Category Astronomy/Space

Zeta Ophiuchi has had an interesting life. It began as a typical large star about twenty times more massive than the sun. It spent its days happily orbiting a large companion star until its companion exploded as a supernova about a million years ago. The explosion ejected Zeta Ophiuchi, so now it is speeding away through interstellar space. Of course, the supernova also expelled the outer layers of the companion star, so rather than empty space, our plucky star is speeding through the remnant gas as well. As they say on Facebook, it’s complicated. And that’s great news for astronomers, as a recent study shows.

Zeta Ophiuchi is most famous for be...

Using the first science image released by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) this month, an international team of scientists with significant contribution from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has built an improved model for the mass distribution of the galaxy cluster SMACS J0723.3−7327. Acting as a so-called gravitational lens, the foreground galaxy cluster produces both multiple images of background galaxies and magnifies these images...

Black holes with varying light signatures but that were thought to be the same objects being viewed from different angles are actually in different stages of the life cycle, according to a study led by Dartmouth researchers.

The research on black holes known as “active galactic nuclei,” or AGNs, says that it definitively shows the need to revise the widely used “unified model of AGN” that characterizes supermassive black holes as all having the same properties.

The study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, provides answers to a nagging space mystery and should allow researchers to create more pre...

A dense, collapsed star spinning 707 times per second—making it one of the fastest spinning neutron stars in the Milky Way galaxy—has shredded and consumed nearly the entire mass of its stellar companion and, in the process, grown into the heaviest neutron star observed to date.

Weighing this record-setting neutron star, which tops the charts at 2...