Tag: rotation

Dawn is Approaching Ceres

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…and not the ‘dawn’ we refer to when watching a sunrise.  Dawn is a NASA spacecraft that was launched in 2007 with the goal of exploring the asteroid belt by observing its largest and most interesting objects up close.  The two largest asteroids, Vesta and Ceres, have been the largest mission goals of Dawn as it has journeyed through the belt. From July 2011 to September 2012, Dawn was in orbit around the 525 Km wide Vesta, snapping amazing photos and studying the giant in detail. Since it’s departure from Vesta in September 2012, the craft has been on route...

Uncanny Alignment Across Billions of Light Years

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Quasars are Galaxies with incredibly massive Black Holes at their centre.  These Black Holes are fuelled by a swirling disc of material that can be ejected in a long jet along their axis of rotation, all due to the conservation of angular momentum.  This accretion disc can be so hot that it causes the central region of the Galaxy to shine more brightly than the entire Galaxy of stars surrounding it. A Belgian team using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) studied a population of 93 Quasars spread over Billions of Light-Years, and noticed that the rotation axes of the Quasars...