205th American Astronomical Society (AAS) Meeting, San Diego

Here are some of the news and findings announced at the 205th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS, in San Diego

- Vega's 815 AU-wide protoplanetary disc might have been the location of repetitive collisions of objects the size of Pluto (1,200 miles -2,000 km) as the very fine dust which results is dissipating in about 1,000 years. Vega of Lyra, the Lyre is 350 million years old and known since 1984 to have a protoplanetary disc surrounding it. One of the collisions would have taken place at about 86 AU from the star, leaving a hole in the disc, there. The scientific work was performed by the Spitzer Telescope
- Spitzer helped too to better characterize huge clouds of intensely glowing material, enveloping faraway galaxies and called "blobs". Such blobs might contain in fact several, monstruously bright, galaxies in the process of merging. The causality between both events is still unknown. Generally, more evidence is needed to close the case
- a wave of space has been detected at a stellar-size black hole in our Galaxy. This matches Einstein's prediction that a spinning black hole drags the fabric of space around it, distorting it. Streams of gas have been seen surfing on a wave of space as falling towards the black hole center
- blobs of matter orbiting at a speed 10 percent the light speed have been observed around a galactic supermassive black hole. The black hole is the size Mercury orbit as the blobs are orbiting at the distance of Jupiter, with a period of 27 hours only. Such figures are the first ever obtained from the neighbourhood of a black hole, allowing acurate computations, like the mass of the black hole and other characteristics. The study was about the galaxy Markarian 766 in the constellation Coma Berenices, the Berenice's Hair