A Fast Radio Burst Came From an Old, Dead Galaxy

By Brian Koberlein - January 23, 2025 10:43 AM UTC | Extragalactic
Astronomers still aren't sure about the source of fast radio bursts, but they appear to come from newly formed neutron stars, with powerful magnetic fields that interact with their surroundings. Researchers were surprised to find a burst that came from the last place you'd expect to see a young neutron star: an ancient elliptical galaxy, which ran out of most of its star-forming gas and dust long ago. So, maybe fast radio bursts have something to do with older stars?
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Supersonic Winds Blowing on an Extreme Exoplanet

By Brian Koberlein - January 22, 2025 12:21 PM UTC | Exoplanets
Astronomers have analyzed the atmosphere of WASP-127b and discovered that its windspeeds reach 33,000 km/h. This is the fastest jetstream that's ever been measured on a planet—over 10 times faster than Neptune's winds, which are the fastest in the Solar System. The winds go 6 times faster than the planet itself is rotating. One clue is the extremely low density of WASP-127b; it's bigger than Jupiter, but a fraction of its mass. It's also tidally locked to its star.
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The First Supernovae Flooded the Early Universe With Water

By Brian Koberlein - January 15, 2025 12:11 PM UTC | Cosmology
Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen: H2O. The H was formed during the Big Bang, but it took the first stars in the Universe to create the O, manufacturing it in their cores before they detonated as supernovae. In a new study, researchers suggest that those first supernovae released water into the Universe within the first 100-200 million years after the Big Bang, concentrating it into dense molecular clouds. Water needed for life was there, right at the beginning.
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Here's How We Could Measure the Mass of SgrA* to Within One Solar Mass

By Brian Koberlein - January 14, 2025 02:02 PM UTC | Milky Way
The mass of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, SgrA*, is roughly 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun, give or take a few hundred thousand solar masses. But a team of astronomers thinks they can dial that accuracy down to know with an error rate of a single solar mass. They propose to do this by measuring gravitational waves from SgrA* as brown dwarfs orbit it closely. These dwarfs act like natural probes mapping out the warped space around SgrA*.
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