This space snow could help scientists better understand planet formation and evolution.
Origami battery that runs on a few drops of water could revolutionize biosensors
This disposable battery runs on bacteria and folds like an origami ninja star. Sold!
Lonely planet found in a family of stars
NASA astronauts have discovered a lonely planetary-like mass floating on its own, without a solar system. Imagine a galaxy, riddled with countless solar systems. Then zoom in slowly on a solar system – how do you picture it? There’s probably a star at the center, and several planets around it. That’s generally where we feel planets should be, rotating around
Hubble captures the death of a star, offering a glimpse of our sun’s final days
A spectacular image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) gives us a glimpse into how the Sun will look at its death.
3,200-year-old papyrus contains astrophysical information about the Algol star
Many ancient civilizations made astronomical notes, but according to researchers, this is the earliest historical document of naked eye observations on a variable star – Algol. Variable stars are stars with a varying brightness (as seen from Earth), and they probably held a special place in Egyptian astronomy – they made careful notes on these stars. Now, more than three
Newborn star fires lightsaber: as seen by Hubble
This celestial lightsaber does not lie in a galaxy far, far away, but rather inside our home galaxy.
Scientists find a tiny star with a huge storm — just like Jupiter’s
While the windy and overcast weather of a stormy day isn’t surprising on telluric planets, it’s not something most of us readily associate with stars. But it does happen — the best evidence for this is W1906+40, a distant dwarf star recently described in a study published in the Astrophysical Journal.
Newly discovered star’s chemistry puzzles researchers
A team of Argentinian astronomers, peering up in the night’s sky from the Astronomical Observatory of Córdoba has found a new, young lithium-rich giant star that they designated KIC 9821622. And they can’t explain where that lithium comes from.
Something is blocking light from a distant star, and one of the possibilities is an alien structure
It’s likely not aliens, but it could be – and it’s really, really strange.
How to weigh a star: a new mathematical method
A novel mathematical model can weigh the mass of a pulsar – a rapidly rotating magnetized neutran star – using principles of nuclear physics, rather than gravity. Up until now, the mass of a star could only be determined in relation with other bodies, based on the gravitational pull these exerted. Now, using the new model scientists will be able to study pulsars in isolation, allowing for more precise measurements than ever before.
Incredibly active galaxy cluster creates 800 stars every year
The gargantuan cluster is 9.8 billion light years away from us, houses at least 27 galaxies and has a combined mass equal to 400 trillion Suns.
Scientists find the sound of stars
A chance discovery has provided experimental evidence that stars may generate sound. While he was examining the interaction of an ultra-intense laser with a plasma target, John Parsley from the University of York found that interfering plasma generates a series of pressure pulses – in other words, sounds.
Supernova flings star out of the Milky Way – it’s the fastest moving star ever
Astronomers have discovered a star racing at a incredible pace of 2.6 million miles an hour (4.2 million kilometers an hour), making it the fastest moving star discovered thus far. It’s so fast that it should exit our galaxy and turn into an intergalactic rogue. It doesn’t stop here. Such celestial oddities are believed to be spurred in motion by the extreme gravitational tugs found in the vecinity of supermassive black holes, such as the one found at the core of the Milky Way. The new found road runner, however, was most likely flung outward by a Type Ia supernova, one of the most powerful and brightest bursts of energy in the universe. Little is know about such stellar explosions, and the hypervelocity star might submit some valuable clues.
Most detailed picture EVER of a new planet being born
Some 450 light-years away in the constellation Taurus, a new planet is being born and astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile were there to capture the moment. It’s the most detailed picture documenting a planetary-forming system. The cutest planetary baby picture “This is truly one of the most remarkable images ever seen at these wavelengths,” Dr. Crystal Brogan, an
Astronomers find the sun’s first sibling: a star made of the same stuff
In what’s considered the first find out of a slew to follow, a team of astronomers have identified a star that originated out of the same matter as our own sun. In lack of a better analogy, the two are siblings and probably share many more sisters. Apart from telling us where in the galaxy our solar system first formed
Kepler telescope – Earth size planets number ’17 billion’
Astronomers working on the Kepler telescope believe that every 1 in 6 stars hosts at least an Earth-sized planet in a close orbit, raising the number of such planets in our galaxy to 17 billion. Finding planets Astrophysicists also announced 461 new planet candidates discovered by the telescope; this raises the number of planets discovered by Kepler to 2,740 –
Astronomers capture light from first stars using bright galaxies
I gotta say, sometimes it absolutely baffles me to see the kind of complex studies astrophysicists do, and this is definitely one of them. The light from the first stars in the Universe is still lingering around in the cosmos, and researchers have found a new way to capture it: using ultra-bright galaxies that act as cosmic beacons, capturing relict
Beautifully colored ‘seagull nebula’ imaged
Nebulae are among the most brightest objects in the sky, and besides their fantastic halo in the night sky, which served to inspire artists for countless past generations and more to come, they’re also an indispensable part of the Universe’s ‘ecosystem’. Essentially interstellar clouds of dust, gas, hydrogen, helium and other ionised gases, a nebula serves like a sort of star nursery, feeding
The star that should not exist
If you look at this picture, you will probably see what can only be described as an unremarkable, even faint star. But this ancient star, in the constellation of Leo (The Lion), called SDSS J102915+172927 has astrophysicists scratching their heads, searching for new answers. A team of European astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to track down a star
Black hole caught eating a star
For the first time in human history we have witnessed a black hole in the act of ‘eating’ a star that just got too close. So far, astronomers have only found the aftermath of such events, and they say that seeing the black hole in the act is shedding a lot of light on ‘relativistic jets‘. It all started when
