Category Astronomy/Space

Newest data from HERA improves search for cosmic dawn radiation, tests theories of galaxy formation. An array of 350 radio telescopes in the Karoo desert of South Africa is getting closer to detecting “cosmic dawn” – the era after the Big Bang when stars first ignited and galaxies began to bloom.

In a paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) team reports that it has doubled the sensitivity of the array, which was already the most sensitive radio telescope in the world dedicated to exploring ...

Curtin University-led research into the durability and age of an ancient asteroid made of rocky rubble and dust, revealed significant findings that could contribute to potentially saving the planet if one ever hurtled toward Earth.

The international team studied three tiny dust particles collected from the surface of ancient 500-metre-long rubble pile asteroid, Itokawa, returned to Earth by the Japanese Space Agency’s Hayabusa 1 probe.

The study’s results showed asteroid Itokawa, which is 2 million kilometres from Earth and around the size of Sydney Harbour Bridge, was hard to destroy and resistant to collision.

Lead author Professor Fred Jourdan, Director of the Western Australian Argon Isotope Facility, part of the John de Laeter Centre and the School of Earth and Plane...

An international team including Southwest Research Institute, Leiden University and NASA used observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to achieve the darkest ever view of a dense interstellar cloud...

Our solar system is estimated to be about 4.57 billion years old. Previous analyses of ancient meteorites have shown that minerals were created through chemical reactions with water as far back as 4.5 billion years ago. New findings from the Ryugu asteroid samples indicate that carbonates were forming from water-rock reactions several million years earlier, even closer to the solar system’s beginnings.

Mineral samples collected from the Ryugu asteroid by the Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft are helping UCLA space scientists and colleagues better understand the chemical composition of our solar system as it existed in its infancy, more than 4.5 billion years ago.

In research recently published in Nature Astronomy, scientists using isotopic ana...