Space and astronomy news
Astronomers have been watching planetary systems form around sun-like stars for decades. And now, new observations with the ALMA telescope reveal the same process playing out around the smallest, but most common, stars in galaxy.
Continue reading “Astronomers are now Finding Planetary Disks Around the Smallest, Least Massive Stars”
Most of the matter of the universe is of a form unknown to physics. While we don’t know what the identity of the dark matter is, a new insight provided by quantum gravity is helping to drastically narrow down its mass.
Continue reading “Narrowing Down the Mass of Dark Matter”
Astronomers have been able to measure an extremely faint glow of light within galaxy clusters, and that measurement came with a surprise: it traced the amount of invisible dark matter, something that scientists have been trying to pin down for decades.
Continue reading “By Measuring Light From Individual Stars Between Galaxy Clusters, Astronomers Find Clues About Dark Matter”
Mighty planets can be whittled down, leaving behind only their rocky cores, becoming nothing bigger than superearths. While astronomers had long suspected that this could happen, a new study reveals that it can occur in as little as a billion years.
Continue reading “A new Class of Exoplanets can Shrink, From Subneptunes Into Superearths”
Gravitational wave detectors are limited by fundamental quantum noise – an incessant “hum” that they cannot ever remove. But now physicists have recently improved a technique, called “squeezing”, that can allow the next generation of detectors to double their sensitivity.
Continue reading “Physicists Figure out how to Make Gravitational Wave Detectors “Hear” 6x More Universe”
Supermassive black holes have a complicated lifecycle. Sometimes they’re “on”, blasting out tremendous amounts of energy, and sometimes they’re “off’, where they sleep like dragons in their caves. By comparing the proportion of high-energy to low-energy waves emitted by quasars, astronomers are beginning to pin down how many black holes are sleeping, and when they’re likely to wake back up.
Continue reading “Astronomers are Starting to Understand the Quasar Lifecycle”
Galaxy mergers are beautiful sights, but ultimately deadly. In the midst of the collision, the combined galaxy will shine brighter than it ever has before. But that glory comes with a price: all those new stars use up all the available fuel, and star formation grinds to a halt.
Continue reading “Galaxy Mergers can Boost Star Formation, and it can Also Shut it Down”
Astronomers have developed a new technique to search for exoplanets – by looking for their crushed up bones in the atmospheres of white dwarfs. And it’s working.
Continue reading “White Dwarf Atmospheres Might Contain the Pulverized Crusts of Their Dead Planets”
In 1995, NASA’s Galileo mission dropped a probe into the atmosphere of Jupiter and found it to be far drier than expected. In 2020, NASA’s follow-up mission Juno explained the mystery: it involves mushballs.
Continue reading “Galileo’s Probe Discovered a Mystery at Jupiter, Juno Finally Helped Solve it”
The northern hemisphere of Mars is beginning to thaw from winter. But for the red planet, that doesn’t mean that birds will sing and flowers will bloom. It means that the carbon dioxide will sublimate. It’s still beautiful though.
Continue reading “You Know it’s Spring on Mars When the Carbon Dioxide is Starting to Sublimate”