Today, astronomers and space lovers around the world are collectively marveling at our mercurial presence in the universe, particularly as we drift the cosmos amid large asteroids like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. June 30 marks Asteroid Day, a holiday observed annually to reflect on the prospect of a […]
A binary system containing a massive star and what is probably a black hole, and which together are a source of intense X-rays, has been shown to be a smaller-scale example of some of the most luminous quasars in the universe. The new findings, from an international team that used NASA‘s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer […]
Scientists have directly imaged eight dim objects accompanying very bright stars within the Gaia data catalog, including so-called “failed stars,” otherwise known as brown dwarfs. The stars and their companions were originally identified from millions of stars in the Gaia catalog. They were considered ideal for follow-up investigations with the ground-based GRAVITY instrument, an advanced […]
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Astronomers are witnessing a never-before-seen spectacle in the cosmos: the awakening of a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy. In late 2019, a team of astronomers took notice of an otherwise […]
Fast radio bursts flash in the sky over Earth. | Credit: NRAO Outreach/T. Jarrett (IPAC/Caltech); B. Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are intense, short-lived blasts of radio waves hailing from beyond the Milky Way that can emit the same amount of energy in just thousandths of a second that the sun takes three days […]
A gif showing a yellow-wrapped spacecraft with solar-panel wings in space. Just outside Hiroya Yamaguchi’s office is a blackboard crowded with exploded stars, spaceship schematics and spectral lines. The A4 printouts obscure almost all the free space, except for a tiny corner where he sometimes scribbles in white chalk. Right now, Yamaguchi, an associate professor […]
Nearly 20 years ago, astronomers observed a massive cloud of fine dust particles around a young star located just 63 light-years away from Earth. In recent observations from the Webb Space Telescope, however, the dust cloud had mysteriously vanished. Now, a new paper suggests the dust cloud may have been caused by a violent event […]
Exoplanet WASP 107b is a gas giant that’s nearly as big as Jupiter, but far less massive. Based on this discrepancy, astronomers didn’t know how a planet like WASP 107b could exist. But now, two independent teams of researchers have harnessed the power of JWST to solve the mystery. Right in our cosmic neighborhood, about […]
Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com. Why do astronomers look for signs of life on other planets based on how life is on Earth? Couldn’t there be totally different kinds of life on other planets? – […]
Goodnight, Sweet Prince The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope has revealed some of the saddest parts of our predominantly dark universe. As the agency explains in a press release, its dark matter-hunting deep space telescope has found seven new “rogue” planets that exist without stars to orbit or keep them warm. Along with its […]
A newly discovered exoplanet, with its surface temperature estimated to be remarkably temperate, is suddenly one of the most intriguing objects in our immediate celestial neighborhood. This rocky Venus-sized world transits a red dwarf star, offering astronomers the rare opportunity to study whether such planets can retain their atmospheres and potentially support life. Gliese 12 […]
For over a century, Einstein’s general theory of relativity has been key to understanding gravity. But new research suggests this theory “glitches” in the farthest reaches of space. That doesn’t mean we’re throwing Einstein’s theory out the window. But it may need a slight tweak. Over the last 100 years, countless studies have proven that […]