Astronomy

Every eleven years, the sun’s magnetic field flips. Sunspots—dark, cooler regions on the sun’s surface that mark intense magnetic activity and often trigger solar eruptions—appear at mid-latitudes and migrate toward the star’s equator in a […]

Using the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), astronomers have discovered a new long-period radio transient source, which received the designation ASKAP J142431.2–612611 (ASKAP J1424 for short). The newfound transient has a period of approximately 36 minutes […]

Even 200 years after asteroid 16 Psyche was discovered, astronomers continue to puzzle over its formation. Psyche is the 10th-most massive asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the largest known metallic […]

Thermonuclear reaction rates power the models that explain how stars live, explode and create the elements. A new study co-authored by NC State faculty member Richard Longland provides a comprehensive, statistically grounded reevaluation of these […]

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the Milky Way’s closest galactic neighbors—a small, gas-rich galaxy visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere, and bound to our galaxy by gravity, alongside its […]

Discovered in the Pictor II dwarf galaxy, star PicII-503 has an extreme deficiency in iron—less than 1/40,000th of the sun. This signature makes it the clearest example of a star within a primordial system that […]

Science in the modern era is increasingly reliant on enormous datasets and automated analysis. In astronomy, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)—a ten-year survey covering the entire southern sky […]

Gamma-ray bursts are the most violent explosions in the universe. In a fraction of a second, they can release more energy than the sun will emit across its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. Most are over before […]

Using data from the Magellan Clay telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), astronomers have investigated a galactic globular cluster known as NGC 5824. Results of the new study, available in a paper published March 5 […]

Patches of the sun’s surface often show strong magnetic fields. These fields can emerge within a matter of hours, and can decay slowly or quickly, sometimes over days, weeks, or even months. Thanks to a […]