Discoveries:

Scientists measure giant planet's rotation

Thursday, February 18, 2016 - 17:23 StudyHall.Rocks

Scientists were able to measure the rotation of a super-Jupiter.

Image: NASA.

Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have measured the rotation of a distant planet -- the first time they have been able to do so with direct imaging.

The planet is 170 light-years from Earth and four times the mass of Jupiter. It completes one rotation about every 10 hours, according to the Hubble website. Coincidentally, that’s the same rotation rate as our solar system's Jupiter.
The planet orbits a faint brown dwarf star and was first observed a decade ago using the Hubble. Scientists were able to measure the rotation rate by observing the varied brightness in its atmosphere, the website explained.

LARGEST BLACK HOLE RECORDED: A record-breaking supermassive black hole has been identified 300 million light-years away in a giant elliptical galaxy, according to NASA. The black hole is 21 billion times the mass of the sun, considerably larger than a black hole at the center of the Milky Way, a space agency news release said.
A black hole is described by Webster’s Dictionary as a “celestial body with a small diameter and intense gravitational field that is held to be a collapsed star.”

TECH COMPETITION: Will artificial intelligence be the end of mankind? Or will it make our life far easier? The answer could be worth $5 million.
A competition sponsored by IBM and XPrize, a nonprofit, is prompting tech teams from around the world to develop ways humans can collaborate with “cognitive technologies” to tackle problems -- climate change, education and health care, for example.
The winner of the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, a cognitive computing competition, will be announced at the TED conference in 2020, according to the competition’s website.

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