During the Space Race, scientists in both the United States and the Soviet Union investigated the concept of ion propulsion. Like many early Space Age proposals, the concept was originally explored by luminaries like Konstantin...
The Milky Way has a missing pulsar problem in its core. Astronomers have tried to explain this for years. One of the more interesting ideas comes from a team of astronomers in Europe and invokes dark matter, neutron stars, and primordial...
Space travel and exploration was never going to be easy. Failures are sadly all too common but it’s wonderful to see missions exceed expectations. The Japanese Space Agency’s SLIM lunar lander was only supposed to survive a single...
It’s difficult to actually visualise a universe that is changing. Things tend to happen at snails pace albeit with the odd exception. Take the formation of galaxies growing in the early universe. Their immense gravitational field would...
We are all very familiar with the concept of the Earth’s magnetic field. It turns out that most objects in space have magnetic fields but it’s quite tricky to measure them. Astronomers have developed an ingenious way to measure the...
Solar Sails are an enigmatic and majestic way to travel across the gulf of space. Drawing an analogy to the sail ships of the past, they are one of the most efficient ways of propelling craft in space. On Tuesday a RocketLab Electron...
Scientists detected the first long-predicted gravitational wave in 2015, and since then, researchers have been hungering for better detectors. But the Earth is warm and seismically noisy, and that will always limit the effectiveness of...
Well over 5,000 planets have been found orbiting other star systems. One of the satellites hunting for them is TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Astronomers using TESS think they are made a rather surprising discovery;...
Over the last few years I have been renovating my home. Building on Earth seems to be a fairly well understood process, after all we have many different materials to chose from. But what about future lunar explorers. As we head closer...
Astrobiologists continue to work towards determining which biosignatures might be best to look for when searching for life on other worlds. The most common idea has been to search for evidence of plants that use the green pigment...
A team of international researchers studied galaxy NGC 4383, in the nearby Virgo cluster, revealing a gas outflow so large that it would take 20,000 years for light to travel from one side to the other.
Astronomers identified the largest stellar black hole yet discovered in the Milky Way, with a mass 33 times that of the Sun, according to a study published on Tuesday.
Scientists at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and their international collaborators have recently developed a new method for efficiently extracting information from galaxy surveys. Their...
For most stars, neutron stars and black holes are their final resting places. When a supergiant star runs out of fuel, it expands and then rapidly collapses on itself. This act creates a neutron star—an object denser than our sun crammed...
If you're a fan of all things space, you've doubtless heard about the "devil comet," which has been captivating keen-eyed observers in the northern hemisphere for the past few weeks. Now it's our turn, as comet 12P/Pons–Brooks is...
Thanks to the dizzying growth of cosmic observations and measurement tools and some new advancements (primarily the "discovery" of what we call dark matter and dark energy) all against the backdrop of General Relativity, the early 2000s...
Like boulders, rocks, and pebbles scattered across a landscape, asteroids come in a wide range of sizes. Cataloging asteroids in space is tricky because they are faint and they don't stop to be photographed as they zip along their orbits...
Using data from various space telescopes and astronomical surveys, Armenian researchers have investigated three star-forming regions. The study identified hundreds of young stellar objects and provided important information regarding the...
NASA is planning to repair NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer), an X-ray telescope on the International Space Station, during a spacewalk later this year. It will be the fourth science observatory in orbit serviced by...
Engineers at L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York, have combined all 10 mirrors for NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Preliminary tests show the newly aligned optics, collectively called the IOA (Imaging Optics Assembly),...
Astronomers have discovered methane emission on a brown dwarf, an unexpected finding for such a cold and isolated world. The findings suggest that this brown dwarf might generate aurorae similar to those seen on our own planet as well as...
A research team from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) presented a detailed analysis of a tidal disruption event (TDE) with unique characteristics, providing new insights...
In a new study published in the The Astrophysical Journal, Dr. Li Zhenwei and his collaborators from Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and Dr. Zhang Yangyang from the Zhoukou Normal University, proposed a new...
Did you know the sun has moss? Due to its resemblance to the earthly plants, scientists have named a small-scale, bright, patchy structure made of plasma in the solar atmosphere "moss." This moss, which was first identified in 1999 by...
Using the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), astronomers have performed high-resolution observations of a recently detected extreme helium star designated EC 19529–4430. It turned out that EC 19529–4430 is the most metal deficient...
A nearby supernova in 2023 offered astrophysicists an excellent opportunity to test ideas about how these types of explosions boost particles, called cosmic rays, to near light-speed. But surprisingly, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space...
A nearby supernova in 2023 offered astrophysicists an excellent opportunity to test ideas about how these types of explosions boost particles, called cosmic rays, to near light-speed. But surprisingly, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space...
When faraway stars explode, they send out flashes of energy called gamma-ray bursts that are bright enough that telescopes back on Earth can detect them. Studying these pulses, which can also come from mergers of some exotic astronomical...
Astronomers have identified the most massive stellar black hole yet discovered in the Milky Way galaxy. This black hole was spotted in data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission because it imposes an odd 'wobbling' motion on the...
To take a census of nearby cosmic objects, sending out a survey won't work. Scientists need to use many telescopes with different specializations to chart what is in the general neighborhood of the sun.
If you want to know where elements come from, look to the stars. Almost every element heavier than helium is formed through nuclear reactions in stars. But which stellar processes are responsible for these elements? Can we find patterns...
Using the Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT), astronomers from the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, have observed a young Galactic open cluster known as Berkeley 50. Results of the observational campaign, presented April 5 on the...
Astronomers have identified the most massive stellar black hole yet discovered in the Milky Way galaxy. This black hole was spotted in data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission because it imposes an odd 'wobbling' motion on the...
Glittering threads of stars around the Milky Way may hold answers to one of our biggest questions about the universe: what is dark matter? With images taken through six different color filters mounted to the largest camera ever built for...
After a journey lasting about two billion years, photons from an extremely energetic gamma-ray burst (GRB) struck the sensors on the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope on October 9th, 2022. The GRB...
It's an exciting time for the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology. Thanks to cutting-edge observatories, instruments, and new techniques, scientists are getting closer to experimentally verifying theories that remain largely...
One of the big mysteries about dark matter particles is whether they interact with each other. We still don't know the exact nature of what dark matter is. Some models argue that dark matter only interacts gravitationally, but many more...
Although their primary purpose is to look for exoplanets, observatories like the Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have supplied a vast amount of data on stellar flares, detected with...
An international team of astronomers has performed radio observations of a massive galaxy cluster known as ACT-CL J0329.2-2330, which resulted in the detection of a new radio halo in this cluster. The finding was reported in a research...
Last September, the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, discovered JWST-ER1g, a massive ancient galaxy that formed when the universe was just a quarter of its current age. Surprisingly, an Einstein ring is associated with this galaxy....
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) represent the most intense radio explosions in the universe. Since the first discovery in 2007, FRBs have garnered significant attention, culminating in the 2023 Shaw Prize in Astronomy. With yet unknown origin,...
The science fiction television series 3 Body Problem, the latest from the creators of HBO's Game of Thrones, has become the most watched show on Netflix since its debut last month. Based on the bestselling book trilogy Remembrance of...
In the constellation Virgo, 700 light years away from Earth, the planet WASP-39b orbits the star WASP-39. The gas giant, which takes little more than four days to complete one orbit, is one of the best-studied exoplanets. Shortly after...
In 2022, astronomers discovered the brightest gamma-ray burst (GRB) of all time. Now, astronomers confirm that a 'normal' supernova, the telltale sign of a stellar collapse, accompanied the GRB. The team also looked for signatures of...
An international research team has for the first time directly detected stellar winds from three Sun-like stars by recording the X-ray emission from their astrospheres, and placed constraints on the mass loss rate of the stars via their...
A star's magnetic field must be considered in order to correctly determine the characteristics of exoplanets from observations by space telescopes such as Kepler, James Webb, or PLATO. Researchers show that the distribution of the star's...
When astronomers looked at a stellar pair at the heart of a stunning cloud of gas and dust, they were in for a surprise. Star pairs are typically very similar, like twins, but in HD 148937, one star appears younger and, unlike the other,...