Space and astronomy news
It’s notoriously difficult to take a picture of a black hole. But when they are surrounded by material we have an opportunity to witness the hole carved out by the event horizon. But what we see in the famous images of black holes isn’t the event horizon itself, but a magnified and enlarged version known as the shadow.
Continue reading “How do Black Holes Make a Shadow?”
Our universe may feature large, macroscopic clumps of dark matter, known as q-balls. These q-balls would be absolutely invisible, but they may reveal their presence through tiny magnifications of starlight.
Continue reading “Astronomers Go Hunting for Mysterious Q-balls”A team of astronomers have proposed a series of missions utilizing land, sea, and airborne observatories to continuously monitor as many total solar eclipses as possible in the coming decade. These missions will reveal aspects of the solar corona that cannot be studied by any other means.
Continue reading “Astronomers Prepare for a Total View of Total Solar Eclipses”
Astronomers have determined that so-called “leaky” galaxies may have responsible for triggering the last great transformational epoch in our universe, one which ionized the neutral interstellar gas.
Continue reading “The James Webb Is Getting Closer to Finding What Ionized the Universe”
The average temperature of the universe is downright cold – right around 3 degrees above absolute zero.
Continue reading “How Cold is Space?”
Over over 50% of high mass stars reside in multiple star systems. But due to their complex orbital interactions, physicists have a difficult time understanding just how stable and long-lived these systems are. Recently a team of astronomers applied machine learning techniques to simulations of multiple star systems and found a new way that stars in such systems can arrange themselves.
Continue reading “A.I. Finds a New Way to Build Multiple-Star Systems”
A team of astronomers have used a model of earthquakes to understand glitches in the timing of pulsars. Their results suggest that pulsars may have interiors that are far stranger than can be imagined.
Continue reading “Astronomers use Earthquakes to Understand Glitches on Neutron Stars”
Astronomers continue to hunt for the elusive kind of star known as Population III stars, the first stars to appear in the young universe. New research has revealed that the James Webb Space Telescope may be on the cusp of discovering them.
Continue reading “The James Webb May See the First Stars to Appear in the Universe”
The universe was simply different when it was younger. Recently astronomers have discovered that complex physics in the young cosmos may have led to the development of supermassive stars, each one weighing up to 100,000 times the mass of the Sun.
Continue reading “The First Stars May Have Weighed More Than 100,000 Suns”
Simulations of the formation of the solar system have been largely successful. They are able to replicate the positions of all the major planets along with their orbital parameters. But current simulations have an extreme amount of difficulty getting the masses of the four terrestrial planets right, especially Mercury. A new study suggests that we need to pay more attention to the giant planets in order to understand the evolution of the smaller ones.
Continue reading “Astronomers Come Closer to Understanding How Mercury Formed”