Astronomy News

Hubble Observes ‘Flapping’ Shadow of HBC 672’s Planet-Forming Disk

This Hubble image shows the Serpens Nebula, a stellar nursery about 1,300 light-years away. Within the nebula, in the upper right of the image, a shadow is created by the protoplanetary disk surrounding HBC 672. While the disk of debris is too tiny to be seen even by Hubble, its shadow is projected upon the cloud in which it was born. In this view, the feature, the Bat Shadow, spans approximately 200 times the diameter of our own Solar System. Image credit: NASA / ESA / STScI.
Jun 26, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have captured striking images of HBC 672’s unseen protoplanetary disk casting a huge shadow across a more distant cloud in a star-forming region. This Hubble image shows the Serpens Nebula, a stellar nursery about 1,300 light-years away. Within the nebula, in the upper right of the image, a shadow is created by the protoplanetary disk surrounding HBC 672. While the disk of debris is too tiny...

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An artist’s impression of a four-planet system. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Breakthrough Listen Scans Kepler-160 System for Alien Technosignatures

Jun 25, 2020 by Sergio Prostak

The Breakthrough Listen Initiative, the largest ever scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of alien civilizations, has conducted a search...

An artist’s rendition of a mystery compact object in ‘mass gap’ found by LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors. Image credit: LIGO / Caltech / MIT / R. Hurt, IPAC.

GW190814 Sheds Light on Mass Gap between Neutron Stars and Black Holes

Jun 25, 2020 by News Staff

The gravitational-wave signal GW190814, detected on August 14, 2019 by NSF’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo...

Astronomers Find Neptune-Sized Exoplanet within Debris Disk around Nearby Star AU Microscopii

Jun 25, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Astronomers using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered a planet about the size of Neptune...

An artist’s impression of the TOI-1266 planetary system. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Two Venus-Zone Planets Found Orbiting Nearby Red Dwarf

Jun 24, 2020 by Natali Anderson

Astronomers have discovered and validated two small exoplanets orbiting the nearby red dwarf star TOI-1266. An artist’s impression of the TOI-1266 planetary...

An artist’s impression of a hot-Jupiter exoplanet. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Astronomers Find Youngest Known Hot Jupiter

Jun 23, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered a transiting hot-Jupiter...

This Hubble image shows the edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 5907. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / R. de Jong / Judy Schmidt, www.geckzilla.com.

Hubble Space Telescope Snaps Image of NGC 5907

Jun 22, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

NASA has released a stunning image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of the edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 5907. This Hubble image shows the edge-on...

This image from the eROSITA X-ray telescope shows the energetic Universe. As eROSITA scans the sky, the energy of the collected photons is measured with an accuracy ranging from 2% - 6%. To generate this image, in which the whole sky is projected onto an ellipse (so-called Aitoff projection) with the center of the Milky Way in the middle and the body of our Galaxy running horizontally, photons have been color-coded according to their energy (red for energies 0.3-0.6 keV, green for 0.6-1 keV, blue for 1-2.3 keV). The red diffuse glow away from the galactic plane is the emission of the hot gas in the vicinity of the Solar System (the Local Bubble). Along the plane itself, dust and gas absorb the lowest energy X-ray photons, so that only high-energy emitting sources can be seen, and their color appears blue in the image. The hotter gas close to the Galactic center, shown in green and yellow, carries imprinted the history of the most energetic processes in the life of the Milky Way, such as supernova explosions, driving fountains of gas out of the plane, and, possibly, past outburst from the now dormant supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Piercing through this turbulent, hot diffuse medium, are hundreds of thousands of X-ray sources, which appear mostly white in the image, and uniformly distributed over the sky. Among them, distant active galactic nuclei are visible as point sources, while clusters of galaxies reveal themselves as extended X-ray nebulosities. In total, about one million X-ray sources have been detected in this image. Image credit: Jeremy Sanders, Hermann Brunner & the eSASS team / Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics / Eugene Churazov & Marat Gilfanov, IKI.

eROSITA X-Ray Telescope Captures Hot, Energetic Universe

Jun 19, 2020 by News Staff

A new all-sky image from the eROSITA X-ray telescope onboard the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) space observatory contains over one million objects, about...

An artist’s impression of a water-world exoplanet. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Ocean Worlds May Be Common in Our Milky Way Galaxy

Jun 19, 2020 by News Staff

A team of U.S. astronomers has calculated internal heating rates for 53 terrestrial exoplanets and found that all of them are likely to have volcanic activity...

Hubble Observes Two Young, Rapidly Evolving Planetary Nebulae: NGC 6302 and NGC 7027

Jun 19, 2020 by News Staff

Planetary nebulae, whose stars shed their layers over thousands of years, can turn into crazy whirligigs while puffing off shells and jets of hot gas....

An artist’s impression of a magnetar. Image credit: ESA.

Astronomers Discover Youngest Magnetar Ever

Jun 18, 2020 by News Staff

Using NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), and ground-based...

SOHO-4000 is seen here in an image from the SOHO alongside its 3,999th comet discovery. The two comets are relatively close at approximately 1 million miles apart, suggesting that they could have been connected together as recently as a few years ago. Image credit: ESA / NASA / SOHO / Karl Battams.

SOHO Spacecraft Discovers Its 4,000th Comet

Jun 17, 2020 by News Staff

The ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) detected its 4,000th comet on June 15, 2020. SOHO-4000 is seen here in an image from the SOHO alongside...

π-Earth: Newfound Earth-Sized Exoplanet Orbits Its Star in 3.14 Days

Jun 17, 2020 by Natali Anderson

Using data from NASA’s Kepler/K2 mission, the SPECULOOS telescopes and the High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES) on the Keck I telescope at W.M....

An artist’s conception of the HR 858 planetary system. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Study: 18% of Sun-Like Stars May Host Potentially Habitable Earth-Sized Exoplanets

Jun 16, 2020 by News Staff

New estimate suggests that 18% of Sun-like (G-type) stars could have a planet the size of Earth orbiting in their conservative habitable zone. There may...

An artist’s illustration of complex organic molecules in space. Image credit: Jenny Mottar / NASA.

Astronomers Detect Organic Molecules in Starless and Prestellar Regions of Nearby Stellar Nursery

Jun 16, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers have detected the signatures of two complex organic molecules, methanol and acetaldehyde, in starless and prestellar cores of the Taurus Molecular...

Westby & Conselice present a cosmic perspective on the search for life and examine the likely number of CETI civilizations in our Milky Way Galaxy by utilizing the latest astrophysical information. Image credit: Angela Yuriko Smith.

Astronomers Say There Could Be 36 Communicating Extraterrestrial Civilizations in Milky Way

Jun 15, 2020 by News Staff

Using the assumption that intelligent life develops on exoplanets in a similar way as it does on Earth, a duo of researchers from the School of Physics...

An artist’s impression of the Proxima Centauri system. Image credit: Lorenzo Santinelli.

Astronomers Confirm Two Planets in Proxima Centauri System

Jun 15, 2020 by Sergio Prostak

Astronomers have finally confirmed the existence of two exoplanets — Proxima b and c — orbiting Proxima Centauri, the Sun’s closest stellar...

This anaglyph image can be viewed with red-blue stereo glasses to reveal Proxima Centauri’s distance from its background. Image credit: Siding Spring node, Las Cumbres Observatory / NASA / Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.

New Horizons Obtains Parallax Measurements for Two Nearby Stars

Jun 15, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers have long used a so-called parallax effect — how a star appears to shift against its background when seen from different locations —...

This Hubble image shows a massive galaxy cluster (center); along its borders reddish dots are visible; these are copies of the same galaxy called PLCK G045.1+61.1, which is 12 billion light-years away. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / B. Frye.

Hubble Uses Gravitational Lens to Capture Extremely Distant Starburst Galaxy

Jun 15, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Thanks to the presence of a cosmic lens, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope got a close-up look at PLCK G045.1+61.1, a starburst galaxy located approximately...

An artist’s impression of the Peter Pan disk around WISE J080822.18-644357.3, a red dwarf located about 331 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Carina. Image credit: Jonathan Holden / NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Astronomers Reveal Secrets of ‘Peter Pan’ Protoplanetary Disks

Jun 11, 2020 by News Staff

Peter Pan disks are a recently-discovered class of long-lived protoplanetary disks around low-mass stars that survive 5-10 times longer than typical protoplanetary...

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