Category Astronomy/Space

Using the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR), astronomers from the University of Bologna, Italy and elsewhere, have conducted radio observations of the nearby galaxy cluster Abell 2142. In result, they detected a new component of the cluster’s giant radio halo. The finding was presented in a paper published August 15 on the pre-print server arXiv.

Galaxy clusters contain up to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity. They are the largest known gravitationally bound structures in the universe, and could serve as excellent laboratories for studying galaxy evolution and cosmology.

Radio halos are enormous regions of diff...

A team of space scientists at the Planetary Science Institute, working with colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen University and the University of Aberdeen, has used data from China’s Chang’E-4 rover to learn more about the history of the moon. In their study, reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, the group analyzed lunar-penetrating radar (LPR) data sent back from the rover.

China’s Chang’E-4 rover has been wandering around on the far side of the moon since 2018...

Earlier this year, another team of astronomers reported the “Scary Barbie” event where they estimated a star with about 14 times the mass of the sun was destroyed by a black hole. However, this has not yet been confirmed as a tidal disruption, with the estimate of the star’s mass mainly based on the brightness of the flare, not on a detailed analysis of material around the black hole as with ASASSN-14li.

Another exciting aspect of the ASASSN-14li result is what it means for future studies. Astronomers have seen moderately massive stars like ASASSN-14li’s in the star cluster that contains the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope obtained images of the Ring Nebula, one of the best-known examples of a pla...