Chalk up yet another win for Einstein. A twist in the fabric of spacetime is causing the orbit of one stellar corpse to teeter around another stellar corpse, researchers report. And the relativistic corkscrew is helping astronomers reconstruct the final days of these two long-dead stars. According to general relativity, any spinning mass drags spacetime around with it, like a hand mixer in molasses. One way to see this “frame dragging” is to keep a careful eye on anything circling the spinning object on a tilted orbit — the spacetime maelstrom will make the orbit wobble, or precess. ...
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The space probe Parker was launched in 2018 with a mission and either: unravel the mysteries of one of the least explored places in the solar system, its own central star. And a year later, the mission of NASA reported on Wednesday its first comments from the edge of the Sun's atmosphere, where no other mission had come before. The revelations, divided into four articles published in the journal Nature, offer clues to mysteries that intrigue the scientific community for decades. One is: why the Sun's atmosphere is much hotter than its surface? The solar surface has a...
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