Enlarge / A rendering of the star V Hydrae, or V Hya for short. In its death throes, the star emitted a series of expanding rings that scientists calculated are being formed every few hundred years, per UCLA astronomer Mark Morris. (credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF)) Astronomers have caught a red giant star going through […]
Enlarge / With better alignment, the test star has been joined by a whole host of background stars and galaxies. (credit: NASA/STScI ) Today, NASA announced that it has successfully completed two further steps to align the mirrors of the Webb telescope. The resulting performance indicates that Webb will meet or exceed its design goals. […]
Enlarge / Illustration of a swarm of smaller black holes in a gas disk rotating around the giant black hole. (credit: J. Samsing/Neils Bohr Institute) In 2019, the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration picked up a gravitational wave signal from a black hole merger that proved to be one for the record books. Dubbed “GW190521, ” it was […]
Enlarge / Illustration of a swarm regarding smaller black holes in some sort of gas disk rotating around a good giant black hole. (credit: M. Samsing/Neils Bohr Institute) Within 2019, the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration selected up a gravitational wave transmission from a black hole merging that proved to be 1 for the record books. Called “GW190521, […]
Enlarge / The slightly hazy, light patch in the middle of the image is the DF2 galaxy, so diffuse that other galaxies are clearly visible behind it. (credit: NASA, ESA, and P. van Dokkum) The first evidence for dark matter were galaxies that behaved as if they had far more matter than could be accounted […]
Enlarge / This artist’s impression shows a close-up view of Proxima d, a planet candidate recently found orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. (credit: ESO/L. Calçada) We’ve now cataloged thousands of planets that orbit distant stars. For most of them, our knowledge is limited to basic statistics: […]
Enlarge / The string of interrupted bright patches moving from top left to lower right is a channel filled with salt deposits. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS) By now, there’s plenty of evidence that Mars had a watery past, and more data is coming in all the time. But that evidence doesn’t necessarily give us a complete picture of Mars’ […]
Enlarge / A Starlink track running across the Andromeda galaxy. (credit: Caltech Optical Observatories/IPAC) SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service will require a dense constellation of satellites to provide consistent, low-latency connectivity. It already has over 1,500 satellites in orbit and has already received approval to operate 12,000 of them. And that has astronomers worried. Although SpaceX […]
Enlarge / Artist’s conception of a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE) — a star being shredded by the powerful gravity of a supermassive black hole. Material from the star spirals into a disk rotating around the black hole, and a jet of particles is ejected. There are decades of radio astronomy data in the archives of […]
Enlarge / The blue area is the basin formed by the particular largest impact on the Moon. Additional craters have formed by subsequent impacts. (credit: NASA/GSFC/University of Arizona ) As the Moon coalesced from the debris of an impact early in the Solar System’s history, typically the steady stream of orbital impacts is thought to […]