Tag: Stars and Galaxies

The Doomsday Clock Keeps Ticking

The Bomb and I go way back. In Seattle, where I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, it was common wisdom that in the event of nuclear war, we were No. 2 on the target list because Seattle was the home of Boeing, maker of B-52 bombers and Minuteman missiles. In school we had […]

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How Astronomers Are Saving Astronomy From Satellites — For Now

In December 2020, astronomers documented a burst of highly energetic light in one of the most distant galaxies ever observed. But less than a year later, the paper’s claims lay in limbo. Other scientists said it had merely been a passing satellite. “I was a bit sad that the gamma ray burst turned out to […]

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Galaxies in the Early Universe Were Shaped Like Bananas, Study Suggests

What does a newborn galaxy look like? For the longest time, many astrophysicists and cosmologists have assumed that newborn galaxies would look like the orbs and spidery discs familiar in the modern universe. But according to an analysis of new images from the James Webb Space Telescope, baby galaxies were neither eggs nor discs. They […]

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How to Create a Black Hole Out of Thin Air

How many ways are there to leave this universe? Perhaps the best known exit entails the death of a star. In 1939 the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his student Harlan Snyder, of the University of California, Berkeley, predicted that when a sufficiently massive star runs out of thermonuclear fuel, it collapses inward and keeps […]

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It’s Christmastime in the Cosmos

For astronomers peering into the depths of the universe, Christmas came a little early this year. Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA released an image last month of a Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, a winking collection of galaxies 4.3 billion light-years from Earth. And last week, an image of Cassiopeia A, the […]

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Our universe’s most extreme stars sometimes ‘glitch’ — we may now know why

Scientists may finally understand the dynamics of neutron star “glitches” that occur when these ultradense dead stars suddenly speed up their spins. It would appear that the strange behavior may be caused when tiny vortices of swirling inner material “break the surface” of these intense stellar corpses. The new breakthrough in understanding neutron star behavior […]

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Could a ‘supervoid’ solve an unrelenting debate over the universe’s expansion rate?

A major discrepancy between different measurements of our universe’s expansion rate could be explained if our galaxy, the Milky Way, sits in a two-billion-light-year-wide void. Such is the conclusion of scientists who argue that a modified theory of gravity can replace the standard model of cosmology. However, this hypothesis is strongly disputed by many astronomers. […]

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Do we live in a giant void? It could solve the puzzle of the universe’s expansion

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Indranil Banik is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Astrophysics at the University of St. Andrews. One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology is the rate at which the universe is expanding. This can be predicted using the standard […]

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What are radio galaxies?

A radio galaxy is a galaxy that dominates the sky over Earth in radiowaves. These bright radio wave emissions come from billowing lobes of gas that extend far beyond the visible structure of the galaxy, often for millions of light-years. These radio lobes usually occur in pairs and are created when the heart of a […]

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X-ray telescope catches ‘spider pulsars’ devouring stars like cosmic black widows (image)

NASA’s space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory has watched a “clutter” of spider pulsars devouring their companion stars in the globular cluster Omega Centauri. This data could help scientists better understand how such rapidly spinning neutron stars, named after the arachnids  that devour their mates, erode surrounding stars with intense beams of radiation. The five spider pulsars […]

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Vera C. Rubin Observatory will track orphan stars to reveal a cosmic ‘fossil record’

Astronomers plan to study stars roaming the cosmos alone. The forthcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which will see “first light” in 2025, will study the glow from stars that were ripped from their home galaxies, to better understand how the universe has evolved.  The investigation of this faint and difficult-to-see “intracluster light” from stars between […]

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Strange ‘blob’ circling Milky Way’s central black hole is shooting powerful radiation at Earth every 76 minutes

Something near the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way has been firing regular blasts of high-energy gamma-rays toward Earth, and scientists may finally know what it is. In new non-peer-reviewed research posted to the preprint server arXiv, a duo of astrophysicists at the National Autonomous University of Mexico conclude that the […]

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300 gamma-ray-blasting neutron stars found in massive haul — and some are ‘spider pulsars’

The Fermi gamma-ray space telescope has discovered around 300 rapidly spinning neutron stars. Each of the newfound objects sweep two beams of radiation across the universe like a cosmic lighthouse.  These neutron stars are known to spin hundreds of times per second and are specifically called millisecond pulsars; prior to the launch of Fermi in […]

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A Star With Six Planets That Orbit Perfectly in Sync

Astronomers have discovered six planets orbiting a bright star in perfect resonance. The star system, 100 light-years from Earth, was described on Wednesday in a paper published in the journal Nature. The discovery of the system could give astronomers a unique opportunity to trace the evolution of these worlds to when they first formed, and […]

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James Webb Space Telescope spies a newborn star in its cosmic crib (image)

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have observed the luminous cloud of material that surrounds a newborn star, cocooning it in a crib of gas and dust. These so-called Herbig-Haro objects are created when stellar winds and jets of gas billow from newborn stars, causing shockwaves that slam into the gas and dust […]

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Hubble Space Telescope spies multiple galaxy clusters masquerading as one (image)

The Hubble Space Telescope has scored a double whammy, as it captured two independent galaxy clusters grouped together in the same view.  The massive galaxy cluster conglomerate, originally labeled Abell 3192 as it was believed to only be one cluster, is located in the constellation Eridanus. The foreground cluster observed is located about 2.3 billion […]

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