Photo By Kristopher Roller On Unsplash

Cone Nebula

#Repost @natgeotravel • • • One-minute journey to the heart of the Milky Way. Video by @babaktafreshi & @esoastronomy The World at Night project We begin this on a photograph of a starry night in California with the setting moon shining on sandstone rock formations. My colleagues at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced an exciting discovery a few days ago. Direct observation of Einstein’s general relativity on a star very close to the 4-million solar mass black hole in the Galactic Center. The swarm of stars orbiting rapidly around the supermassive blackhole have been observed for about 3 decades, leading to this discovery. The second part of the video, created by ESO, is a combination of telescopic images, all the way to some of the world’s largest ones called the VLT (Very Large Telescope). Follow me @babaktafreshi to explore more of astronomy & space photography. #milkyway #blackhole #astrophotography #astronomy #nightphotography @natgeocreative @natgeo

sorry what

Strange star system may hold first evidence of an ultra-rare 'dark matter star'

In a distant star system, a sunlike star orbits an invisible object that may be the first example of a 'boson star' made of dark matter, new research suggests.

Astronomers long thought that a peculiar star system observed by the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite was a simple case of a star orbiting a black hole.

But now, two astronomers are challenging that claim, finding that the evidence suggests something far stranger: Possibly, a never-before-seen type of star made of invisible dark matter. Their research, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, was published April 18 on the preprint server arXiv.

The system itself consists of a sunlike star and, well, something else. The star weighs a little less than the sun (0.93 solar mass) and has roughly the same chemical abundance as the sun. Its mysterious companion is much more massive — around 11 solar masses. The objects orbit each other at a distance of 1.4 astronomical units, about the distance at which Mars orbits the sun, making a complete orbit every 188 days.

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Markarian's Chain

Orion. Nebula by sirbozlington

★☆★ SPACE ★☆★

Enceladus [6th Largest Moon Of Saturn]

3 … 2 … 1… ALOHA!

Sometimes in space, you have to set your clocks to island time and gather for a good Hawaiian shirt day. In this 2001 #TBT, Expedition Two and STS-100 crew members gather for a group photo with a pre-set digital still camera.

Clockwise from the 12 o'clock point in the circle are Kent V. Rominger, Yuri V. Lonchakov, Yury V. Usachev, Umberto Guidoni, James S. Voss, Jeffrey S. Ashby, Scott E. Parazynski, John L. Phillips and Chris A. Hadfield, with Susan J. Helms at center. Usachev, Helms and Voss are members of three Expedition Two crew, with the other seven serving as the STS-100 crew on the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Usachev and Lonchakov represent Rosaviakosmos; Guidoni is associated with the European Space Agency (ESA); and Hadfield is from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

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Panarona shot of Mars taken by the Curiosity Rover by Tucker717

★☆★ SPACE ★☆★