Astronomy Archives - Page 2 of 15

A strange bright burst in space baffled astronomers for more than a year. Now, they’ve solved the mystery

Around midday on June 13 last year, my colleagues and I were scanning the skies when we thought we had discovered a strange and exciting new object in space. Using a huge radio telescope, we […]

Powerful magnets could unlock detection of high-frequency gravitational waves

New research published in Physical Review Letters suggests that superconducting magnets used in dark matter detection experiments could function as highly precise gravitational wave detectors, thereby establishing an entirely new frequency band for observing these […]

A new way to detect primordial black holes through their Hawking radiation

Scientists may have found a new way to detect some of the universe’s most mysterious objects, primordial black holes (PBHs), using Hawking radiation. This groundbreaking approach relies upon watching for their radiation signatures as they […]

Tiny stars, many Earths: Potentially habitable worlds may be especially common around low-mass stars

According to the latest studies led by Heidelberg University astronomers, low-mass stars quite often host Earth-like planets. Data collected as part of the CARMENES project were the basis of this finding. By analyzing the data, […]

If we can’t detect the first stars, maybe we can see their first galaxies

Population III (PopIII) stars represent astronomy’s ultimate prize: the first generation of stars born from the pristine hydrogen and helium created in the Big Bang. These theoretical giants, potentially hundreds of times more massive than […]

Webb might detect if supermassive black holes form directly

One of the most perplexing discoveries in modern astronomy has been finding supermassive black holes, some weighing billions of times more than our sun, in galaxies that formed less than 750 million years after the […]

Discovery of ‘mini halo’ points to how the early universe was formed

Astronomers have uncovered a vast cloud of energetic particles—a “mini halo”—surrounding one of the most distant galaxy clusters ever observed, marking a major step forward in understanding the hidden forces that shape the cosmos.This post […]

The galactic center isn’t spitting out stars; here’s what this means

We know black hole mergers occur because we can detect the resulting gravitational waves. But when trying to piece together the history of black hole mergers in the Milky Way, astronomers need another tactic. They […]

Citizen scientists find new eclipsing binary stars

When two stars orbit one another in such a way that one blocks the other’s light each time it swings around, that’s an eclipsing binary. A new paper from NASA’s Eclipsing Binary Patrol citizen science […]

Webb telescope digs into structural origins of disk galaxies

Disk galaxies, like our own Milky Way galaxy, commonly consist of both a thick and thin disk of stars—each with different features, including stellar population and movement. Three major theoretical scenarios have been proposed to […]