Astrophysics News

September 5, 2024

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Gravitational Waves Unveil Previously Unseen Properties of Neutron Stars

Sep. 5, 2024 — A better understanding of the inner workings of neutron stars will lead to a greater knowledge of the dynamics that underpin the workings of the universe and also could help drive future technology. A new study details how new insights into how ...

Distorted Galaxy Forming Cosmic Question Mark

Sep. 4, 2024 — It's 7 billion years ago, and the universe's heyday of star formation is beginning to slow. What might our Milky Way galaxy have looked like at that time? Astronomers have found clues in the form of a cosmic question mark, the result of a rare ...

How Bright Is the Universe's Glow? Study Offers Best Measurement Yet

Sep. 3, 2024 — Over billions of years, the universe's stars and galaxies shined their light into space, leaving behind an imperceptibly faint night light known as the cosmic optical background. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has traveled to the edge of Earth's ...

Dancing Galaxies Make a Monster at the Cosmic Dawn

Aug. 29, 2024 — Astronomers have spotted a pair of galaxies in the act of merging 12.8 billion years ago. The characteristics of these galaxies indicate that the merger will form a monster galaxy, one of the brightest types of objects in the ...

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Dark Matter Could Have Helped Make Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe

Aug. 28, 2024 — Supermassive black holes typically take billions of years to form. But the James Webb Space Telescope is finding them not that long after the Big ...

Six New Rogue Worlds: Star Birth Clues

Aug. 27, 2024 — The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted six likely rogue worlds -- objects with planet-like masses but untethered from any star's gravity -- including the lightest ever identified with a dusty ...

Bubbling, Frothing and Sloshing: Long-Hypothesized Plasma Instabilities Finally Observed

Aug. 27, 2024 — Scientists have observed new details of how plasma interacts with magnetic fields, potentially providing insight into the formation of enormous ...

Highest-Resolution Observations Yet from the Surface of Earth

Aug. 27, 2024 — Astronomers have achieved the highest resolution ever obtained from the surface of Earth. They managed this feat by detecting light from distant galaxies at a frequency of around 345 GHz, equivalent ...

Astrophysicists Use AI to Precisely Calculate Universe's 'Settings'

Aug. 26, 2024 — The new estimates of the parameters that form the basis of the standard model of cosmology are far more precise than previous approaches using the same galaxy distribution ...

Extraterrestrial Chemistry With Earthbound Possibilities

Aug. 21, 2024 — Who are we? Why are we here? We are stardust, the result of chemistry occurring throughout vast clouds of interstellar gas and dust. To better understand how that chemistry could create prebiotic ...

Early Galaxies Were Not Too Big for Their Britches After All

Aug. 26, 2024 — According to a new study, some of the earliest galaxies observed with the James Webb Space Telescope are in fact much less massive than they first appeared. Black holes in some of these galaxies make ...

New Record in Search for Dark Matter

Aug. 26, 2024 — New results from the world's most sensitive dark matter detector put the best-ever limits on particles called WIMPs, a leading candidate for what makes up our universe's invisible ...

First Low Frequency Search for Alien Technology in Distant Galaxies

Aug. 26, 2024 — Researchers have announced a groundbreaking study using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Western Australia. The research is the first to search for signs of alien technology in galaxies beyond ...

New Heaviest Exotic Antimatter Nucleus

Aug. 21, 2024 — Scientists studying the tracks of particles streaming from six billion collisions of atomic nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) -- an 'atom smasher' that recreates the conditions of ...

New View of North Star Reveals Spotted Surface

Aug. 20, 2024 — High-resolution images show large spots on the surface of ...

Explanation Found for X-Ray Radiation from Black Holes

Aug. 20, 2024 — Researchers have succeeded in something that has been pursued since the 1970s: explaining the X-ray radiation from the black hole surroundings. The radiation originates from the combined effect of ...

Right on Schedule: Physicists Use Modeling to Forecast a Black Hole's Feeding Patterns With Precision

Aug. 16, 2024 — The dramatic dimming of a light source ~ 870 million light years away from Earth confirms the accuracy of a detailed ...

Galaxies in Dense Environments Tend to Be Larger, Settling One Cosmic Question and Raising Others

Aug. 14, 2024 — A new study has found galaxies with more neighbors tend to be larger than their counterparts that have a similar shape and mass, but reside in less dense environments. The team, which used a ...

Astronomers Uncover Risks to Planets That Could Host Life

Aug. 5, 2024 — A groundbreaking study has revealed that red dwarf stars can produce stellar flares that carry far-ultraviolet (far-UV) radiation levels much higher than previously ...

Cold Antimatter for Quantum State-Resolved Precision Measurements

Aug. 2, 2024 — Why does the universe contain matter and (virtually) no antimatter? Scientists have achieved an experimental breakthrough in this context. It can contribute to measuring the mass and magnetic moment ...

The Rotation of a Nearby Star Stuns Astronomers

July 31, 2024 — Astronomers have found that the rotational profile of a nearby star, V889 Herculis, differs considerably from that of the Sun. The observation provides insights into the fundamental stellar ...

What No One Has Seen Before -- Simulation of Gravitational Waves from Failing Warp Drive

July 30, 2024 — Physicists have been exploring the theoretical possibility of spaceships driven by compressing the four-dimensional spacetime for decades. Although this so-called 'warp drive' originates ...

The Corona Is Weirdly Hot: Parker Solar Probe Rules out One Explanation

July 30, 2024 — By diving into the sun's corona, NASA's Parker Solar Probe has ruled out S-shaped bends in the sun's magnetic field as a cause of the corona's searing ...

Dark Matter: A Camera Trap for the Invisible

July 29, 2024 — AI-powered image recognition could give researchers a new tool in hunt for dark ...

NASA's Fermi Finds New Feature in Brightest Gamma-Ray Burst Yet Seen

July 25, 2024 — In October 2022, astronomers were stunned by what was quickly dubbed the BOAT -- the brightest-of-all-time gamma-ray burst (GRB). Now an international science team reports that data from NASA's ...

Dark Matter Flies Ahead of Normal Matter in Mega Galaxy Cluster Collision

July 24, 2024 — Astronomers have untangled a messy collision between two massive clusters of galaxies in which the clusters' vast clouds of dark matter have decoupled from the so-called normal ...

Researchers Explore the Effects of Stellar Magnetism on Potential Habitability of Exoplanets

July 22, 2024 — A study extends the definition of a habitable zone for planets to include their star's magnetic ...

Astrophysicists Uncover Supermassive Blackhole/dark Matter Connection in Solving the 'Final Parsec Problem'

July 22, 2024 — Researchers have found a link between some of the largest and smallest objects in the cosmos: supermassive black holes and dark matter particles. Their new calculations reveal that pairs of ...

Life Signs Could Survive Near Surfaces of Enceladus and Europa

July 21, 2024 — Europa and Enceladus, icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn respectively, have evidence of oceans beneath their crusts. A NASA experiment suggests -- if these oceans support life -- signatures of that life ...

Exoplanet-Hunting Telescope to Begin Search for Another Earth in 2026

July 18, 2024 — Europe's next big space mission -- a telescope that will hunt for Earth-like rocky planets outside of our solar system -- is on course to launch at the end of 2026. PLATO, or PLAnetary Transits ...

Another Intermediate-Mass Black Hole Discovered at the Center of Our Galaxy

July 18, 2024 — So far, only about ten intermediate-mass black holes have been discovered in the entire universe. The newly identified black hole causes surrounding stars in a cluster to move in an unexpectedly ...

Want to Spot a Deepfake? Look for the Stars in Their Eyes

July 17, 2024 — In an era when the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) images is at the fingertips of the masses, the ability to detect fake pictures -- particularly deepfakes of people -- is becoming ...

How Astronomers Are Using Pulsars to Observe Evidence of Dark Matter

July 16, 2024 — Tantalizing evidence of potential dark matter objects has been detected with the help of the Universe's 'timekeepers'. These pulsars -- neutron stars which rotate and emit ...

Sun-Like Stars Found Orbiting Hidden Companions

July 16, 2024 — Astronomers have uncovered what appear to be 21 neutron stars in orbit around stars like our Sun. The discovery is surprising because it is not clear how a star that exploded winds up next to a star ...