Programme website: http://bbc.in/1WPKDrc Steve Backshall dives into the waters of Monterey Bay, to swim side by side with Sea Lions.

Programme website: http://bbc.in/1WPKDrc Following the sea lion pups that have been fortunate enough to be rescued and rehabilitated at the Pacific Marine Mammal Centre.

Programme website: http://bbc.in/1WPKDrc A day in the life of a sea otter parent and their pups.

A new analysis of 13 supernovae — including archived data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope — is helping astronomers explain how some young stars exploded sooner than expected, hurling them to a lonely place far from their host galaxies.

Astronomers hypothesize that a pair of supermassive black holes in the merging galaxies can provide the gravitational slingshot to rocket the binary stars into intergalactic space. Hubble observations reveal that nearly every galaxy has a massive black hole at its center.

According to astronomer Ryan Foley’s scenario, after two galaxies merge, their black holes migrate to the center of the new galaxy, each with a trailing a cluster of stars.

As the black holes dance around each other, slowly getting closer, one of the binary stars in the black holes’ entourage may wander too close to the other black hole. Many of these stars will be flung far away, and those ejected stars in surviving binary systems will orbit even closer after the encounter, which speeds up the merger.

Please join +Tony Darnell Dr.+Carol Christian and +Scott Lewis as they discuss these observations with lead investigator Dr. Ryan Foley of the University of Illinois.  As always, we welcome your questions and comments.

Read more here:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2015/28/

#Space   #astronomy   #blackholes   #hubble   #galaxies   #cosmology