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Welcome to our archive of past news articles.
You will find previous articles listed below
from most the recent back to our first articles in 1996.
1998
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Yes, Virginia, There is a Magnetar! [26 October 1998] - A star, located 40,000 light-years from Earth, is generating the
most intense magnetic field yet observed in the Universe, according to an
international team of astronomers led by scientists at NASA's Marshall
Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL.
The discovery confirms the existence of a special class of neutron stars
dubbed "magnetars." A neutron star is a burned-out star roughly equal
in mass to the Sun that has collapsed through gravitational forces to be
only about 10 miles across. A magnetar has a magnetic field estimated to
be one thousand trillion times the strength of Earth's magnetic field.
Magnetars have a magnetic field that is about 100 times stronger than the
typical neutron star.
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"Old Faithful" Black Hole Provides Insight into Jet Formation [17 August 1998] - Scientists observing a disk of matter surrounding a black
hole in our Galaxy have discovered that the disk is periodically
disrupted and hurled outward in opposite directions from the black
hole, in jets moving at nearly the speed of light. The black hole
replenishes the disk by pulling hot gas from the surface of a
nearby "companion" star, and then undergoes another disruption,
repeating the sequence at half-hour intervals.
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Astronomers Detect Most Powerful Explosion Since Big Bang [18 May 1998] - The energy released in a cosmic gamma-ray burst detected in
December 1997 is the most energy ever detected from an explosion in the
Universe, perhaps making it the most powerful explosion since the creation of
the Universe in the Big Bang.
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NASA Announces Contest to Name X-Ray Observatory [17 April 1998] - NASA is searching for a new name for the
Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF),
currently scheduled for launch Dec.
3, 1998, from the Space Shuttle Columbia. AXAF is the third of
NASA's Great Observatories, after the
Hubble Space Telescope and
the Compton Gamma
Ray Observatory. Once in orbit around Earth, it
will explore hot, turbulent regions in the universe where X-rays
are produced.
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Newly Discovered Pulsar Spins its Way into History [25 Feb 1998] - Astronomers have discovered a neutron star spinning at a rate of over 60
times a second! The star, a pulsar believed to have formed in a supernova
explosion some five thousand years ago, is spinning faster than most
scientists believed possible for such an object. The pulsar was found by a
team of astronomers including Frank Marshall, William Zhang, and Eric
Gotthelf from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, along with John
Middleditch from Los Alamos National Laboratory. "The pulsar is spinning
twice as fast as any young pulsar that we have seen before," said
Marshall. "To put it in perspective, this pulsar is spinning more than 6
million times as rapid as the Earth."
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