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'Death Spiral' Around a Black Hole Yields Tantalizing Evidence of an Event Horizon
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By NASA
Explore Hubble Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts e-Books Online Activities Lithographs Fact Sheets Posters Hubble on the NASA App Glossary More 35th Anniversary Online Activities 2 min read
Hubble Images a Peculiar Spiral
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a peculiar spiral galaxy called Arp 184 or NGC 1961. ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, R. J. Foley (UC Santa Cruz), C. Kilpatrick A beautiful but skewed spiral galaxy dazzles in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxy, called Arp 184 or NGC 1961, sits about 190 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Camelopardalis (The Giraffe).
The name Arp 184 comes from the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies compiled by astronomer Halton Arp in 1966. It holds 338 galaxies that are oddly shaped and tend to be neither entirely elliptical nor entirely spiral-shaped. Many of the galaxies are in the process of interacting with other galaxies, while others are dwarf galaxies without well-defined structures. Arp 184 earned its spot in the catalog thanks to its single broad, star-speckled spiral arm that appears to stretch toward us. The galaxy’s far side sports a few wisps of gas and stars, but it lacks a similarly impressive spiral arm.
This Hubble image combines data from three Snapshot observing programs, which are short observations that slotted into time gaps between other proposals. One of the three programs targeted Arp 184 for its peculiar appearance. This program surveyed galaxies listed in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as well as A Catalogue of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations, a similar catalog compiled by Halton Arp and Barry Madore.
The remaining two Snapshot programs looked at the aftermath of fleeting astronomical events like supernovae and tidal disruption events — like when a supermassive black hole rips a star apart after it wanders too closely. Since Arp 184 hosted four known supernovae in the past three decades, it is a rich target for a supernova hunt.
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Claire Andreoli (claire.andreoli@nasa.gov)
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
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Last Updated May 01, 2025 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Hubble’s Galaxies
Tracing the Growth of Galaxies
Reshaping Our Cosmic View: Hubble Science Highlights
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By USH
Several days ago, a massive blackout swept across large parts of Spain, Portugal, and parts of southern France. Millions were left without power as the interconnected European energy grid experienced a rare and abrupt failure. While authorities quickly pointed to a "rare atmospheric phenomenon" as the cause, not everyone is convinced.
Here are some explanations of authorities as well as controversial theories:
According to REN, Portugal’s national electricity grid operator, the blackout was triggered by a fault originating in Spain’s power infrastructure. The disruption, they claim, was linked to "induced atmospheric variation", a term referring to extreme temperature differences that led to anomalous oscillations in high-voltage transmission lines. These oscillations reportedly caused synchronization failures between regional grid systems, ultimately sparking a chain reaction of failures across the European network.
What makes the situation even more intriguing is that just days before the blackout, Spain hit a historic energy milestone. On April 16, for the first time, the country’s electricity demand was met entirely by renewable energy sources - solar, wind, and hydro, during a weekday. It raises questions whether the outage was caused by a technical failure of this new renewable energy system.
While this achievement is noteworthy, it also exposes the fragility of a grid increasingly reliant on variable energy sources, especially solar, which can fluctuate dramatically with weather and atmospheric conditions.
Despite official explanations, some experts and observers remain skeptical. There were no solar flares or geomagnetic storms in the days leading up to the blackout, and solar activity had been relatively calm. Critics argue that while atmospheric disturbances may have played a role, they are not sufficient to explain such a widespread, synchronized failure.
Despite the fact that the blackout this time was probably not caused by solar flares or geomagnetic storms it has been proven that Earth’s magnetic shield is rapidly weakening, leaving us increasingly vulnerable to powerful solar storms. The magnetic north pole is accelerating toward Siberia, and the South Atlantic Anomaly continues to expand, ominous signs that a looming plasma event could bring consequences far beyond just technological disruption.
This has led to speculation that the blackout could have been intentional, possibly even a test run for handling future crises or threats to infrastructure.
Among the more controversial theories is the suggestion that this event might have involved the use of a graphite bomb, a non-lethal weapon designed to disable power grids. These devices disperse ultra-fine carbon filaments into high-voltage power lines, causing short circuits by creating conductive paths between lines. Such an attack would appear as a grid malfunction but could be devastating in scale.
Another controversial theory is that the outage has been caused by weather manipulation systems such as HAARP or the Ice Cube Neutrino observatory, constructed at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica.
Could this have been a covert drill or a demonstration of vulnerability? Some point to global forums, such as the World Government Summit, where figures like Klaus Schwab have warned about Black Swan: An unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences.
Whether the blackout was triggered by a rare natural event, a technical failure, or something more deliberate, it seems only a matter of time before we face a true Black Swan event. View the full article
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By USH
Shape-Shifting Materials are advanced, adaptive materials capable of changing their physical form, embedding sensors and circuits directly into their structure, and even storing energy, all without traditional wiring. Lockheed Martin is at the forefront of developing these futuristic materials, raising questions about the possible extraterrestrial origin of this technology.
In a previous article, we discussed why suppressed exotic technologies are suddenly being disclosed. One company that frequently comes up in this conversation is Lockheed Martin, the American defense and aerospace giant known for pushing the boundaries of aviation and space innovation.
Imagine an aircraft that can grow its own skin, embed sensors into its body, store energy without wires, and even shift its shape mid-flight to adapt to changing conditions. This isn’t science fiction anymore, Lockheed Martin’s cutting-edge research is turning these futuristic concepts into reality.
But where is all this coming from?
The rapid development and creativity behind Lockheed Martin’s projects raise intriguing questions. Whistleblowers like David Grusch have recently alleged that Lockheed Martin has had access to recovered UFO materials for decades. Supporting this, Don Phillips, a former Lockheed engineer, confirmed years ago that exotic materials have been held and studied by the company since at least the 1950s.
This suggests that for over half a century, Lockheed has secretly been engaged in researching and reverse-engineering off-world technologies. It's possible that the breakthroughs we’re seeing today are the result of this hidden legacy. Ben Rich, former head of Lockheed’s Skunk Works division, famously hinted at this when he said, "We now have the technology to take ET home."
One particularly stunning development involves "smart" materials that behave almost like muscles, allowing aircraft structures to morph in real-time. These materials enable a craft to fine-tune its aerodynamics on the fly, adjusting instantly to turbulence, speed shifts, or mission-specific demands.
Lockheed’s innovations go even further. By embedding carbon nanotubes, extremely strong and highly conductive microscopic structure, directly into the material, they have created surfaces that can transfer information and power without traditional wiring. In these next-generation aircraft, the "skin" itself acts as the nervous system, the energy grid, and the sensor network all at once.
You can only imagine the kinds of technologies that have been developed over the years through the reverse engineering of exotic materials and recovered extraterrestrial craft. Yet, governments and space agencies remain tight-lipped about the existence of advanced alien civilizations, who likely introduced these techniques to Earth unintentionally.
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By European Space Agency
The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton is playing a crucial role in investigating the longest and most energetic bursts of X-rays seen from a newly awakened black hole. Watching this strange behaviour unfold in real time offers a unique opportunity to learn more about these powerful events and the mysterious behaviour of massive black holes.
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By NASA
Explore This Section Webb News Latest News Latest Images Blog (offsite) Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Observatory Overview Launch Deployment Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 6 Min Read NASA Webb’s Autopsy of Planet Swallowed by Star Yields Surprise
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of what is thought to be the first-ever recorded planetary engulfment event revealed a hot accretion disk surrounding the star, with an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. Webb also revealed that the star did not swell to swallow the planet, but the planet’s orbit actually slowly depreciated over time, as seen in this artist’s concept. Full illustration below. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, R. Crawford (STScI) Observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have provided a surprising twist in the narrative surrounding what is believed to be the first star observed in the act of swallowing a planet. The new findings suggest that the star actually did not swell to envelop a planet as previously hypothesized. Instead, Webb’s observations show the planet’s orbit shrank over time, slowly bringing the planet closer to its demise until it was engulfed in full.
“Because this is such a novel event, we didn’t quite know what to expect when we decided to point this telescope in its direction,” said Ryan Lau, lead author of the new paper and astronomer at NSF NOIRLab (National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) in Tuscon, Arizona. “With its high-resolution look in the infrared, we are learning valuable insights about the final fates of planetary systems, possibly including our own.”
Two instruments aboard Webb conducted the post-mortem of the scene – Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph). The researchers were able to come to their conclusion using a two-pronged investigative approach.
Image A: Planetary Engulfment Illustration
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of what is thought to be the first-ever recorded planetary engulfment event revealed a hot accretion disk surrounding the star, with an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene. Webb also revealed that the star did not swell to swallow the planet, but the planet’s orbit actually slowly depreciated over time, as seen in this artist’s concept. NASA, ESA, CSA, R. Crawford (STScI) Constraining the How
The star at the center of this scene is located in the Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years away from Earth.
The brightening event, formally called ZTF SLRN-2020, was originally spotted as a flash of optical light using the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego, California. Data from NASA’s NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) showed the star actually brightened in the infrared a year before the optical light flash, hinting at the presence of dust. This initial 2023 investigation led researchers to believe that the star was more Sun-like, and had been in the process of aging into a red giant over hundreds of thousands of years, slowly expanding as it exhausted its hydrogen fuel.
However, Webb’s MIRI told a different story. With powerful sensitivity and spatial resolution, Webb was able to precisely measure the hidden emission from the star and its immediate surroundings, which lie in a very crowded region of space. The researchers found the star was not as bright as it should have been if it had evolved into a red giant, indicating there was no swelling to engulf the planet as once thought.
Reconstructing the Scene
Researchers suggest that, at one point, the planet was about Jupiter-sized, but orbited quite close to the star, even closer than Mercury’s orbit around our Sun. Over millions of years, the planet orbited closer and closer to the star, leading to the catastrophic consequence.
“The planet eventually started to graze the star’s atmosphere. Then it was a runaway process of falling in faster from that moment,” said team member Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The planet, as it’s falling in, started to sort of smear around the star.”
In its final splashdown, the planet would have blasted gas away from the outer layers of the star. As it expanded and cooled off, the heavy elements in this gas condensed into cold dust over the next year.
Inspecting the Leftovers
While the researchers did expect an expanding cloud of cooler dust around the star, a look with the powerful NIRSpec revealed a hot circumstellar disk of molecular gas closer in. Furthermore, Webb’s high spectral resolution was able to detect certain molecules in this accretion disk, including carbon monoxide.
“With such a transformative telescope like Webb, it was hard for me to have any expectations of what we’d find in the immediate surroundings of the star,” said Colette Salyk of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, an exoplanet researcher and co-author on the new paper. “I will say, I could not have expected seeing what has the characteristics of a planet-forming region, even though planets are not forming here, in the aftermath of an engulfment.”
The ability to characterize this gas opens more questions for researchers about what actually happened once the planet was fully swallowed by the star.
“This is truly the precipice of studying these events. This is the only one we’ve observed in action, and this is the best detection of the aftermath after things have settled back down,” Lau said. “We hope this is just the start of our sample.”
These observations, taken under Guaranteed Time Observation program 1240, which was specifically designed to investigate a family of mysterious, sudden, infrared brightening events, were among the first Target of Opportunity programs performed by Webb. These types of study are reserved for events, like supernova explosions, that are expected to occur, but researchers don’t exactly know when or where. NASA’s space telescopes are part of a growing, international network that stands ready to witness these fleeting changes, to help us understand how the universe works.
Researchers expect to add to their sample and identify future events like this using the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will survey large areas of the sky repeatedly to look for changes over time.
The team’s findings appear today in The Astrophysical Journal.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
To learn more about Webb, visit: https://science.nasa.gov/webb
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Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Hannah Braun – hbraun@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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Last Updated Apr 10, 2025 Editor Marty McCoy Contact Laura Betz laura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
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