Astronomers found a pulsar hurtling through space at nearly 2.5 million miles per hour — so fast it could travel the distance between Earth and the Moon in just 6 minutes. The discovery was made using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). Pulsars are superdense, ...
The center of our galaxy is a frenzy of activity. A behemoth black hole — 4 million times as massive as the Sun — blasts out energy as it chows down on interstellar detritus while neighboring stars burst to life and subsequently explode. Now, an international team of astronomers has discovered two exhaust channels — ...
Located in the constellation of Hercules, about 230 million light-years away, NGC 6052 is a pair of colliding galaxies. They were first discovered in 1784 by William Herschel and were originally classified as a single irregular galaxy because of their odd shape. However, we now know that NGC 6052 actually consists of two galaxies that are in the process of ...
What is a black hole? In an article that has just appeared in the journal Nature Astronomy, LMU philosopher Erik Curiel shows that physicists use different definitions of the concept, depending on their own particular fields of interest. It is conventionally thought of as an astronomical object that irrevocably consumes all matter and radiation that ...
On Nov. 22, 2014, astronomers spotted a rare event in the night sky: A supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, nearly 300 million light-years from Earth, ripping apart a passing star. The event, known as a tidal disruption flare, for the black hole’s massive tidal pull that tears a star apart, created ...
New research led by astrophysicists at Durham University, UK, predicts that the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) could hit the Milky Way in 2 billion years’ time. The collision could occur much earlier than the predicted impact between the Milky Way and another neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, which scientists say will hit our galaxy in 8 billion years. ...
An unusual supernova studied by multiple telescopes, including the SOAR telescope and other telescopes at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) and NSF’s Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), is thought to herald the birth of a new black hole or neutron star, caught at the exact moment of its creation. Observations ...
Using data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, citizen scientists have discovered a new world, a planet roughly twice the size of Earth located within its star’s habitable zone, the range of orbital distances where liquid water may exist on the planet’s surface. The new world, known as K2-288Bb, could be rocky or could be a gas-rich ...
An international team of astronomers, including from the University of Cambridge, discovered the massive object when trawling through data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite. The object, named Antlia 2 (or Ant 2), has avoided detection until now thanks to its extremely low density as well as a perfectly chosen hiding place, behind the ...
Astronomers have found what could be one of the universe’s oldest stars, a body almost entirely made of materials spewed from the Big Bang. The discovery of this approximately 13.5 billion-year-old tiny star means more stars with very low mass and very low metal content are likely out there — perhaps even the universe’s very ...
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