Astronomy Archives - Page 10 of 15

Mega-Earth GJ 523b is 23 times as massive as our planet—but only 2.5 times as wide

It’s nearly 170 million years old. It’s more than 2.5 times the size of Earth. And it’s the first exoplanet discovered and cataloged by researchers with the Wisconsin Center for Origins Research (WiCOR).This post was […]

First pair of feeding supermassive black holes found in a Green Pea galaxy

Astronomers have discovered the first confirmed dual active galactic nucleus in a Green Pea galaxy, revealing two supermassive black holes growing at the same time inside a compact, intensely star-forming system. X-ray observations with Chandra […]

Dark matter may be gravitationally lensing a likely source of cosmic neutrinos

Astronomers have discovered that the jet of a distant blazar has been gravitationally lensed by an unseen source of dark matter. Led by Silke Britzen at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, […]

The brightened night sky nobody actually wanted

A new paper has put hard numbers on a plan that’s been rattling around the astronomy community for a while now—a California company called Reflect Orbital wants to put giant mirrors in orbit and beam […]

Radio telescopes help scientists map molecules in space and uncover where and how stars form

You may have heard the phrase “we are made of star-stuff.” This statement by the astronomer Carl Sagan refers to the fact that elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were forged in the centers of […]

Einstein Probe catches rare X-ray flash from an exploding star

Astronomers have linked an X-ray flash discovered by the Einstein Probe to a known type of supernova with unusual features that point to the birth of an ultra-dense, rapidly spinning magnetar. The paper outlining this […]

Black hole star: Astronomers discover a brand-new type of astrophysical object

Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot in the early universe. The object resembles an enormous star, roughly the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out […]

Early-universe plasma may have stopped dark photons from heating cosmos

A new paper published in Physical Review Letters reveals that a leading dark matter candidate—the hypothetical “dark photon”—would not have heated the early universe as previously thought. The finding opens a vast region for experimental […]

Mysterious Cygnus Bubble may trace back to microquasar, astronomers suggest

Astronomers have proposed a new explanation for the mysterious Cygnus Bubble, a vast cloud of ultra-high-energy gamma rays stretching thousands of light-years across the sky. While the bubble has generally been linked to the Cygnus […]

Tiny satellite will use the dark side of the moon to eavesdrop on whispers from the early universe

A tiny UK-developed satellite, roughly the size of a small carry-on suitcase, could help answer one of the biggest questions in cosmology: What happened during the roughly 150 million years of the cosmic dark ages, […]