Astronomy

By analyzing data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Dutch astronomers have investigated a young, oxygen-rich supernova remnant known as G292.0+1.8. Results of the new study, published June 29 on the arXiv preprint server, yield important […]

There’s a bit of a historical mystery surrounding the star Theta Eridani. Ptolemy in the second century A.D. and al-Sufi in A.D. 964 both recorded Theta Eridani as one of the 13 brightest stars in […]

For the first time, scientists have used NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) to directly measure the magnetic fields of PSR J1101−6101, a pulsar located within what is often referred to as the Lighthouse Nebula. […]

An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a new exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star as part of the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS). The newfound alien world, designated NGTS-39 b, is a Jupiter-sized […]

Sub-Neptunes are the most common type of planet in our galaxy. Bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, these worlds remain deeply mysterious because scientists still do not know what they are made of. What […]

Stars like our sun are formed from the collapse of stellar objects called prestellar cores, cold and dense concentrations of gas and dust held together by gravity. While many questions remain about the exact mechanisms […]

For six and a half days in July 2024, the balloon-borne solar observatory Sunrise III kept its gaze fixed on the sun. The stratospheric flight, which stretched from the northernmost tip of Sweden to Canada’s […]

We’ve talked plenty of times here about the infeasibility of launching a mirror big enough to directly image exoplanets using current rocket fairings—at least as long as we’re not sending them 500-plus AU away to […]

An international team led by Juan Diego Soler at the University of Vienna used two of the world’s most powerful radio telescopes to uncover previously hidden structures within the Orion Nebula. The project produced the […]

For the first time, astronomers have discovered stellar cocoons rich in complex organic molecules within a supernova remnant. A research team from Niigata University, Gifu University, RIKEN and Kyoto University in Japan used the Atacama […]