Astronomers have discovered the stellar “missing link” that directly connects a massive star’s death to the birth of a black hole or a neutron star. Two teams of scientists made the discovery using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the New Technology Telescope (NTT) to look at supernova wreckage designated SN 2022jli, which was discovered […]
China launched its Einstein Probe on Tuesday (Jan. 9), kicking off its mission to observe the X-ray sky. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) spacecraft will hunt for high-energy light from some of the universe’s most powerful objects and events, including feeding black holes, neutron star collisions and supernovas that mark the explosive death of […]
Astronomers continue to struggle in their hunt for dark matter, the elusive and mysterious form of matter that dominates the mass of the universe. But one astronomer proposes that, instead of building gigantic, expensive experiments on Earth, we should try another method of searching for dark matter: Looking to the stars. Multiple independent lines of […]
The gold that comprises the ring on your ring, the jewelry, and the uranium used as fuel in nuclear power plants is believed to come from the violent conditions created when two ultradense dead stars called neutron stars collide. This collision between neutron stars also generates ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves, blasts of high-energy […]