High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey - NASA Science (.gov)

The U. S. Coast Guard searches for a missing Latitude Air Ambulance aircraft off the coast of Nantucket. Niagara Health nurse Sarah Jane Paton was one of the six people aboard the jet that crashed Saturday. Sarah Jane Paton is being remembered as a kind, funny and trusted Niagara Health teammate who fiercely advocated for her patients. Paton, a local hospital system nurse, is among six people presumed dead after a Hamilton-based Latitude Air Ambulance jet crashed over the Atlantic Ocean en route to Boston from Bermuda.

Milky Way’s first microblazar candidate sits 12,000 light-years away, offering a rare ground-level lab for studying relativistic jetsA black hole 12,000 light-years away is firing a jet of plasma almost directly toward Earth. At that distance, no known or expected danger to Earth has been identified by the researchers or the institutions involved. What astronomers have actually found is rarer and more interesting than a threat. Researchers have identified IRAS 18293-0941 as a compelling candidate for the Milky Way’s first microblazar, a class of object that gives astrophysicists a close-up laboratory for studying some of the most violent physics in the galaxy. What Astronomers FoundThe discovery centers on a binary system whose black hole expels plasma jets at close to three-quarters the speed of light, pointed almost directly toward Earth. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a black hole that completes a full orbit roughly every 11.38 days. Material drawn from the companion star feeds the black hole, and some of that matter gets expelled outward as opposing jets traveling at approximately three-quarters the speed of light. Terminology matters here.