Month: July 2022

Enlarge / Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin really knows how to fill out a hard hat. (credit: Yegor Aleyev / TASS via Getty Images)

8:30 am ET Friday Update: The Kremlin has made it official in a short communique—Dmitry Rogozin is out as director general of the country's state-owned space corporation, Roscosmos. The decree is effective immediately. Former Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov will replace Rogozin.

The moves come amid a significant shakeup in leadership posts in Russia nearly five months after the country's invasion of Ukraine. Borisov has followed the same path to Roscosmos as Rogozin, a demotion. Both men served as deputy prime ministers over Russia's space and defense industry before being moved to Roscosmos. It is not clear where Rogozin will land.

This brings an end to Rogozin's tumultuous career at Roscosmos, where he directly worked with the leaders of other international space agencies, including NASA and other International Space Station partners such as Europe, Canada, and Japan. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Rogozin has been increasingly bellicose and made numerous threats about Russian participation in the station. While most of those threats have ended up being hollow, they have damaged working relations with the West.

Jony Ive, longtime Apple designer. (credit: Gary Cohen)

After three decades, the professional relationship between Apple and designer Jony Ive has ended, according to sources cited by The New York Times.

Ive joined Apple in 1992 and went on to make a name for himself by designing the colorful iMac in 1998 that played a major role in saving the company after Steve Jobs' return to the CEO role. For many years afterward, he was reportedly Jobs' closest partner, and he was second only to Jobs in terms of influence within the company.

He headed up hardware design but took over software design along the way. After Jobs' death, Ive spearheaded the design and launch of the Apple Watch. But that process left Ive frustrated, according to many sources, and he switched to a part-time role.

Enlarge / If a star (red trail) wanders too close to a black hole (left), it can be shredded, or spaghetified, by the intense gravity. Some of the star’s matter swirls around the black hole, like water down a drain, emitting copious X-rays (blue). (credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss)

When astronomers first observed a star that was shredded, or “spaghettified,” after approaching too close to a massive black hole in 2019, they determined that much of the star’s matter was launched outward in a powerful wind from the optical light emitted from the blast. Now, astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) have analyzed the polarization of that light to determine that the cloud was likely spherically symmetric, adding further evidence for the presence of that powerful wind.

“This is the first time anyone has deduced the shape of the gas cloud around a tidally spaghettified star,” said co-author Alex Filippenko, a UCB astronomer. The latest findings appeared in a recent paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

As we've reported previously, an object that passes beyond the event horizon of a black hole—including light—is swallowed up and can't escape, although black holes are also messy eaters. That means that part of an object's matter is actually ejected in a powerful jet. If that object is a star, the process of being shredded (or "spaghettified") by the powerful gravitational forces of a black hole occurs outside the event horizon, and part of the star's original mass is ejected violently outward. This can form a rotating ring of matter (aka, an accretion disk) around the black hole that emits powerful X-rays and visible light. The jets are one way astronomers can indirectly infer the presence of a black hole.