Astronomy News

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. New images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have helped astronomers identify rapid changes in material blasting off stars at the centers of two nearby young planetary nebulae: NGC 6302 and NGC 7027. This Hubble image shows NGC 7027, or the ‘Jewel Bug’ nebula. Image credit: NASA / ESA / J....

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 —...

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...

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...

Jun 11, 2020 by Natali Anderson

Astronomers have found evidence of a substellar companion — a low-mass brown dwarf or a giant planet — orbiting Roque 12, a member of the young...

Jun 10, 2020 by News Staff

A research team led by University of Manchester astronomers has carried out a long-term monitoring campaign of a repeating fast radio burst called FRB...

Jun 9, 2020 by Natali Anderson

Astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope have discovered two new planets in the Kepler-160 planetary system. One of the new planets...

Jun 8, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Astronomers using ISRO’s AstroSat space observatory have detected a very rare ultraluminous X-ray source in the Magellanic Bridge, a 43,000-light-year-long...

Jun 8, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced this stunning image of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 2608. This Hubble image shows NGC 2608, a barred spiral...

Jun 4, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have found no evidence of hypothetical first-generation stars — called Population III stars...

Jun 3, 2020 by News Staff

About 3.5 million years ago, a so-called Seyfert flare from Sagittarius A*, Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, created two enormous ionization cones...

Jun 3, 2020 by News Staff

A team of professional astronomers and citizen scientists has spotted a young brown dwarf with a disk that could potentially form exoplanets. Named W1200-7845,...

Jun 2, 2020 by News Staff

Massive neutron stars have sizable quark-matter cores, according to a study published in the journal Nature Physics. An artist’s conception of a massive...