On May 19, the Juno spacecraft once again swung by Jupiter in its looping 53 day orbit around the Solar System’s ruling gas gaint. Beginning at the top, this vertical 14 frame sequence of enhanced-color JunoCam images follows the spacecraft’s rapidly changing perspective during its two hour passage. They look down on Jupiter’s north polar region, equatorial, and south polar region (bottom images). With the field-of-view shrinking, the seventh and eighth images in the sequence are close-up. Taken only 4 minutes apart above Jupiter’s equator they were captured just before the spacecraft reached perijove 6, its closest approach to Jupiter on this orbit. Final images in the sequence pick up white oval storm systems, Jupiter’s “String of Pearls”, and the south polar region from the outward bound spacecraft.

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Add GW170104 to the chart of black holes with known mass. The extremely energetic merger of two smaller black holes corresponds to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory’s (LIGO) third detection of gravitational waves. The newfound black hole has a mass about 49 times that of the Sun, filling a gap between the masses of the two merged black holes detected previously by LIGO, with solar masses of 62 (GW150914) and 21 (GW151216). In all three cases, the signal in each of the twin LIGO detectors was unambiguously identified as coming from black hole mergers while a fourth case (LVT151012) resulted in a lower confidence detection. GW170104 is estimated to be some 3 billion light-years away, more distant than present estimates for GW150914 and GW151216. The ripples in spacetime were discovered during LIGO’s current observing run, which began November 30, 2016 and will continue through the summer.

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