Astronomy

Astronomers from the University of Hawai’i (UH) at Manoa and elsewhere have observed the Taurus star-forming region, which resulted in the discovery of planetary-mass and stellar companions of two ultracool dwarf stars. The new finding […]

The first exoplanet ever discovered in 1995 was what we now call a “hot Jupiter,” a planet as massive as Jupiter with an orbital period of just a few days. Today, hot Jupiters are thought […]

One of the oldest unsolved riddles in planetary science concerns the origin of the moon. Over a century ago, George Darwin proposed that tidal and centrifugal forces on a rapidly rotating proto-Earth caused the moon […]

What could force a supermassive black hole (SMBH) out of its host galaxy? They can have hundreds of millions, even billions of solar masses. What’s powerful enough to dislodge one of these behemoths?This post was […]

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies and satellites of the Milky Way. The LMC is about 163,000 light-years away and the SMC is about 206,000 light-years away, and their close proximity […]

A research team has investigated long-term X-ray variability in the neutron star NGC 7793 P13, an object thought to be driven by supercritical accretion, where an extraordinary amount of gas falls onto the object and […]

Images captured by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe as the spacecraft made its record-breaking closest approach to the sun in December 2024 have now revealed new details about how solar magnetic fields responsible for space weather […]

Researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) are helping reshape how scientists study the sun. The UH-led team has developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can map the sun’s magnetic […]

Astronomers have produced the first continuous, two-dimensional maps of the outer edge of the sun’s atmosphere, a shifting, frothy boundary that marks where solar winds escape the sun’s magnetic grasp. By combining the maps and […]

Most smaller galaxies may not have supermassive black holes in their centers, according to a recent study using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This contrasts with the common idea that nearly every galaxy has one of […]