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Astronomy

A collection of 379 posts

Space

Scientists Discover Two Supermassive Black Holes in Merging Galaxies

It will take several hundred million years for this particular pair of black holes to collide, but the insight gained from this observation could help scientists better estimate how many pairs of black holes in the universe are close to colliding.

Space

NASA Released an Hour-long Time-Lapse Video Showing 133 Days of the Sun's Life

From a series of images taken by cameras of the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft, NASA specialists have created a stunning video showing how the Sun's surface has changed over 133 days.

Space

Hubble Telescope Finds a Black Hole Twisting a Star into a Doughnut as It Swallows It

Scientists say that a star is only torn apart in this way a few times every 100 thousand years in a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its core. These stellar killings are called "tidal disruption events."

Space

Astronomers Discovered Two Exoplanets That May Be Mostly Water

Scientists hope the planets orbiting the red dwarf Kepler-138 won't be the last of its kind to be discovered. As instruments and detection techniques improve, more aquatic worlds like Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d are likely to be discovered.

Space

Hubble Captured a Star-Studded Cosmic Cloud

NGC 6530 is a cluster of several thousand stars embedded within the Lagoon Nebula – a gigantic interstellar cloud of gas and dust. It is the nebula that gives this image its distinctive smoky appearance.

Space

NASA's Webb Studied the Atmosphere of an Alien Exoplanet in Detail

The planet's atmosphere is composed of sulfur and silicates. When they interact with the parent star's light, they produce sulfur dioxide – this is the first time such a compound has been found in the atmosphere of an exoplanet.

Space

NASA Shared a 12-year Timelapse of the Entire Universe

NEOWISE has added hundreds of brown dwarfs to its catalog, monitored 1,000 protostars, gas balls hot enough to ignite and become stars, and discovered millions of supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies.

Space

James Webb's New Image Shows the Early Days of Star Formation

The protostar is now hidden in an hourglass-shaped cloud of dust and gas, and it has yet to develop the ability to generate its own energy through nuclear fusion, like the Sun and other stars.

Space

A Well-Known Ground Detector Can Detect Alien Spaceships

A team of American scientists has published a new study, which has not yet passed scientific peer review, in which they propose to use the world's largest detector for detecting gravitational waves LIGO to find alien spaceships.

Space

The Automated Martian Station InSight Stopped Communicating

The InSight space science station, which arrived at Mars in 2018, has stopped communicating. As NASA noted, the last time the spacecraft could be contacted was December 15.

Space

Astronomers Predicted the Death of an Exoplanet

Kepler-1658b is a typical hot Jupiter. It orbits a pro-evolved star of spectral class F, located 2,600 light-years from Earth. The exoplanet has six times the mass of Jupiter, and its orbit is only 0.05 AU (7 million km) from its parent luminary.

Space

Astronomers Discover a Huge Planet Killer Asteroid

Over time, the movement of this asteroid will sync with that of the Earth, and it will cross much closer by, but it will happen centuries into the future. Any asteroid over 1km in size is considered a planet killer and enough to trigger a mass extinction event on Earth.

Space

Astronomers Created a New Interactive Map of the Universe

The full map of the observable universe is actually a slice of cosmos with a thickness of about 10 degrees. However, it still gives an idea of the scale of our universe as well as its stars and galaxies up to 13.7 billion light-years away.

Space

James Webb Telescope Spotted Two Unusually Bright Galaxies from the Early Universe

The galaxies are extremely bright, and one of the reasons for this may be that they could have been very massive, with lots of low-mass stars. Or they could be much less massive, consisting of a smaller number of extremely bright Population III stars.

Space

Astronomers Discover Traces of an Ancient Ocean on Mars

Scientists from Pennsylvania State University have found evidence that about 3.5 billion years ago, Mars had a vast ocean, which covered hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of the planet. Its existence was indicated by the topography of the shoreline.

Space

Astronomers Discover Closest Known Black Hole to Earth

A team of astronomers has discovered the closest known black hole to Earth using data from the Gaia spacecraft. They did it by observing the Sun-like star moving in unexpected ways caused by the gravity of an unseen massive object.

Space

Astronomers Found a Way to Predict When a Supernova Will Occur

Type II-P supernovae abruptly dump the matter surrounding them, which becomes a cloud. It gets very hot during the explosion and then gradually cools down, thus creating the effect of a slow-fading star.

Space

NASA Captured an Image of the Sun Smiling

Despite the cheerful appearance of our star, what caused its smile might be rather unpleasant for the inhabitants of Earth and has a scientific explanation.

Space

Mumm Designed a Champagne Bottle Designed for Space Travel

If you squeeze a finger-controlled valve, a globule of champagne will be released in the form of foam. Drinkers can scoop the wine out of the air using a tiny glass with a long stem that resembles an egg cup.

Space

NASA's DART Spacecraft Successfully Changed the Orbit of an Asteroid

The goal of DART was to change the orbit of Dimorphos around the larger asteroid by at least 73 seconds, although scientists had hoped the effect would be more like 10 minutes. This minimum benchmark has been exceeded by more than 25 times.

Space

A New Simulation Shows That Our Moon Could Have Formed Within Hours

According to a popular theory, the Moon was formed after Earth's collision with the larger celestial body – planet Theia. That collision resulted in a giant cloud of space material that later formed the satellite of our planet.

Space

Mars Is Littered with More than 15 Thousand Pounds of Human Trash

West Virginia University postdoc Cagri Kilic has calculated how much debris humans have left on Mars over 50 years of exploring the surface of the Red Planet. There are now three main sources of debris: discarded hardware, inactive spacecraft, crashed spacecraft.

Space

Astronauts Could Use Martian Soil for 3D-Printing

In most of their experiments, the researchers mixed different amounts of simulated Martian regolith with a titanium alloy. They also tried to make a 3D-printing material from pure simulated regolith.

Space

Astronomers May Have Discovered Remnants of the Universe's Earliest Stars

At the end of their life cycle, first-generation stars would explode as exceptionally bright pair-instability supernovae, filling interstellar space with a characteristic mixture of heavy chemical elements.

Space

The Webb Telescope Captures Mysterious Rings Around a Distant Star

Astronomer at NOIRLab and principal investigator of the project Ryan Lau confirmed that these rings are real, not an optical illusion. He promised that scientists would soon publish a full research paper explaining this phenomenon.