The bright, red star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion has shown some unexpected behavior. In late 2019 and 2020, it became fainter than we had ever seen it — at least in records going back more than a century. Briefly, it became fainter (just about) than Bellatrix, the third brightest star of Orion. This event ...
The search for habitable conditions beyond Earth has just become more interesting with the discovery on Saturn’s moon Enceladus of biologically available phosphorus. Phosphorus is the most elusive of the six crucial elements needed for life. In research published in Nature, data from the Cassini spacecraft were used to find phosphorus compounds called phosphates in ...
Astronomers have been working to better understand the galactic environments of fast radio bursts (FRBs) — intense, momentary bursts of energy occurring in mere milliseconds and with unknown cosmic origins. Now, a study of the slow-moving, star-forming gas in the same galaxy found to host an FRB has been published in The Astrophysical Journal. This ...
When stars like our Sun die, they tend to go out with a whimper and not a bang — unless they happen to be part of a binary (two) star system that could give rise to a supernova explosion. Now, for the first time, astronomers have spotted the radio signature of just such an event ...
Physicists believe most of the matter in the universe is made up of dark matter, an invisible substance that we only know about by its indirect effects on the stars and galaxies we can see. We’re not crazy! Without this “dark matter,” the universe as we see it would make no sense. But the nature ...
The coastal town of Exmouth in Western Australia experienced one of the most spectacular astronomical phenomena on April 20, 2023 — a total solar eclipse. Eclipses have entranced us for millennia. But it turns out that calculating exactly when and where we can watch an eclipse in its full glory can be surprisingly hard. Watching ...
Finding life on other planets might well be the holy grail of astronomy, but the hunt for suitable host exoplanets that can sustain life is a resource-intensive task. The search for exoplanets (planets outside our Solar System) involves competing for time on Earth’s biggest telescopes — yet the hit rate of this search can be ...
In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration produced the first-ever image of a black hole, stunning the world. Now, scientists are taking it further. The next-generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) collaboration aims to create high-quality videos of black holes. But this next-generation collaboration is groundbreaking in other ways, too. It’s the first large physics ...
Hot on the heels of the disappointing Green Comet, astronomers have just discovered a new comet with the potential to be next year’s big story — C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS). Although it is still more than 18 months from its closest approach to Earth and the Sun, Tsuchinshan-ATLAS already has social media buzzing, with optimistic articles ...
It is no exaggeration to say the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) represents a new era for modern astronomy. Launched on December 25 last year and fully operational since July, the telescope offers glimpses of the universe that were inaccessible to us before. Like the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb telescope is in space, so ...
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