News (Page 2)

Colliding Stars, Stellar Siphoning, and a now a “Blue Lurker.” This Star System has Seen it All Triple star systems are more common than might be imagined – about one in ten of every Sun-like star is part of a system with two other stars. However, the dynamics of such a system are complex, and understanding the history of how they came to be even more so. Science took a step towards doing so with a recent paper by Emily Leiner from the Illinois Institute of Technology and her team. They examined a star called WOCS 14020 in the star cluster M67, which is aboutRead More →

Recent Observations Challenge our Understanding of Giant Black Holes Black holes are among the most mysterious and powerful objects in the Universe. These behemoths form when sufficiently massive stars reach the end of their life cycle and experience gravitational collapse, shedding their outer layers in a supernova. Their existence was illustrated by the work of German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild and Indian-American physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar as a consequence of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. By the 1970s, astronomers confirmed that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) reside at the center of massive galaxies and play a vital role in their evolution. However, only in recent years were theRead More →

An Even Ghostlier Neutrino May Rule the Universe Strange “right-handed” neutrinos may be responsible for all the matter in the universe, according to new research. Why is the universe filled with something other than nothing? Almost all fundamental interactions in physics are exactly symmetrical, meaning that they produce just as much matter as they do antimatter. But the universe is filled with only matter, with antimatter only appearing in the occasional high-energy process. Obviously something happened to tip the balance, but what? New research suggests that the answer may lie in the ghostly little particles known as neutrinos. Neutrinos are beyond strange. There are threeRead More →

The Gaia Mission’s Science Operations are Over The ESA has announced that Gaia’s primary mission is coming to an end. The spacecraft’s fuel is running low, and the sky-scanning phase of its mission is over. The ground-breaking mission has taken more than three trillion observations of two billion objects, mostly stars. The ESA launched Gaia in December 2013. It’s an astrometry mission that measures the positions, motions, and distances of stars with extreme accuracy. It created the largest and most accurate 3D map of space ever, including about one billion objects, mostly stars but also quasars, comets, asteroids, and planets. Gaia’s mission lasted twice asRead More →

About a Third of Supermassive Black Holes are Hiding Supermassive black holes can have trillions of times more mass than the Sun, only exist in specific locations, and could number in the trillions. How can objects like that be hiding? They’re shielded from our view by thick columns of gas and dust. However, astronomers are developing a way to find them: by looking for donuts that glow in the infrared. It seems almost certain that large galaxies like our own Milky Way host supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in their centers. They grow through mergers with other SMBHs and through accretion. When they’re actively accreting material,Read More →

The First Supernovae Flooded the Early Universe With Water Water is the essence of life. Every living thing on Earth contains water within it. The Earth is rich with life because it is rich with water. This fundamental connection between water and life is partly due to water’s extraordinary properties, but part of it is due to the fact that water is one of the most abundant molecules in the Universe. Made from one part oxygen and two parts hydrogen, its structure is simple and strong. The hydrogen comes from the primordial fire of the Big Bang and is by far the most common element.Read More →

Astronomers See Flares Coming from the Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole There’s plenty of action at the center of the galaxy, where a supermassive black hole (SMBH) known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) literally holds the galaxy together. Part of that action is the creation of gigantic flares from Sgr A*, which can give off energy equivalent to 10 times the Sun’s annual energy output. However, scientists have been missing a key feature of these flares for decades – what they look like in the mid-infrared range. But now, a team led by researchers at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute forRead More →

Earth’s Temporary Moon Might Have Come from THE Moon A tiny asteroid loitering in a near-Earth orbit for a few months last year may have an intriguing origin on our Moon. Its characteristics led scientists to ask: is it a chip off the old lunar block, making a pass by Earth for a visit? The object is known as Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) 2024 PT5 (or PT5, for short) and its orbit is very similar to Earth’s. Oddly enough, that region often gets littered with rocket bodies. Interestingly, it’s also a region where debris blasted off the Moon during impacts tends to collect. So, could PT5Read More →

Galaxy Cores May be Giant Fuzzy Dark Stars A fuzzy form of dark matter may clump up to become the cores of galaxies, according to new research. The traditional dark matter hypothesis, that it’s some form of cold, massive particle that hardly ever interacts with itself or with normal matter, has some difficulties. In particular, it can’t quite explain the dense cores of galaxies. Cold, heavy dark matter tends to produce extremely dense cores, far denser than what we observe. But dark matter might be something else. Recently astronomers have hypothesized that dark matter might instead be incredibly light, far lighter than any known particle.Read More →

This Quasar Helped End the Dark Ages of the Universe After the Big Bang came the Dark Ages, a period lasting hundreds of millions of years when the universe was largely without light. It ended in the epoch of reionization when neutral hydrogen atoms became charged for the first time and the first generation of stars started to form. The question that has perplexed astronomers is what caused the first hydrogen atoms to charge. A team of researchers have observed an early quasar that pumped out enormous amounts of x-ray radiation helping to drive the reionization.  The universe began with the Big Bang around 13.8Read More →