The latest in Ph-word: July ’24

Two plus one small news from the skies graced July.

First, Curiosity rover literally stumbled on a martian rock made out of sulfur.

This happened in the Gediz Vallis channel on Mars, thought to be where a river was flowing 3 billion years ago. According to NASA’s tight-lipped announcement, sulfur can form only under specific conditions, but what they meant by this flew right past me.

As about the rover, like a true 21^st century gold digger, it is now drilling the riverbed for more sulfur or other treasures.

Second news, a group of astrophysicists looked at images taken by the Hubble space telescope throughout the last couple of decades; and they ferreted seven stars which told them that an interesting black hole is hiding in their ’hood.

The ’hood is the omega Centauri star cluster, a hotspot of some millions of stars kept close by by their gravity, at around 17 thousand light years from here. The seven stars stood out because of their fast-changing positions. Apparently, they move so quickly that they should have catapulted out of the cluster, but they don’t. Taken together they can only mean that they move around a black hole of approximately eight thousand times the Sun’s mass.

Finding the seven hustlers was already a cute move but, furthermore, it seems that black holes of such a size –neither supermassive nor smallish– are pretty rare, turning all this into a small new astromystery.

And about that “plus one”. It’s not exactly new news, but I thought you might like it. Here is a nice article on everything Oumuamua, you know, the meteor-like object that a few years back was the first thing reaching us from outside the solar system.

You might have heard at that time that scientists claimed it was an extraterrestrial artifact. Yeah, I didn’t bother with this one either. Until, later, I learned of all the little hints that point at its non-natural features — have a look for yourselves at the article, will you. You’ll also read about Project Lyra, an effort to actually send a spacecraft to look at Oumuamua up close, which I totally support.

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