Category Astronomy/Space

An international team of astronomers has performed follow-up observations of a nearby alien world known as TOI-1685 b. Results of the observations, published May 21 on the pre-print server arXiv, indicate that TOI-1685 b is a hot and rocky alien world with an Earth-like density.

The so-called “super-Earths” are planets more massive than Earth but not exceeding the mass of Neptune...

Stars near the center of our galaxy are acting kind of weird. Dark matter may be the explanation. A team of scientific detectives (so to speak) have discovered a potential new class of stars that could exist within a light-year of the Milky Way’s center that could be operating according to an unusual mechanism: dark matter annihilation. This process would produce an outward pressure on the stars other than hydrogen fusion, keeping them from gravitationally collapsing—and making them essentially immortal, their youth being refreshed constantly...

After its “birth” in the Big Bang, the universe consisted mainly of hydrogen and a few helium atoms. These are the lightest elements in the periodic table. More-or-less all elements heavier than helium were produced in the 13.8 billion years between the Big Bang and the present day.

Stars have produced many of these heavier elements through the process of nuclear fusion. However, this only makes elements as heavy as iron. The creation of any heavier elements would consume energy instead of releasing it.

In order to explain the presence of these heavier elements today, it’s necessary to find phenomena that can produce them. One type of event that fits the bill is a gamma-ray burst (GRB)—the most powerful class of explosion in the universe...

An international team of astronomers today announced the discovery of the two earliest and most distant galaxies ever seen, dating back to only 300 million years after the Big Bang. These results, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), mark a major milestone in the study of the early universe.

The discoveries were made by the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) team. Daniel Eisenstein from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) is one of the team leaders of JADES and Principal Investigator of the observing program that revealed these galaxies...