Space and astronomy news
Life and supernovae don’t mix. From a distance, supernovae explosions are fascinating. A star more massive than our Sun runs out of hydrogen and becomes unstable. Eventually, it explodes and releases so much energy it can outshine its host galaxy for months. But space is vast and largely empty, and supernovae are relatively rare. And …
Continue reading “How Dangerous are Nearby Supernovae to Life on Earth?”
A galactic nova flared briefly into naked eye visibility for a day, before vanishing from sight.
The Event Horizon Telescope has just released the first images of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy!
A new study by an international team of astrophysicists has shown what a space-based interferometry telescope could reveal about supermassive black hole!
The Event Horizon Telescope Consortium has some big news about the center of our galaxy, and will be announcing at the ESO’s headquarters on May 12th!
When two neutron stars collide, it creates a kilonova. The event causes both gravitational waves and emissions of electromagnetic energy. In 2017 the LIGO-Virgo gravitational-wave observatories detected a merger of two neutron stars about 130 million light-years away in the galaxy NGC 4993. The merger is called GW170817, and it remains the only cosmic event …
The Sun isn’t the only star in this galactic neighbourhood. Other stars also call this neighbourhood home. But what’s the neighbourhood’s history? What triggered the birth of all those stars? A team of astronomers say they’ve pieced the history together and identified the trigger: a series of supernovae explosions that began about 14 million years …
Astronomers have captured a radio galaxy that spans 16 Moon-widths in the sky.
A recent plan would send a Centaur mission to Jupiter’s orbit and follow a comet through formation.
Black holes are more than just massive objects that swallow everything around them – they’re also one of the universe’s biggest and most stable energy sources. That would make them invaluable to the type of civilization that needs huge amounts of power, such as a Type II Kardashev civilization. But to harness all of that …