say that we are not alone in the universe, but if that is true, then where the heck is everyone? One explanation could be that life in the universe is truly rare because GRBs are sterilizing the cosmos.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full"><div><div class="image"></div><p></p></div></div>GRBs are a stunning burst of radiation consisting of beams of gamma radiation that usually last seconds to a few minutes but can last as long as a <a href="http://science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2014-news/Burrows9-2014">few hours</a>.</p>
<p>On Earth, gamma radiation is generated from radioactive decay of elements, and is extremely hazardous to living beings.</p>
<p>These super-intense beams of gamma radiation - the gamma-ray bursts - are created by the most powerful type of stellar explosion: a hypernova.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full"><div><div class="image"></div><p></p></div></div>Hypernovae are a more spectacular version of the better-known supernova - a massive explosion of light and energy that occurs when a high-mass star implodes. While supernovae shoot gamma rays that are visible from about 100 light years away, these hypernovae launch gamma ray bursts to a distance of <a href="http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2009/06/ranking-most-powerful-forces-in.html">500 to 1,000 light years</a>.</p>
<p>If you're home planet is in the way, say hello to a mass, if not complete, extinction. It's events like these that could be sterilizing the universe. If other planets are anything like Earth, then it will take billions of years of evolution to reach a point to where life on other planets is intelligent and technically advanced enough to build spaceships that can escape their solar system and explore other worlds.</p>
<p>If a GRB occurs at any point during that society's evolution, then the chances of intelligent life on other planets is much lower than we think. This issue is known as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox">Fermi paradox</a>.</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full"><div><div class="image"></div><p></p></div></div>Gamma ray bursts are the brightest light sources in the universe and were first discovered by accident at the height of the Cold War. In the late 1960s, the U.S. dispatched a series of military satellites that monitored space for any evidence of residual gamma radiation from nuclear testing by the Soviets. The satellites did find gamma radiation, but from sources millions and billions of light years away, much further than Russia.</p>
<p>Because they are so bright, we can observe GRBs at incredibly far distances at all corners of the universe. We detect on average one GRB every day, which means that a single galaxy should see one burst every one-hundred thousand to one million years, which is rare even by cosmic standards.</p>
<p>Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has never experienced a GRB, as far as we know. The most likely candidate for a GRB in our galaxy is about 7500 light years away - a safe distance from Earth, but if aimed at us will be bright enough that night will seem like day.</p>
<p><em>This post is part of a continuing series that answers all of your "why" questions related to <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">science</keyword>. Have your own question? Email <a href="mailto:science@businessinsider.com">science@businessinsider.com</a> with the subject line "Q&amp;A"; tweet your question to <a href="https://twitter.com/BI_Science" target="_blank">@BI_Science</a>; or <a href="https://www.facebook.com/BusinessInsiderScience" target="_blank">post to our Facebook page</a>.</em></p>

What Is The Most Powerful Thing In The Universe? 

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2015-05">NASA/CXC/SAO</a></span></p><p class="caption">HAWC will allow scientists to study some of the most violent processes in the universe.</p></div><p></p></div></div>On the flanks of the Sierra Negra volcano in Central Mexico, nearly 14,000 feet above sea level, there is a giant field of water tanks. Three hundred water tanks, to be exact, occupying a space that's roughly the size of three football fields.</p><p>Collectively, this massive array is known as the <a href="http://hawc-observatory.org/">High Altitude Cherenkov Gamma Ray Observatory</a> (HAWC), and it's helping scientists measure high energy particles from outer space called <a href="http://home.cern/about/physics/cosmic-rays-particles-outer-space">cosmic rays</a> that are racing toward us at nearly the speed of light.</p><p>Cosmic rays are often called space messengers. That's because they carry information from distant parts of the cosmos, up to billions of light-years away. Just like astronomers use different wavelengths of light to understand different aspects of the universe, scientists can study different properties of cosmic rays - like their velocity, trajectory, radiation, mass and energy - to learn more about our universe, including its structure, composition and the processes happening within it. Using cosmic rays, scientists can try to answer questions about our galaxy and the universe that they wouldn't be able to using visual clues alone.</p><p><span>In addition to being messengers, cosmic rays </span><span>are a form of high energy radiation and</span><span> can be damaging to the human body, which is why it's a good thing that Earth's atmosphere blocks most of them from ever reaching </span><span>us at the surface. But astronauts in space who are un</span><span>sheltered by the atmosphere are </span><span>not protected from this radiation. Understanding how and when cosmic rays are produced can also help us protect them.</span></p><h2>The most sensitive map ever made</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>NASA</span></p><p class="caption">This very second, billions of cosmic rays are smashing into out atmosphere.</p></div><p></p></div></div>Cosmic rays were <a href="http://timeline.web.cern.ch/events/victor-hess-discovers-cosmic-rays">originally discovered</a> in 1912 by Austrian physicist Victor Hess, but scientists still aren't sure where they come from. Some cosmic rays have such high energies that scientists believe they might have been created by some of the most violent processes in the universe - supermassive black holes, rapidly spinning super dense stars, remnants of exploding stars.</p><p><span>By figuring out exactly where these cosmic rays are originating, scientists will be able to probe these violent processes and get a better understanding of the universe. </span></p><p><span>That's why scientists at HAWC, a collaboration between national laboratories and universities in Mexico and the United States, are working together to get a closer look. <span>On April 18, after a little over a year of collecting data, HAWC released the highest energy and most sensitive map ever made of the sky.</span></span></p><p>"We spent four years working in the high mountains in Mexico, taking this green hillside and turning it into a laboratory," Jordan Goodman, the US spokesperson and principal investigator for HAWC, said. "Now we're getting to the fun part of actually doing the <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">science</keyword> - making the highest energy map that anyone's ever made and seeing things no one's ever seen before."</p><p>But cosmic rays are charged particles, which means their paths in space are bent by magnetic fields. This makes it hard to retrace their steps to figure out what which forces catapulted them towards us. In order to get to the bottom of this mystery, scientists are studying the highest energy light particles out there, gamma rays.</p><p>The same violent processes that produce cosmic rays can also radiate gamma rays. And because gamma rays are light particles, or photons, they travel in straight lines through space unaffected by magnetic fields. Tracing these gamma rays back to their sources scientists might link their path to the mysterious cosmic rays.</p><h2><strong>So what's with the water tanks?</strong></h2><p>Both cosmic rays and gamma rays speed into our atmosphere, smashing into other particles and creating a <a href="http://www.physics.purdue.edu/astro/KASCADE/intro/air_show.html">cascade of secondary particles</a> called an air shower. As the air shower descends towards the ground at nearly the speed of light, the particles spread out, multiplying as they smash into other particles. They then form a particle pancake that contains billions of particles that can spread up to 10 miles wide.</p><p>This is where all those giant water tanks come in.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Jordanagoodman</span></p><p class="caption">HAWC is a massive array of water detectors located near the Sierra Negra volcano in Mexico.</p></div><p></p></div></div>Each of the tanks holds 50,000 gallons of purified water - an amount that required 3,900 tanker trucks driving up the mountain to fill them, Goodman told Business Insider.</p><p>When the high-energy particle pancake (the one that's traveling at nearly the speed of light) smacks into the water, the individual particles produce <a href="http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/cherenkov.html">blue cones of light</a> called Cherenkov radiation. A team of four extremely sensitive light detectors fixed to the bottom of the tanks picks up these flashes of light.</p><p>Because the vast majority of particles hitting the detectors are a result of the bent cosmic rays, scientists need to filter out them by the different footprints they produce. Then, by measuring nanosecond-size differences in the time it takes the particles from the gamma ray showers to arrive in each of the different tanks, scientists can reconstruct the direction they came from. The result is their high energy universe map.</p><p>"We are only now pinpointing what the actual sources of cosmic rays are," University of Mexico research assistant professor and HAWC collaborator Robert Lauer told Business Insider. "Now with this map we can really check individual objects in our galaxy and beyond and say this which sources are producing these particles."</p><h2><strong>Seven times more powerful than the most powerful particle smasher on the planet</strong></h2><p>So just how high-energy is this map? Well, most of the particles HAWC detects are just about the same energy as particles produced in the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle collider on the planet. But some of them can be up to seven times more energetic, much more powerful than anything we can create here on Earth. And the longer HAWC runs, the higher the energies it will pick up.</p><p>What makes HAWC unique is that unlike other gamma ray detectors, which can only operate on dark, moonless nights focusing on just a small section of the sky, HAWC is a detector that operates around the clock and looks at the entire overhead sky all at once.</p><p>Twenty thousand air shower particles per second hit our detector, Brenda Dingus, <span>the principal investigator of the U.S. Department of Energy funding for HAWC and research fellow at </span>Los Alamos National Laboratory told <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2084761-water-telescopes-first-sky-map-shows-flickering-black-holes/">New Scientist</a>. This produces about two terabytes of data every day and nearly a petabyte per year.</p><p>Since the birth of gamma ray astronomy in the 60s, NASA Marshall Spaceflight Center and HAWC collaborator Michelle Hui told Business Insider, they've gone from having only a handful of sources to having over a hundred. In just its first year of data, HAWC picked up 40 different sources of gamma rays, many of which had never been seen before.</p><h2><strong>Black holes and exploding stars</strong></h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="www.space.com/18861-hercules-a-galaxy-radio-jets.html">NASA, ESA, S. Baum and C. O'Dea (RIT), R. Perley and W. Cotton (NRAO/AUI/NSF), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) </a></span></p><p class="caption">Supermassive black holes are one candidate for what might accelerate cosmic rays to such high energies.</p></div><p></p></div></div>One of these sources is located 400 million light-years away in a galaxy called Markarian 501. On April 7, <span>2016</span> HAWC detected a flare of gamma rays coming from Markarian 501 that lasted a little over a day before disappearing. Scientists believe that a flickering supermassive black hole living in the center of the galaxy might have produced this flare. If HAWC hadn't been running day and night focusing on the entire sky above, it would have missed it.</p><p>"We can see events that occurred 400 million years ago and still follow all of these interesting things that happened very rapidly," Lauer said. "It's a completely different way to look at the most extreme objects in universe - in our own galaxy and others."</p><p>Scientists found another source in the remnants of a supernova in our own galaxy. When a massive star dies, collapsing under its own gravity, it explodes into a supernova. The explosion sometimes leaves behind a pulsar, which is a super dense star (imagine the mass of our sun compressed into something the size of Washington, DC) that can spin more than 50 times per second. This spinning star generates intense magnetic fields, which scientists believe might produce a wind of high energy particles. As shockwaves spread through the shell of stellar material surrounding the pulsar that was left behind by the supernova explosion, the particles are accelerated to even higher energies and can emit gamma rays, which is what HAWC picked up.</p><p>The Fermi Telescope, a space observatory orbiting in space, had already been investigating the pulsar itself but HAWC has a unique perspective on the way the cosmic rays interact with the supernova guts surrounding the pulsar.</p><p>The next big project for HAWC, Hui said, is to compare the data with other experiments and look at how their findings overlap with other findings in the community to try to understand the bigger picture. Scientists at HAWC hope to work with the community to gain insight into new physics and possibly even put the hundred-year-old mystery of cosmic rays to rest.</p><p>"We've been looking at the sky for a long time," Hui said. "But now we have this new instrument up and we're still seeing new things that we hadn't seen before. Just to figure out what these objects are is exciting."</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/mysteriously-large-black-hole-explained-nasa-science-outer-space-2016-4">There's something very strange about this rare supermassive black hole that astronomers can't explain</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="FxMjZvMjE6pYdJ0bWaREPXK_kZM15FO3" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

A field of water tanks in Mexico is bringing us closer than ever to solving a 100-year-old cosmic mystery

<p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><ul class="summary-list"><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/nasa">NASA</a>'s <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/hubble-space-telescope">Hubble Space Telescope</a> revealed the remnants of a huge explosion near the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/video-black-hole-milky-way-center-2019-10">supermassive black hole</a> at <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/milky-way-galaxy-black-hole-lights-up-suddenly-2019-8">the center of our galaxy</a>, just 3.5 million years ago.</li><li>In galactic timescales, that's recent. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/discoveries-change-our-understanding-of-human-origins-2018-7">Ancient human ancestors</a> lived across Africa at the time.</li><li>Video of an artist's interpretation shows how the explosion produced cones of radiation that reached 200,000 light-years beyond our <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/alien-civilizations-may-have-already-colonized-galaxy-study-2019-8">galaxy</a>.</li><li>Researchers say the blast was likely caused by <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/nuclear">nuclear</a> activity.</li><li>The finding suggests the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/new-3d-map-of-milky-way-warped-shape-2019-7">Milky Way</a> is far more active than scientists thought, "dramatically" changing our understanding of our galaxy, according to one researcher.</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/?hprecirc-bullet">Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories</a>.</li></ul><p>The <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/video-black-hole-milky-way-center-2019-10">supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy</a> may not be as peaceful as scientists thought.</p><p>Just 3.5 million years ago, the Milky Way's black hole produced a massive explosion that sent cones of radiation shooting through the galaxy and beyond, according to new research. It was recent in galactic terms - ancient ancestors of modern humans walked the Earth at the time.&#xa0;</p><p>The explosion, likely due to nuclear activity, was so powerful that it stretched to the Magellanic Stream, a cosmic river of gas clouds 200,000 light-years outside the Milky Way.&#xa0;</p><p>A study analyzing the explosion's impacts on the Magellanic Stream was <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.02225">posted</a> in the online repository arXiv, which publishes research that has not yet been peer-reviewed. The study is awaiting publication in The Astrophysical Journal.</p><p>"These results dramatically change our understanding of the Milky Way," study co-author Magda Guglielmo said in a <a href="https://www.scienceinpublic.com.au/media-releases/astronomical-explosion-astro-3d">press release</a>. "We always thought about our galaxy as an inactive galaxy, with a not so bright center. These new results instead open the possibility of a complete reinterpretation of its evolution and nature."</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>The team analyzed observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to reveal that some clouds in the Magellanic Stream are highly ionized - something removed or added electrons from their molecules to give them an electric charge.</p><p>Those ionized clouds are a pivotal piece of evidence for the nuclear explosion that previous findings had only hinted at.</p><p>Satellites have detected bubbles of gamma- and X-ray radiation extending up to 50,000 light-years above and below the plane of the galaxy. In 2013, scientists identified changes in the energy levels of hydrogen electrons along the part of the Magellanic Streamt that's in line with those radiation bubbles. They could tentatively attribute those changes to activity in the galaxy's black hole, but this new finding makes the picture much more clear.</p><p>The explosion created two cones of radiation that shot through the Milky Way, expanding from a tiny point near the central black hole to impact a vast portion of the Magellanic Stream.</p><p>The below video, created by James Josephides, shows the cones (purple) stretching beyond the Milky Way spiral to intersect the Magellanic Stream as it circles the galaxy.</p><p>&#xa0;</p><p>"The flare must have been a bit like a lighthouse beam," Joss Bland-Hawthorn, an astronomer who led the research team, said in the release. "Imagine darkness, and then someone switches on a lighthouse beacon for a brief period of time."</p><p>The blast lasted about 300,000 years, the researchers estimate. On cosmic timescales, that's a short explosion. On a human timescale, it would have seemed like a permanent fixture in the sky.</p><h2>Ancient human ancestors may have watched the explosion</h2><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>At the time of the explosion, one of humans' longest-lived ancestors was spreading across Africa. Australopithecus was a group of primate species that walked on two legs like us, but still had the tiny brains characteristic of apes, and sported teeth somewhere in between.</p><p>The group encompassed Australopithecus afarensis, a species of early human that lived in Eastern Africa and included the famously well-preserved fossil "Lucy."</p><p>They might have noticed the galactic explosion looming overhead, but it likely had no impact on them.</p><p>"They may well have looked up towards [the constellation] Sagittarius and seen cones of light shooting sideways from the Milky Way, brighter than any star in the night sky," Bland-Hawthorn wrote in <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-dormant-volcano-the-black-hole-at-the-heart-of-our-galaxy-is-more-explosive-than-we-thought-124696">The Conversation</a> on Monday. "The lightshow would have appeared as static beams on a human timescale, only flickering on timescales of thousands of years."</p><h2>The explosion shows how much we don't know about black holes</h2><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>It's still unclear what exactly would have caused an explosion on such a huge scale. How black holes evolve and influence their galaxies remains "an outstanding problem in astrophysics," the researchers conclude in their paper.</p><p>"We don't understand why this activity is intermittent, but it has something to do with how material gets dumped onto the black hole," Bland-Hawthorn wrote in The Conversation. "It might be like water droplets on a hot plate that sputter and explode chaotically, depending on their size."</p><p>In an effort to better understand the nature of that activity, the international team of researchers that took <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-hole-first-photo-event-horizon-telescope-picture-explained-2019-4">the first photograph of a black hole</a> is turning its telescopes to the center of our galaxy. The team plans to start releasing <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/video-black-hole-milky-way-center-2019-10">video footage of the Milky Way's black hole</a> in the next five years.</p><p>In the meantime, Earth is safe from flares like this one, since we're far from the galactic center, in a backwater of the galaxy.</p><p>"This is a dramatic event that happened a few million years ago," Lisa Kewley, director of the Arc Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3D, said in the release. "This shows that the center of the Milky Way is a much more dynamic place than we had previously thought. It is lucky we're not residing there!"</p><div><div style="position:relative; padding-bottom:calc(56.25% + 44px)"></div></div>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/astronomers-discover-hidden-void-dipole-repeller-hurling-milky-way-galaxy-2017-1">Astronomers found evidence the Milky Way is being pushed through space by a hidden void</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

A huge explosion sliced through our galaxy just 3.5 million years ago, as human ancestors walked the Earth. Scientists think it was nuclear activity in the black hole at the Milky Way's center.

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/4364907875/">NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / Flickr</a></span></p><p class="caption">The waves could have been made by a supernova.</p></div><p></p></div></div>Some mysterious radio waves from space have left astronomers scratching their heads for years. The cosmic waves are called "fast radio bursts" (FRBs) and were <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12699-extragalactic-radio-burst-puzzles-astronomers/">first discovered</a> about a decade ago. </p><p>However, it wasn't clear where the bursts were coming from, or what was making them. It was assumed that they originated somewhere within the Milky Way or a nearby galaxy.</p><p>Thanks to new information <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v541/n7635/full/nature20797.html" target="_blank">published in the journal Nature</a>, researchers from Cornell University, McGill University, and other international institutions found that the FRBs were coming all the way from across the universe, more than 3 billion light-years away. </p><p>The first FRBs were actually detected at the Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia in 2007 <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12699-extragalactic-radio-burst-puzzles-astronomers/" target="_blank">by a US undergraduate student</a> who was looking at archived data from the Parkes radio dish. In November 2012, astronomers from Cornell discovered a new FRB which they named, creatively, FRB 121102. Four years later, researchers estimated that that FRB was coming from somewhere around <a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/first-location-of-fast-radio-burst-discovered" target="_blank">about 6 billion light years away</a>.</p><p>For the most recent study, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Karl G Jansky Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico provided the resolution needed to pinpoint the FRB's precise location. It turns out that FRB 121102 originates from the pentagon-shaped constellation called Auriga. </p><p>"The host galaxy for this FRB appears to be a very humble and unassuming dwarf galaxy, which is less than 1 percent of the mass or our Milky Way galaxy," said Dr Shriharsh Tendulkar, an expert in neutron stars at McGill University and one of the authors of the study, <a href="http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2017/01/cosmic-source-found-mysterious-fast-radio-burst" target="_blank">in a statement</a>. "That's surprising. One would generally expect most FRBs to come from large galaxies which have the largest numbers of stars and neutron stars - remnants of massive stars."</p><p>He added that the dwarf galaxy has fever stars than they would expect, but it's also forming them at a fast rate. This could suggest that FRBs are linked to the creation of young neutron stars, he said.</p><p>More radio emissions were detected from the same region, which could be a result of two other extreme events that often occur in dwarf galaxies: long duration gamma-ray bursts and superluminous supernovae, which is a hugely energetic star explosion. </p><p>However, although the location of the FRBs has been found, what is really creating them remains a mystery. </p><p>"We think it may be a magnetar - a newborn neutron star with a huge magnetic field, inside a supernova remnant or a pulsar wind nebula - somehow producing these prodigious pulses," said lead author Shami Chatterjee, a senior research associate in astronomy at Cornell University, <a href="http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2017/01/cosmic-source-found-mysterious-fast-radio-burst">in a statement</a>. "Or, it may be an active galactic nucleus of a dwarf galaxy... Or it may be a combination of those two ideas - explaining why what we're seeing may be somewhat rare."</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/watch-violent-events-that-destroyed-earth-to-make-the-moon-2016-6">Watch the violent, cosmic event that changed Earth forever </a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="ZrNWE1NDE6_Qrkxz7llrzB0sT3qLiHl0" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

Astronomers have finally nailed the location of a strange and powerful signal deep in space - but they still don't know what it is

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Lurking 8,000 light years from Earth is a black hole 12 times more massive than our sun. It's been peacefully sleeping for 26 years.</p><p>But on June 15, it woke up.</p><p>Now, scientists around the world are using highly sophisticated instruments to learn as much as they can about this mysterious beast of nature before the black hole returns to its slumber, which will be soon.</p><p>Black holes are very dense, massive objects in space that have an immensely powerful gravitational field that traps anything and everything that comes too close, including light. But on occasion they'll spit out material as well as suck it in.</p><p>On <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-missions-monitor-a-waking-black-hole">June 15</a>, one of NASA's satellites picked up a torrent of x-rays all coming from a single source: the black hole.</p><p>"Relative to the lifetime of space observatories, these black hole eruptions are quite rare," said Neil Gehrels, the principal investigator for Swift, the NASA satellite that first identified the eruption in a <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-missions-monitor-a-waking-black-hole">NASA press release</a>. "So when we see one of them flare up, we try to throw everything we have at it, monitoring across the spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays."</p><h2>A deadly companion</h2><p>This black hole is just one half of a two-body system called V404 Cygni. Its partner is a star slightly smaller than our sun, and it's been nourishing the black hole for at least 77 years. The x-rays that astronomers observed on June 15 were the heated guts from the companion star that had spiraled into the mouth of the black hole.</p><p>When black holes in binary systems, like V404 Cygni, feed, they do so by gravitationally attracting a single thread of gas from the star. The black hole is 12 times more massive than its companion and therefore has a much stronger gravitational grip which slowly pulls gas from the star as the star orbits around it, like in the animation below:</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>As the gas gets pulled in, it orbits around the black hole, forming a disc. The closer the gas gets to the black hole, the stronger gravitational force it feels and so the faster it moves, heating up to searing-hot temperatures. When the gas reaches temperatures of more than <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_astronomy">1.7 million degrees Fahrenheit</a>, it emits a jet of high-energy particles, which satellites like NASA's Swift instrument then detect - albeit 8,000 years later because of the time it takes light to travel from the V404 Cygni to Earth.</p><p>But there isn't always a steady stream of gas falling into the black hole, which is why it takes such long naps in between feedings.</p><p>That <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">disc has two regions: and inner, hot region, and an outer cool region. You need a lot of gas to provide enough pressure and push to cross this barrier, which takes time to generate. Once the black hole has consumed all of the gas in the inner region, which it does in a few days, it has to wait for more.</span></p><h2>A once-in-a-professional-lifetime opportunity</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>V404 Cygni's black hole has erupted before.</p><p>Astronomers first took interest in this black hole more than 77 years ago, when they initially detected a strong burst of light from it in 1938. It came again in 1956, and then again in 1989. </p><p>While the eruption of 1989 was studied with a handful of instruments, the outburst wasn't studied in half the detail compared to this year's event.</p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Outbursts like this usually only last for a few weeks to months, so astronomers have culminated a total of nine instruments in space and on the ground to study the black hole in all wavelengths, from very low energy like radio waves to the most energetic like gamma rays, before time runs out.</span></p><p>Some of the instruments they're using include the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the European Space Agency's INTEGRAL satellite, Japan's MAXI, and the 10.4-meter Gran Telescope Canarias operated by Spain in the Canary Islands.</p><p>"It is definitely a 'once in a professional lifetime' opportunity," said Erik Kuulkers, the INTEGRAL project scientist in the <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-missions-monitor-a-waking-black-hole">NASA press release</a>.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/neil-degrasse-tyson-wormhole-black-hole-interstellar-2014-11">Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains The Science Behind Wormholes And Black Holes - And How 'Interstellar' Got It Wrong</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="YzZnl0cTrGuuJnJeUAGlNuWsg3M2O_Z5" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

A nearby black hole just erupted for the first time in 26 years and scientists are ecstatic 

<p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>The scientific world is still reeling over the first-ever detection of ripples in the fabric of spacetime, called gravitational waves.<p>Albert Einstein predicted their existence 100 years ago but <a href="http://www.techinsider.io/physics-einstein-got-wrong-2015-11">never believed we'd actually detect the waves</a>. So right now if you hang around physicists, who can't contain their excitement, you're bound to hear some profound scientific poetry.</p><p>One scientist from the <a href="https://ligo.caltech.edu/" target="_blank">Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory</a> (LIGO) experiment, which announced the <a href="http://www.techinsider.io/gravitational-waves-detected-first-time-ligo-2016-2">detection of gravitational waves</a> on February 11, shared what is perhaps the most beautiful and poignant description Tech Insider has heard so far.</p><p>Physicist <a href="http://www.astro.columbia.edu/profile?uid=marka" target="_blank">Szabi Marka</a>, a LIGO collaborator based at Columbia University, gushed about the coming scientific revolution to a crowded Columbia lecture hall in New York.</p><p>"The skies will never be the same," Marka told the audience, mainly physics students. "Gravitational waves will let us listen to the music of the cosmos."</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Marka's use of the word "listen" is no accident.<p>Sound travels as waves, and so does a gravitational wave. Except instead of air or water or some other matter, gravitational waves move through a medium that permits everything in it - you, me, the Earth, the stars - to exist at all.</p><p>What's more, when something calamitous happens in outer space, like the truly awesome collision of two black holes, the waves warp space as they pass by. Until September 2015, when LIGO first recorded this "music," it was entirely out of reach of humankind.</p><p>No telescope that detects light of any wavelength - radio, microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, X-ray, or gamma - could have <a href="http://www.techinsider.io/gravitational-wave-ligo-uses-astronomy-2016-2">detected such an event</a>.</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>"Imagine that you can touch, you can smell, you can taste, you can see, and one day, one day you can hear. That day is a glorious day," Marka said. "You can appreciate Beethoven … Your life will never be the same again. This is what happened to us. This is what happened to us as a community."<p>Marka finished: "From today, we can hear the cosmos. We can see the unseen."</p><p>Many researchers, like Marka, told us the discovery of gravitational waves is just the beginning of a <a href="http://www.techinsider.io/gravitational-wave-ligo-uses-astronomy-2016-2">revolution in science</a>. It's such a radically new paradigm that the detection itself brought with it a <a href="http://www.techinsider.io/binary-black-holes-confirmed-gravitional-waves-2016-2">(growing) list of firsts</a>.</p><p>"We're humans, we're curious, and on a quest to understand such weird things that are a big part of our universe," Kip Thorne, a physicist at Caltech and a cofounder of LIGO, told Tech Insider. "It's a quest that's part of dream of humanity that goes back to a child's earliest days."</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/gravitational-wave-black-holes-sound-2016-2">Here's what the first gravitational waves ever detected sound like</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="NhOTd1MDE6B9r5BKoi_2tw7QY6U1DSig" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

This is the most profound explanation I've heard of what it means to detect gravitational waves

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>NASA</span></p><p class="caption">An illustration of two neutron stars colliding.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><ul><li><strong>For the first time ever, astronomers have detected a neutron star collision.</strong></li><li><strong>Gravitational waves picked up by the LIGO and Virgo detectors pinpointed the source to a galaxy 130 million light-years away.</strong></li><li><strong>The collision produced a radioactive "kilonova" that forged hundreds of Earths' worth of platinum, gold, silver, and other heavy elements.</strong></li></ul><p>Platinum and gold are among the most precious substances on Earth, each fetching roughly $1,000 per ounce.</p><p>However, their allure may grow stronger - and weirder - thanks to a groundbreaking new finding about their violent, radioactive, cosmic origins.</p><p>On Monday, scientists <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/2017-nobel-prize-in-physics-gravitational-waves-kip-thorne-rainer-weiss-barry-barish-2017-10">who won a Nobel Prize</a> for their discovery of gravitational waves, or <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/gravitational-waves-detected-first-time-ligo-2016-2">ripples in the fabric of space</a>, announced the first-ever detection of the collision of two neutron stars.</p><p>The team alerted astronomers all over the world to the event, helping them point telescopes directly at the crash scene, and recorded unprecedented observations of the aftermath in visible light, radio waves, X-rays, and gamma rays.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://obs.carnegiescience.edu/swope">UC Santa Cruz/Carnegie Observatories</a></span></p><p class="caption">The Swope Telescope was one of several that recorded a neutron star merger's kilonova.</p></div><p></p></div></div>These images revealed a radioactive soup giving birth to unfathomable amounts of platinum, gold, and silver - not to mention the iodine in our bodies, uranium in <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-weapons-stockpiles-world-map-2017-8">nuclear weapons</a>, and bismuth in Pepto-Bismol - while blasting those materials deep into space.</p><p>The two neutron stars likely merged to form a black hole, though the tiny bit of neutron star that escaped could get recycled into planets like Earth, where creatures may eventually dig up the metals.</p><p>"The calculations we did suggest most of the matter that came out of this event was in a swirling disk around a black hole. Half of that matter fell in, and half of it got ejected," Brian Metzger, an astrophysicist at Columbia University one of roughly 4,000 researchers involved in the discovery, told Business Insider. "The matter that ended up in your wedding band could have just as well fallen in."</p><p>Astronomers detected the merger from 130 million light-years away in the galaxy NGC 4993 on morning of August 17.</p><p>"This is going to have a bigger impact on <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">science</keyword> and human understanding, in many ways, than the first discovery of gravitational waves," Duncan Brown, an astronomer at Syracuse University and a member of the research collaboration, told Business Insider. "We're going to be puzzling over the observations we've made with gravitational waves and with light for years to come."</p><h2>When two city-size atoms collide</h2><p>Albert Einstein first predicted the existence of gravitational waves a century ago, but he didn't believe they'd ever be detected due to their extraordinarily weak energies.</p><p>The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (<a href="https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/">LIGO</a>) in the US defied Einstein in November 2015, when it "heard" the elusive phenomenon for the first time and proved its existence. Europe's new Virgo gravitational wave detector has also come online since then and worked with LIGO to make this fifth detection possible.</p><p>Yet unlike the four previous events, the latest one wasn't created by colliding black holes. Its signal was weaker, closer to Earth by hundreds of millions of light-years, and lasted 100 seconds as opposed to 1 second.</p><p>Brown and others think the new gravitational wave signal, dubbed "GW170817", is revolutionary because it provides clues about how the heaviest elements found on Earth formed in space. Iron and lighter elements, for example, are thought to form in giant stars that explode as supernovas - blasts that are brighter than billions of suns.</p><p>"Some of the heavy elements are made in supernova explosions, but it turns out this can't explain the abundances," Brown said. "They didn't appear to be coming from supernova explosions, and so people have wondered for a long time where they came from."</p><p>Researchers eventually hypothesized that pairs of colliding neutron stars could do the trick.</p><p>Most stars in the universe form in pairs, and the same is true of massive stars. Unlike the sun, however, big stars become supernovas when they die. And at that point, their own gravity crushes them into one of two forms: a black hole (if they're heavier than about three suns) or a neutron star (if they're between about 1.5 and three suns' worth of mass).</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>LIGO-Virgo/Daniel Schwen/Northwestern</span></p><p class="caption">The size of a neutron star (top) compared to the Chicago skyline.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>The latter is essentially one big atomic nucleus, since its gravity is powerful enough to squash all the particles together into an orb roughly the width of a metropolitan city - just one teaspoon weighs billions of tons.</p><p>"You smash these two things together at one-third the speed of light, and that's how you make gold," Brown said. "Turns out it's not the Philosopher's Stone, it's not the things alchemists were looking at thousands of years ago."</p><h2>100 Earths of gold forged in 1 second</h2><p>Metzger was among the first to seriously explore how this could happen.</p><p>He said a neutron star merger is a "messy process" that spills some of the stars' guts into space, like "squeezing a tube of toothpaste" - and accelerates those particles to a fraction of the speed of light while heating them to 10 million degrees.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Fermilab</span></p><p class="caption">An illustration of a neutron star collision creating platinum, gold, and other precious heavy elements.</p></div><p></p></div></div>"If you just ejected all of this stuff and it did nothing, it'd get extremely cold and we'd never be able to see it," Metzger said, though that's not what happened on August 17, of course.</p><p>"The heaviest elements, you can't create them through nuclear fusion in a star. The way you form them is through neutron-capture," Metzger said.</p><p>The process, known appropriately as the rapid process (or r-process), goes like this: As the two neutron stars spiral toward each other - each about 1.4 times the mass of the sun - they shed high-energy neutrons. Those neutrons smash into each other while moving outward, building giant atomic cores. But huge super-atoms are unstable, so they almost immediately break apart and decay into smaller atoms.</p><p>The same thing happens in nuclear reactors, which bombard uranium with neutrons to form the heavier element plutonium. A neutron star merger performs the r-process on a cosmic scale, bleeding off enough radioactive energy from decaying super-atoms to be visible from millions of light-years away.</p><p>In 2010, Metzger coined this flash of radioactive light a "kilonova" because calculations showed it'd be dimmer than a supernova yet about 1,000 times brighter than a nova (a flash that occurs when a star is born).</p><p>Scientists have seen what they suspected were kilonovas before, but couldn't confirm the masses of the two objects as happened with GW170817.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>1M2H Collaboration/UC Santa Cruz/Carnegie Observatories</span></p><p class="caption">The first neutron star collision ever detected changed color from blue to red four days after it was found.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Their observations of the recent kilonova revealed a striking tally of materials created: 50 Earth masses' worth of silver, 100 Earth masses of gold, and 500 Earth masses of platinum.</p><p>The gold alone is worth about 100 octillion dollars at today's market price, according to Metzger, or $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 written out (1 followed by 29 zeroes).</p><p>"You'd need Captain Kirk to go and get it for you, though, so we're not in any danger of disrupting the market right now," Brown said.</p><h2>A new era of astronomy is beginning</h2><p>In the worldwide call to arms on August 17, and in the days and months that followed, more than a third of all astronomers on the planet stepped up to help analyze and make sense of the event.</p><p>Vicky Kalogera, a member of the LIGO collaboration and an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, said she was one of nine people who wrote the main research study about the discovery. The writing process took the team two weeks of 12- to 16-hour international conference calls with hundreds of people from 910 institutions. The printed list of 4,000-or-so authors runs 28 pages long.</p><p>"It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life," Kalogera told Business Insider, and added that more discoveries are on the way.</p><p>"These are rare events. For a galaxy like the one we're observing, it's somewhere between 30 and 470 neutron star mergers per million years," Kalogera said. "But LIGO is not sensitive only to this particular galaxy. We should see a few per year, because we're listening to millions of galaxies."</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>LIGO</span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Brown said LIGO entered a planned year-long upgrade shortly after the experiment detected GW170817. (LIGO was last <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/ligo-detecting-gravitational-waves-more-sensitive-2016-11">booted up in November 2016</a> and ran through August 2017.)</p><p>After the new work is finished in 2018, he said, LIGO should have a 50% boost in range - allowing it to gaze another 500 million light-years deeper into space and time. And in the early 2020s, a Japanese detector called KAGRA and perhaps an Indian detector will join forces to listen to even more of the universe.</p><p>Researchers hope these improvements will reveal the secrets of a nearby supernova - perhaps Betelgeuse, which could explode at any moment.</p><p>"In some sense, this is the next big undiscovered country for gravitational waves," Brown said. "But we're only at the beginning of gravitational-wave astronomy, and we've been rewarded with these incredible discoveries."</p> <p class="tagline">Get the latest Gold price<a href="http://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/gold-price"> here.</a></p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/2017-nobel-prize-in-physics-gravitational-waves-kip-thorne-rainer-weiss-barry-barish-2017-10">Scientists won the Nobel Prize for detecting gravitational waves - here's why that matters</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

Astronomers just proved the incredible origin of nearly all gold, platinum, and silver in the universe

<p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Back in January astronomers got one of their first close-up glimpses of <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-a-dwarf-planet-2015-3" target="_parent">dwarf planet</a> Ceres, and they were baffled.<p>The tiny planet is the largest chunk of rock in the asteroid belt that hangs between Mars and Jupiter, and those close-up <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/best-images-of-dwarf-planet-ceres-2015-4" target="_parent">images</a>, captured by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, revealed two huge, and hugely mysterious, bright spots on the surface.</p><p>The problem is that no one knows what in the world they are - and the more we observe and photograph them, the more complicated and confusing they get.</p><p>And people have some crazy theories about what they might be.</p><p>Maybe they're some kind of hybrid water volcano:</p><div><div></div></div><p>We've even seen some crazy ideas that the spots are actually electricity:</p><div><div></div></div><p>Or maybe they're just good old fashioned aliens:</p><div><div></div></div><p>NASA officials admit they have no idea what the spots are. Guesses have ranged from volcanoes to ice plumes to salt deposits. In the meantime NASA put together <a href="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/dawn/world_ceres/" target="_parent">a poll</a> where you can vote on what you think the weird bright spots are.</p><p>Soon, though, Dawn will get some real answers.</p><p>After eight years, Dawn has settled into orbit around Ceres and has finally started collecting scientific data as of April 24. Soon, even closer photos and surface analysis using a spectrometer and gamma ray detector will hopefully reveal what the weird bright spots are.</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>Last year astronomers at the European Space Agency peered at Ceres with the Herschel telescope and determined that the planet is actually surrounded by a thin layer of <a href="http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/feature_stories/HerschelTelescope_DetectsWater_Ceres.asp" target="_parent">water vapor</a>. That means that Ceres may hold ice water beneath its surface, and lends some support to the idea that those weird bright spots are actually light reflecting off ice plumes.</p><p>So even though Ceres hangs out in the asteroid belt, the presence of water vapor makes it seem less like an asteroid and more like the icy moons of the outer planets - just without the planet.</p><p>Many scientists think those icy moons have the potential to <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/types-of-alien-life-on-europa-2015-2" target="_parent">host alien life</a>, so scientists are eager to get a closer look at Ceres.</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div><p>Dawn is equipped with detectors designed to measure the composition of Ceres, and it will reveal once and for all if the planet is harboring any water.</p><p>Scientists will also use instruments on Dawn to reconstruct a map of Ceres's gravity field. The gravity map will reveal the shape and density of the planet's core.</p><p>Scientists hope that all the data will tell us more about Ceres's violent past tumbling through the asteroid belt, and provide some insight into how our solar system formed, and may even guide our search for life off of Earth.</p><p>But really we just want to know what those bright dots are.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/space-program-rocket-launch-failures-footage-nasa-2015-3">14 extraordinary rocket test failures that paved the way for NASA's space program</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="ZkYjY2dDo3ReZtyZ70q_5zjT1StY3j3q" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

You Searched For "fermi gamma ray telescope" and got 13 results

The black hole at the center of our galaxy just belched two giant bubbles of radiation

Michelle Starr

NASA has detected a burst of light that might be linked to one of the most monumental space discoveries ever made

Ali Sundermier

Scientists detected ripples in space and time from a potentially new class of collision in the universe. Their observatory cracked a 100-year-old mystery posed by Einstein.

Morgan McFall-Johnsen

Here's how space would look if you had superhuman vision

Dave Mosher

'Dark Lightning' Is The Invisible Twin Of The Lightning We Know

Jennifer Welsh

What Is The Most Powerful Thing In The Universe?

Jessica Orwig

A field of water tanks in Mexico is bringing us closer than ever to solving a 100-year-old cosmic mystery

Ali Sundermier

A huge explosion sliced through our galaxy just 3.5 million years ago, as human ancestors walked the Earth. Scientists think it was nuclear activity in the black hole at the Milky Way's center.

Morgan McFall-Johnsen

Astronomers have finally nailed the location of a strange and powerful signal deep in space - but they still don't know what it is

Lindsay Dodgson

A nearby black hole just erupted for the first time in 26 years and scientists are ecstatic

Jessica Orwig

This is the most profound explanation I've heard of what it means to detect gravitational waves

Dave Mosher

Astronomers just proved the incredible origin of nearly all gold, platinum, and silver in the universe

Dave Mosher

NASA is about to solve a major mystery about dwarf planet Ceres

Kelly Dickerson