Astronomers are predicting a close encounter between a stellar remnant the size of a city and one of the brightest stars in the Milky Way.
The small object, a pulsar, was initially discovered by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Dedicated follow-up radio observations led by a team at The University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, using the 76-m Lovell Radio Telescope, now show that the pulsar travels in an extreme orbit around a companion star. This orbit will, in early 2018, plunge the pulsar through a broad disk of gas and dust round its partner, generating a spectacular series of explosions which will create a range of emissions from radio waves to gamma rays. Scientists are planning a global campaign to watch the event, which could reveal important information about the formation of stars.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.
