Category Astronomy/Space

Researchers’ recent observations of a stellar-mass black hole called Cygnus X-1 reveal new details about the configuration of extremely hot matter in the region immediately surrounding the black hole.

Matter is heated to millions of degrees as it is pulled toward a black hole. This hot matter glows in X-rays...

Planets can force their host stars to act younger than their age, according to a new study of multiple systems using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This may be the best evidence to date that some planets apparently slow down the aging process for their host stars.

While the anti-aging property of “hot Jupiters” (that is, gas giant exoplanets that orbit a star at Mercury’s distance or closer) has been seen before, this result is the first time it has been systematically documented, providing the strongest test yet of this exotic phenomenon.

“In medicine, you need a lot of patients enrolled in a study to know if the effects are real or some sort of outlier,” said Ni...

There are several theories about how Earth and its moon were formed, most involving a giant impact. Now scientists at the University of Leeds and the University of Chicago have analyzed the dynamics of fluids and electrically conducting fluids and concluded that Earth must have been magnetized either before the impact or as a result of it.

They claim this could help to narrow down the theories of the Earth-moon formation and inform future research into what really happened. Their work is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Professor David Hughes, an applied mathematician in the School of Mathematics at the University of Leeds, said, “Our new idea is to point out that our theoretical understanding of the Earth’s magnetic field today can a...

A trio of researchers from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Universität Innsbruck and the University of Geneva, respectively, has discovered a “stripped, pulsating core of a massive star” for the first time. In their paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, Andreas Irrgang, Norbert Przybilla and Georges Meynet, describe the unique object and the work that they did in verifying its makeup.

Stellar cores, as their name suggests, are the innermost parts of stars. Most often, such cores are covered by what space scientists call their “opaque envelope.” Theory has suggested that such cores can appear without their envelope if conditions arise that lead to its removal. But until now, this had never been observed.

In their pap...