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SN2021yfj, Dark Matter in Gravitational Waves & Rubin's 500K Galaxies
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A stripped supernova delivers the first direct proof of stellar layering, while MIT finds dark matter may be hiding inside gravitational wave signals. Plus, Vera Rubin's first deep field captures half a million galaxies in a single shot.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A single exploding star has just confirmed something astronomers spent decades theorizing but couldn't prove. The supernova designated SN2021yfj, published in Nature this week, is the first direct observational evidence that massive stars are structured in distinct layers, with light elements on the outside and heavy elements locked deep within.
Shift to a different class of discovery. An MIT-led team has developed waveform models capable of detecting dark matter scalar fields around merging black holes using data from LIGO and Virgo.
The Vera Rubin Observatory has released its first deep field image of the COSMOS region, and the numbers are hard to dismiss. A single observation captured over half a million galaxies and fifty thousand foreground stars.
The James Webb Space Telescope has been detecting compact, bright red objects in the early universe that didn't fit neatly into any established category. The leading hypothesis now is that these are black hole stars, primordial objects where a massive black hole sits at the core, wrapped in a thick gas envelope.
Pull these threads together and a clear picture emerges. Stellar physics now has direct evidence for layered structure.
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