Astronomy

It’s great to see old astronomical observations come to light. Not only can these confirm or refute what’s known about historic astronomical events, but they can describe what early observers actually saw.This post was originally […]

White dwarfs are the compact remnants of stars that have stopped nuclear burning, a fate that will eventually befall our sun. These extremely dense objects are degenerate stars because their structure is counterintuitive: the heavier […]

A pair of Sydney Ph.D. students helped sharpen the view of humanity’s most powerful space observatory—without leaving Earth. As an indelible reminder of this thrilling result, Louis Desdoigts, now a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden in […]

Radio astronomy opens a window onto the invisible universe. While our eyes can detect visible light, countless objects in space emit radiation at much longer wavelengths, in the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Where […]

Weather forecasting is a powerful tool. During hurricane season, for instance, meteorologists create computer simulations to forecast how these destructive storms form and where they might travel, which helps prevent damage to coastal communities. When […]

Betelgeuse, the brilliant red star marking Orion’s shoulder, has long been suspected of harboring a secret. I have to confess, Betelgeuse holds a special place in my heart as the first star I ever looked […]

When galaxies collide, it’s not a gentle affair, but it does take millions of years. Over this time, the two massive star systems slowly merge together, their gravitational pull drawing them closer. At the heart […]

Dark matter, the substance that makes up about 27% of the universe, could potentially be detected as a red or blue light “fingerprint,” new research shows. The research is published in the journal Physics Letters […]

Using various space telescopes, an international team of astronomers have observed a newly detected very faint X-ray transient designated 4XMM J174610.7–290020. Results of the observational campaign, published October 2 on the arXiv pre-print server, yield […]

Using CO (J=1–0) molecular line data obtained from the 13.7-meter millimeter-wave telescope at the Purple Mountain Observatory’s Delingha Observatory, Sun Mingke, a Ph.D. student from the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences […]