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Calvin College professor of astronomy Larry Molnar made a bold announcement in 2017—he and his team had identified a binary star in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan, that was a strong candidate to merge and explode in the near future. Known by its Kepler mission number, KIC 9832227, the pair of stars is about 1800 light years from Earth and has an orbit so close that it takes just 11 hours to go around once. That first-of-its-kind prediction caught the attention of an international audience, creating excitement within the scientific community and among the general public. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image showcases the galaxy NGC 4036, a lenticular galaxy some 70 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major (the Great Bear). Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

Apart from a billion Milky Way stars, ESA’s Gaia spacecraft also observes extragalactic objects. Its automated alert system notifies astronomers whenever Gaia spots a transient event. A team of astronomers have found out that by tweaking the existing automated system, Gaia can be used to detect hundreds of peculiar transients in the centres of galaxies. They found about 480 transients over a period of about a year. Their new method will be implemented in the system as soon as possible allowing astronomers to determine the nature of these events. The findings will be published in the November issue of the Monthly Notices of the RoyalRead More →

Phosphorus, which is vital to life but somewhat rare, condensed inside asteroids in the outer Solar System before moving back towards the sun, where some of it ended up on Earth, according to new research. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), launched on April 18, has as its core mission goal to discover small transiting exoplanets orbiting nearby bright stars, and to do so it will conduct a nearly all-sky photometric survey over the next two years. For 27.4 days at a time TESS will look at one region of the sky while its 64-million-pixel camera reads out once every 30 minutes in an effort to spot the slight dips in starlight that signal the transit of a planet across the face of a distant star. (Several hundred thousand of the pixels will read out in a two minute cadenceRead More →

Astronomers have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to discover a ring of black holes or neutron stars in a galaxy 300 million light years from Earth. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

For the first time, a powerful “wind” of molecules has been detected in a galaxy located 12 billion light-years away. Probing a time when the universe was less than 10 percent of its current age, University of Texas at Austin astronomer Justin Spilker’s research sheds light on how the earliest galaxies regulated the birth of stars to keep from blowing themselves apart. The research will appear in the Sept. 7 issue of the journal Science. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

To answer significant questions about planetary systems, such as whether our solar system is a rare phenomenon or if life exists on planets other than Earth, NASA should lead a large direct imaging mission – an advanced space telescope – capable of studying Earth-like exoplanets orbiting stars similar to the sun, says a new congressionally mandated report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

Wolf 503b, an exoplanet twice the size of Earth, has been discovered by an international team of Canadian, American and German researchers using data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. The find is described in a new study whose lead author is Merrin Peterson, an Institute for research on exoplanets (iREx) graduate student who started her master’s degree at Université de Montréal (UdeM) in May. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

Precise measurement using a continent-wide collection of National Science Foundation (NSF) radio telescopes has revealed that a narrow jet of particles moving at nearly the speed of light broke out into interstellar space after a pair of neutron stars merged in a galaxy 130 million light-years from Earth. The merger, which occurred in August of 2017, sent gravitational waves rippling through space. It was the first event ever to be detected both by gravitational waves and electromagnetic waves, including gamma rays, X-rays, visible light, and radio waves. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →