Taylor Swift fans slam Billboard for ‘undermining’ pop star’s achievements with Greatest Pop Star ranking

The magazine, which has been rolling out its list of “25 Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century,” revealed Swift as the number two spot on Tuesday (November 26). “After crossing over from country music to pop music at the turn of the 2010s, @taylorswift achieved success like we’ve never quite seen before, in either shape or size,” the outlet wrote on Instagram. “Billboard looks back at the century in Swift, who took pop stardom to places we hadn’t previously thought possible.” The “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” singer, 34, was ranked ahead of Rihanna (No. 3), Drake (No. 4) and Lady Gaga (No. 5). The list also includes Katy Perry (No. 25), Ed Sheeran (No. 24), Bad Bunny (No. 23) and One Direction (No. 22). While the outlet has yet to reveal its top artist, readers are expecting it to be Beyoncé. According to the outlet, the list is completely subjective and all based on staff picks.

Still, fans are taking the rankings to heart, with Swifties flocking to Billboard’s Instagram post to slam the publication for not naming Swift as No. 1. “Taylor deserved #1,” one fan argued, while a second commented: “Shame on you, Billboard! Taylor Swift is redefining the music industry, shattering records, and transforming everything she touches. Yet, you felt the need to undermine her achievements. For any artist worldwide, #2 on your list would be a monumental accomplishment — except when it’s Taylor, the very reason your relevance endures.” “2nd? The only artist to occupy the entire top 10 of your chart twice,” a second noted, with a third writing: “Are you guys joking with this? Taylor deserved number 1 However, some fans reasoned that Swift’s ranking was fair, like one person who said: “If the list was based solely on charts and mathematics, we could say Taylor. But if we consider cultural impact, artistic influence, legacy, longevity, vocals, live performances, the greatest-of-all-time lists, the appreciation of her peers, that substantial aspect that goes beyond objective stats; it’s obviously Beyoncé.” “Beyonce is great, no doubt,” another argued. “But Taylor is clear by all metrics. Sales? Streams? Tour? Etc, plus she holds several records. Taylor is clear by a landslide and she deserves number 1.” Earlier this month, Hailey Bieber mocked Billboard after it announced Justin Bieber was No. 7 on its list. “Billboard is a f***ing joke as per usual!” wrote Bieber’s wife of six years in a since-deleted comment below the post.

Was a Star Ejected from Our Central Black Hole?

Was a Star Ejected from Our Central Black Hole?

Generally thought to be the point of no return, our very own black hole seems to have ejected a star at hyper velocity.

In something known as the Hills mechanism – which occurs in binary star systems when they are disrupted by a super massive black hole – the stars are pulled apart and left to continue on their separate journeys. The closest star is pulled into an orbit around the black hole while the other is ejected at extremely high velocity. However, although this was proposed in 1988 by astronomer Jack Hills, it has never been confirmed.

Now, a worldwide team of scientists led by Ting Li have observed what they believe to be the first example of such a mechanism.

The team utilised data from the 3.9 metre Anglo-Australian Telescope as part of the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey – a survey that aims to map the kinematics and chemistry of long, dense regions of stars, known as stellar streams. Looking through the data for any stars with velocities greater than 800km/s, the team came across a star with a radial velocity of ~1020 km/s – that’s more than 2 million miles per hour. Further analysis revealed the star, known as S5-HVS, is a hot dwarf star more than twice the mass of our Sun and located 9 kpc (kila parsecs) – approximately 30 thousand light years – from the galactic centre in the Jhelum stellar stream system. Given the measured distance, the proper motion and the radial velocity, the total velocity of the star in the Galactic rest frame is a whopping 1755 km/s – almost 4 million miles per hour – making it one of the fastest known stars in the Galaxy.

To infer the origin of the star, the team studied the kinematics and traced the orbit backwards in time in the gravitational potential of the Milky Way. Remarkably, they found that the star can unambiguously be traced back to the Galactic Centre where it was ejected at a speed of 1800km/s 4.8 million years ago, making S5-HVS the first clear demonstration of the Hill Mechanism.

First identified comet to visit our solar system from another star

Comet 2I/Borisov is only the second interstellar object known to have passed through the solar system. These two images, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, capture the comet appearing near a background galaxy (left) and soon after its closest approach to the Sun (right).

Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA)

When astronomers see something in the universe that at first glance seems like one-of-a-kind, it's bound to stir up a lot of excitement and attention. Enter comet 2I/Borisov. This mysterious visitor from the depths of space is the first identified comet to arrive here from another star. We don't know from where or when the comet started heading toward our Sun, but it won't hang around for long. The Sun's gravity is slightly deflecting its trajectory, but can't capture it because of the shape of its orbit and high velocity of about 100,000 miles per hour.

Telescopes around the world have been watching the fleeting visitor. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided the sharpest views as the comet skirts by our Sun. Since October the space telescope has been following the comet like a sports photographer following horses speeding around a racetrack. Hubble revealed that the heart of the comet, a loose agglomeration of ices and dust particles, is likely no more than about 3,200 feet across, about the length of nine football fields. Though comet Borisov is the first of its kind, no doubt there are many other comet vagabonds out there, plying the space between stars. Astronomers will eagerly be on the lookout for the next mysterious visitor from far beyond.

These two images, taken by Hubble, capture comet 2I/Borisov streaking though our solar system and on its way back to interstellar space. It is only the second interstellar object known to have passed through the solar system.

Nov. 16, 2019, photo

The comet appears in front of a distant background spiral galaxy (2MASX J10500165-0152029). The galaxy's bright central core is smeared in the image because Hubble was tracking the comet. Comet Borisov was approximately 203 million miles from Earth in this exposure. Its tail of ejected dust streaks off to the upper right. The comet has been artificially colored blue to discriminate fine detail in the halo of dust, or coma, surrounding the central nucleus. It also helps to visually separate the comet from the background galaxy.

Dec. 9, 2019, photo

Hubble revisited the comet shortly after its closest approach to the Sun where it received maximum heating after spending most of its life in frigid interstellar space. The comet also reached a breathtaking maximum speed of about 100,000 miles per hour. Comet Borisov is 185 million miles from Earth in this photo, near the inner edge of the asteroid belt but below it. The nucleus, an agglomeration of ices and dust, is still too small to be resolved. The bright central portion is a coma made up of dust leaving the surface. The comet will make its closest approach to Earth in late December at a distance of 180 million miles.

"Hubble gives us the best upper limit of the size of comet Borisov's nucleus, which is the really important part of the comet," said David Jewitt, a UCLA professor of planetary science and astronomy, whose team has captured the best and sharpest look at this first confirmed interstellar comet. "Surprisingly, our Hubble images show that its nucleus is more than 15 times smaller than earlier investigations suggested it might be. Our Hubble images show that the radius is smaller than half a kilometer. Knowing the size is potentially useful for beginning to estimate how common such objects may be in the solar system and our galaxy. Borisov is the first known interstellar comet, and we would like to learn how many others there are."

Crimean amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov discovered the comet on Aug. 30, 2019, and reported the position measurements to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, working with the Minor Planet Center, computed an orbit for the comet, which shows that it came from elsewhere in our Milky Way galaxy, point of origin unknown.

Nevertheless, observations by numerous telescopes show that the comet's chemical composition is similar to the comets found inside our solar system, providing evidence that comets also form around other stars. By the middle of 2020 the comet will have already zoomed past Jupiter's distance of 500 million miles on its way back into the frozen abyss of interstellar space.

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First identified comet to visit our solar system from another star

Comet 2I/Borisov is only the second interstellar object known to have passed through the solar system. These two images, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, capture the comet appearing near a background galaxy (left) and soon after its closest approach to the Sun (right).

When astronomers see something in the universe that at first glance seems like one-of-a-kind, it's bound to stir up a lot of excitement and attention. Enter comet 2I/Borisov. This mysterious visitor from the depths of space is the first identified comet to arrive here from another star. We don't know from where or when the comet started heading toward our Sun, but it won't hang around for long. The Sun's gravity is slightly deflecting its trajectory, but can't capture it because of the shape of its orbit and high velocity of about 100,000 miles per hour.

Telescopes around the world have been watching the fleeting visitor. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided the sharpest views as the comet skirts by our Sun. Since October the space telescope has been following the comet like a sports photographer following horses speeding around a racetrack. Hubble revealed that the heart of the comet, a loose agglomeration of ices and dust particles, is likely no more than about 3,200 feet across, about the length of nine football fields. Though comet Borisov is the first of its kind, no doubt there are many other comet vagabonds out there, plying the space between stars. Astronomers will eagerly be on the lookout for the next mysterious visitor from far beyond.

These two images, taken by Hubble, capture comet 2I/Borisov streaking though our solar system and on its way back to interstellar space. It is only the second interstellar object known to have passed through the solar system.

Nov. 16, 2019, photo

The comet appears in front of a distant background spiral galaxy (2MASX J10500165-0152029). The galaxy's bright central core is smeared in the image because Hubble was tracking the comet. Comet Borisov was approximately 203 million miles from Earth in this exposure. Its tail of ejected dust streaks off to the upper right. The comet has been artificially colored blue to discriminate fine detail in the halo of dust, or coma, surrounding the central nucleus. It also helps to visually separate the comet from the background galaxy.

Dec. 9, 2019, photo

Hubble revisited the comet shortly after its closest approach to the Sun where it received maximum heating after spending most of its life in frigid interstellar space. The comet also reached a breathtaking maximum speed of about 100,000 miles per hour. Comet Borisov is 185 million miles from Earth in this photo, near the inner edge of the asteroid belt but below it. The nucleus, an agglomeration of ices and dust, is still too small to be resolved. The bright central portion is a coma made up of dust leaving the surface. The comet will make its closest approach to Earth in late December at a distance of 180 million miles.

"Hubble gives us the best upper limit of the size of comet Borisov's nucleus, which is the really important part of the comet," said David Jewitt, a UCLA professor of planetary science and astronomy, whose team has captured the best and sharpest look at this first confirmed interstellar comet. "Surprisingly, our Hubble images show that its nucleus is more than 15 times smaller than earlier investigations suggested it might be. Our Hubble images show that the radius is smaller than half a kilometer. Knowing the size is potentially useful for beginning to estimate how common such objects may be in the solar system and our galaxy. Borisov is the first known interstellar comet, and we would like to learn how many others there are."

Crimean amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov discovered the comet on Aug. 30, 2019, and reported the position measurements to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, working with the Minor Planet Center, computed an orbit for the comet, which shows that it came from elsewhere in our Milky Way galaxy, point of origin unknown.

Nevertheless, observations by numerous telescopes show that the comet's chemical composition is similar to the comets found inside our solar system, providing evidence that comets also form around other stars. By the middle of 2020 the comet will have already zoomed past Jupiter's distance of 500 million miles on its way back into the frozen abyss of interstellar space.

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Materials provided by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

A runaway star ejected from the galactic heart of darkness

A runaway star ejected from the galactic heart of darkness

Astronomers have spotted an ultrafast star, traveling at a blistering 6 million km/h, that was ejected by the supermassive black hole at the heart at the Milky Way five million years ago.

The discovery of the star, known as S5-HVS1, was made by Carnegie Mellon University Assistant Professor of Physics Sergey Koposov as part of the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey (S5). Located in the constellation of Grus -- the Crane -- S5-HVS1 was found to be moving ten times faster than most stars in the Milky Way.

"The velocity of the discovered star is so high that it will inevitably leave the galaxy and never return," said Douglas Boubert from the University of Oxford, a co-author on the study.

Astronomers have wondered about high velocity stars since their discovery only two decades ago. S5-HVS1 is unprecedented due to its high speed and close passage to the Earth, "only" 29 thousand light years away. With this information, astronomers could track its journey back into the center of the Milky Way, where a four million solar mass black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, lurks.

"This is super exciting, as we have long suspected that black holes can eject stars with very high velocities. However, we never had an unambiguous association of such a fast star with the galactic center," said Koposov, the lead author of this work and member of Carnegie Mellon's McWilliams Center for Cosmology. "We think the black hole ejected the star with a speed of thousands of kilometers per second about five million years ago. This ejection happened at the time when humanity's ancestors were just learning to walk on two feet."

Superfast stars can be ejected by black holes via the Hills Mechanism, proposed by astronomer Jack Hills thirty years ago. Originally, S5-HSV1 lived with a companion in a binary system, but they strayed too close to Sagittarius A*. In the gravitational tussle, the companion star was captured by the black hole, while S5-HVS1 was thrown out at extremely high speed.

"This is the first clear demonstration of the Hills Mechanism in action," said Ting Li from Carnegie Observatories and Princeton University, and leader of the S5 Collaboration. "Seeing this star is really amazing as we know it must have formed in the galactic center, a place very different to our local environment. It is a visitor from a strange land."

The discovery of S5-HVS1 was made with the 3.9-meter Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) near Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia, coupled with superb observations from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite, that allowed the astronomers to reveal the full speed of the star and its journey from the center of the Milky Way.

"The observations would not be possible without the unique capabilities of the 2dF instrument on the AAT," said Daniel Zucker, an astronomer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the S5 executive committee. "It's been conducting cutting-edge research for over two decades and still is the best facility in the world for our project."

These results were published on November 4 online in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the S5 collaboration unites astronomers from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Chile.

"I am so excited this fast-moving star was discovered by S5," says Kyler Kuehn, at Lowell Observatory and a member of the S5 executive committee. "While the main science goal of S5 is to probe the stellar streams -- disrupting dwarf galaxies and globular clusters -- we dedicated spare resources of the instrument to searching for interesting targets in the Milky Way, and voila, we found something amazing for 'free.' With our future observations, hopefully we will find even more!"

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2019 Nobel Prize in Physics: Evolution of the universe and discovery of exoplanet orbiting solar-type star

                                                        illustration of exoplanet orbiting star 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2019 "for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth's place in the cosmos" with one half to James Peebles of Princeton University, USA, "for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology" and the other half jointly to Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and the University of Cambridge, UK, "for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star."

New perspectives on our place in the universe

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics rewards new understanding of the universe's structure and history, and the first discovery of a planet orbiting a solar-type star outside our solar system.

James Peebles' insights into physical cosmology have enriched the entire field of research and laid a foundation for the transformation of cosmology over the last fifty years, from speculation to science. His theoretical framework, developed since the mid-1960s, is the basis of our contemporary ideas about the universe.

The Big Bang model describes the universe from its very first moments, almost 14 billion years ago, when it was extremely hot and dense. Since then, the universe has been expanding, becoming larger and colder. Barely 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe became transparent and light rays were able to travel through space. Even today, this ancient radiation is all around us and, coded into it, many of the universe's secrets are hiding. Using his theoretical tools and calculations, James Peebles was able to interpret these traces from the infancy of the universe and discover new physical processes.

The results showed us a universe in which just five per cent of its content is known, the matter which constitutes stars, planets, trees -- and us. The rest, 95 per cent, is unknown dark matter and dark energy. This is a mystery and a challenge to modern physics.

In October 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the first discovery of a planet outside our solar system, an exoplanet, orbiting a solar-type star in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. At the Haute-Provence Observatory in southern France, using custom-made instruments, they were able to see planet 51 Pegasi b, a gaseous ball comparable with the solar system's biggest gas giant, Jupiter.

This discovery started a revolution in astronomy and over 4,000 exoplanets have since been found in the Milky Way. Strange new worlds are still being discovered, with an incredible wealth of sizes, forms and orbits. They challenge our preconceived ideas about planetary systems and are forcing scientists to revise their theories of the physical processes behind the origins of planets. With numerous projects planned to start searching for exoplanets, we may eventually find an answer to the eternal question of whether other life is out there.

This year's Laureates have transformed our ideas about the cosmos. While James Peebles' theoretical discoveries contributed to our understanding of how the universe evolved after the Big Bang, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz explored our cosmic neighbourhoods on the hunt for unknown planets. Their discoveries have forever changed our conceptions of the world.

James Peebles, born 1935 in Winnipeg, Canada. Ph.D. 1962 from Princeton University, USA. Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton University, USA.

Michel Mayor, born 1942 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Ph.D. 1971 from University of Geneva, Switzerland. Professor at University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Didier Queloz, born 1966. Ph.D. 1995 from University of Geneva, Switzerland. Professor at University of Geneva, Switzerland and University of Cambridge, UK.

Prize amount: 9 million Swedish krona, with one half to James Peebles and the other half jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz

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