Super massive black hole nearest Earth is becoming intensely bright!

The huge black hole at the heart of our galaxy has turned unusually bright – and scientists have no explanation for the dramatic behaviour.

It has started eating far more interstellar gas and dust than it has ever been seen doing before, researchers said. When they first spotted it, they thought they had accidentally looked a star – but further research has shown that the black hole is in fact showing behaviour that astronomers had never expected.

“We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole,” said Andrea Ghez, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-senior author of the research. “It’s usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet.

Read more at Independent 

Water vapor — and maybe even rain — found on distant world twice the size of Earth

Water vapor has been found in the atmosphere of a distant planet that’s just over twice the size of Earth. It’s the smallest world yet found with water in its surrounding atmosphere, and it’s possible that it even rains liquid water there. That makes this world a tantalizing candidate in the ongoing search for extraterrestrial life outside our cosmic neighborhood.

Finding water around an exoplanet (a world outside our Solar System) is particularly exciting for scientists because water is a critical ingredient for life on our planet. It could equally be pivotal for life that exists elsewhere in the Universe. Researchers have found this precious molecule around exoplanets before, but these worlds have not been suitable places for life to thrive. They’ve been large balls of gas, similar in size to Jupiter or Neptune, lacking any kind of surface for life as we know it to exist.

Read more at the Verge