Outer reaches of the solar system could harbor another – ninth planet—or evidence modifying laws of gravity. An artist’s impression of a Kuiper Belt object (KBO), located on the outer…
Category: Astronomy
“Starquakes” Could Explain Mystery Signals
Receiver of the Arecibo Telescope, Puerto Rico. FRB data was provided by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in China and the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico, two of the…
Dazzling – and Fortunate – Story of Gold
New research offers a theory on how gold, platinum, and other precious metals found their way to shallow pockets within Earth’s mantle. Artistic rendering of a large collision on the…
Bursts of Star Formation Explain Mysterious Brightness at Cosmic Dawn
Intense flashes of light, not mass, during star formation, resolve the puzzle of impossible brightness. When scientists viewed the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) first images of the universe’s earliest…
How New Satellite Type Will Impact Earth Astronomy
A team of scientists has been tracking a bright object in the sky. But it’s not a star. It’s a new type of commercial satellite. Astronomers are trying to understand…
Prehistoric Cosmic Airburst Preceded the Advent of Agriculture in the Levant
Agriculture in Syria started with a cosmic bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth’s atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the…
Seeking Euclid’s Hidden Stars: Commissioning Looks Up
Euclid commissioning – the period after launch when a mission’s instruments and subsystems are deployed, turned on, tested and calibrated – began well. Teams at ESA’s mission control worked 24 hours a day…
Supernova Bubble Expands in New Hubble Time-Lapse Movie
Though a doomed star exploded some 20,000 years ago, its tattered remnants continue racing into space at breakneck speeds – and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has caught the action. Expanding supernova bubble…
Unexpectedly Calm and Remote Galaxy Cluster Discovered
Cluster is farthest ever spotted not disrupted by violent collisions with other galaxy clusters. Astronomers have discovered the most distant “relaxed” galaxy cluster to date — the farthest cluster ever spotted that…
Cosmic Web Lights Up in Darkness of Space
Chris Martin, the principal investigator of the Keck Cosmic Web Imager, is seen inspecting the instrument in a clean room at Caltech before it was installed at Keck Observatory. Image…
