Space and astronomy news
Black holes are the ultimate limit of gravitational collapse. Bring enough mass into a small enough volume, and its own weight will squeeze the mass into oblivion. All that remains is a warped pocket of space that it can trap anything that strays too close, even light.
Continue reading “Astronomers Just Detected Either the Least Massive Black Hole, or a Strange and Massive Neutron Star”
Five hundred million light-years from Earth, there is a deeply unusual object. It is radio silent for 12 days, then erupts in bright radio bursts. These fast radio bursts occur randomly over four days, then the object goes silent for another 12 days. Astronomers have observed this object for 500 days, and the pattern always repeats, like clockwork. We still aren’t sure what the object is.
Continue reading “A Repeating Fast Radio Burst Has Been Found. It Flares for 4 Days and then Remains Silent for 12 Days”
Dark matter is notoriously difficult to detect. So difficult that we haven’t detected it yet. Evidence for dark matter can be seen in everything from the warping of light near galaxies to the way galaxies cluster together. We are pretty sure dark matter is real, but we also know it can’t be made of any type of particle we currently know. But a new study has found some interesting data that could be evidence of dark matter, or not.
Continue reading “Japanese Dark Matter Detector is Seeing a “Surprising Excess of Events””
Once again a new measurement of cosmic expansion is encouraging astronomers to reconsider the standard cosmological model. The problem is the Hubble constant and dark energy. While we have a broad understanding of dark energy, pinning down the value of the Hubble constant has been a problem, since different measurements keep getting different results. Now a new study has been published which further complicates things.
Continue reading “Evidence is Building that the Standard Model of the Expansion of the Universe Needs some new Ideas”
Neutron stars are strange things. They can form when gravity kills a star, crushing its remains into a dense ball the size of a small city. They are so dense that only quantum forces and the Pauli exclusion principle keeps it from collapsing into a black hole singularity. The interior of a neutron star is so dense that matter behaves in ways we still don’t fully understand.
Continue reading “Neutron Stars Could Have a Layer of Exotic Quark Matter Inside Them”
In our search for exoplanets, we have found more than three dozen potentially habitable worlds. It’s estimated that there are 8 to 20 billion potentially habitable, Earth-like worlds in our galaxy alone. But there is a big difference between potentially habitable and actually habitable, and scientists are starting to narrow their definitions.
Continue reading “Is the Concept of a Habitable Zone Too Wide?”
In the standard model of cosmology, dark energy fills the universe. It causes the universe to expand at an ever-increasing rate, and it makes up more than 70% of the cosmos. But there’s a problem. When we measure the rate of cosmic expansion in different ways, we get results that disagree with each other.
Continue reading “A New Test Confirms Dark Energy and the Expansion of the Universe”
Almost everything in the universe spins. Planets rotate on their axis, stars spin around black holes, and galaxies spin in great spiral structures. But what about the universe as a whole?
Continue reading “Study of 200,000 Galaxies Reveals the Entire Universe Might Have Been Spinning in One Direction Early On”
The closest star to the Sun is a small red dwarf star known as Proxima Centauri. It is only 4.2 light-years away and is now known to have an Earth-sized planet in its habitable zone. That doesn’t mean there is life orbiting the nearest star, but its proximity should help us understand the possibilities.
Continue reading “Powerful Telescope Confirms There’s an Earth-Sized World Orbiting Proxima Centauri”
There are eight classical planets in our solar system, from speedy Mercury to distant Neptune. There are also numerous dwarf planets, such as Pluto and Ceres. While we continue to find more dwarf planets, there are some hints that another large planet could lurk far beyond Neptune. This Planet Nine is thought to be a “super-Earth” about five times the mass of our planet, which would make it about twice as large as Earth. But despite several searches for the planet, it has not yet been found.
Continue reading “Maybe a Fleet of Tiny Spacecraft Could Help Detect a Primordial Black Hole Planet 9”