Category Astronomy/Space

Pioneering a new technique, researchers have peered into the extremely faint light that exists between galaxies to describe the history and state of orphan stars. An international team of astronomers have turned a new technique onto a group of galaxies and the faint light between them — known as ‘intra-group light’ — to characterise the stars that dwell there.

Lead author of the study published in MNRAS, Dr Cristina Martínez-Lombilla from the School of Physics at UNSW Science, said “We know almost nothing about intra-group light.

“The brightest parts of the intra-group light are ~50 times fainter than the darkest night sky on Earth...

An international team of scientists has observed the narrowing of a quasar jet for the first time by using a network of radio telescopes across the world...

The JWST just scored another first: a detailed molecular and chemical portrait of a distant world’s skies. New observations of WASP-39 b reveal a never-before-seen molecule in the atmosphere of a planet – sulfur dioxide – among other details.

The telescope’s array of highly sensitive instruments was trained on the atmosphere of a “hot Saturn” – a planet about as massive as Saturn orbiting a star some 700 light-years away – known as WASP-39 b. While JWST and other space telescopes, including Hubble and Spitzer, previously have revealed isolated ingredients of this broiling planet’s atmosphere, the new readings provide a full menu of atoms, molecules, and even signs of active chemistry and clouds.

“The clarity of...

A research team has reconstructed the origin of an unusual gravitational wave signal. The signal GW190521 may result from the merger of two massive black holes that captured each other in their gravitational field and then collided while spinning around each other in a rapid, eccentric motion.

When black holes collide in the universe, the clash shakes up space and time: the amount of energy released during the merger is so great that it causes space-time to oscillate, similar to waves on the surface of water...