Good news for late bloomers: Planets may have millions of years more time to arise around most stars than previously thought. Planet-making disks around young stars typically last for 5…
Category: Astronomy
For the first time, astronomers saw dust in space being pushed by starlight
A pair of stars in our galaxy is revealing how light pushes around matter. It’s the first time anyone has directly seen how the pressure of light from stars changes…
A 3-D model of the Cat’s Eye nebula shows rings sculpted by jets
Roughly 3,000 light-years from Earth sits one of the most complex and least understood nebulae, a whirling landscape of gas and dust left in the wake of a star’s death…
The James Webb Space Telescope spied the earliest born stars yet seen
Some of the earliest stars yet seen are now coming to light in one of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Formed roughly 800 million years after…
A protogalaxy in the Milky Way may be our galaxy’s original nucleus
The Milky Way left its “poor old heart” in and around the constellation Sagittarius, astronomers report. New data from the Gaia spacecraft reveal the full extent of what seems to…
Passing through the Milky Way’s arms may have helped form Earth’s solid ground
Earth’s journey through the Milky Way might have helped create the planet’s first continents. Comets may have bombarded Earth every time the early solar system traveled through our galaxy’s spiral…
Here’s the James Webb telescope’s first direct image of an exoplanet
This is the first picture of an exoplanet from the James Webb Space Telescope. “We’re actually measuring photons from the atmosphere of the planet itself,” says astronomer Sasha Hinkley of…
The James Webb telescope spotted CO2 in an exoplanet’s atmosphere
The James Webb Space Telescope has gotten the first sniff of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet in another solar system. “It’s incontrovertible. It’s there. It’s definitely there,”…
The discovery of the Kuiper Belt revamped our view of the solar system
On a Hawaiian mountaintop in the summer of 1992, a pair of scientists spotted a pinprick of light inching through the constellation Pisces. That unassuming object — located over a…
Over time, Betelgeuse changed color. Now it’s also lost its rhythm
The star Betelgeuse has always been a diva. Astronomers from antiquity through the present day have watched the red supergiant pulsing at the shoulder of the constellation Orion, and the…
