Scientists from Washington University in St. Louis have launched a balloon-borne telescope to unlock the secrets of astrophysical black holes and neutron stars, some of the most extreme objects in…
Category: Space
The origins of dark comets
According to a University of Michigan study, up to 60% of near-Earth objects could be dark comets or mysterious asteroids that orbit the sun in our solar system. These comets…
The sun is already starting its next solar cycle—despite being halfway through its current one
This map shows which latitudes on the sun were rotating faster (shown in red and yellow) or slower (shown in blue and green) than average over the last 29 years,…
Sun-Like Stars Found Orbiting Hidden Companions
Most stars in our universe come in pairs. While our own Sun is a loner, many stars like our Sun orbit similar stars, while a host of other exotic pairings…
NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory will detect thousands of elusive brown dwarfs, unlocking Milky Way mysteries
Too big to be planets but too small to be stars, distant brown dwarfs are a key ingredient for understanding the history of the Milky Way. These elusive objects have…
Nearest millisecond pulsar has radius of 11.4 kilometers and is 1.4x as heavy as the sun
The nearest millisecond pulsar, PSR J0437-4715, has a radius of 11.4 kilometers and a mass 1.4 times that of the Sun. This is the result of precision measurements made by…
Engineers build optical elements for the Coronagraph Instrument of the Roman Space Telescope
Artist’s impression of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The actively cooled primary mirror has a diameter of 2.4 metres. It is a copy of the primary mirror of the…
Here’s how AI Is changing NASA’s Mars rover science
PIXL, the white instrument at top left, is one of several science tools located on the end of the robotic arm aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover. The Mars rover’s left navcam…
Slow-spinning radio neutron star breaks all the rules
No other radio-emitting neutron star, out of the more than 3000 discovered so far, has been discovered rotating so slowly. The results are published today in Nature Astronomy. Lead author…
