Category Astronomy/Space

A team of astronomers have found that planet formation in our young Solar System started much earlier than previously thought, with the building blocks of planets growing at the same time as their parent star.

A study of some of the oldest stars in the Universe suggests that the building blocks of planets like Jupiter and Saturn begin to form while a young star is growing. It had been thought that planets only form once a star has reached its final size, but new results, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggests that stars and planets ‘grow up’ together.

The research, led by the University of Cambridge, changes our understanding of how planetary systems, including our own Solar System, formed, potentially solving a major puzzle in astronomy.

“We have a pretty good i...

Space scientists may need to rethink how gamma-ray bursts are formed after new research shows new-born supramassive stars, not black holes, are sometimes responsible for these huge extragalactic bursts of energy.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have been detected by satellites orbiting Earth as luminous flashes of the most energetic gamma-ray radiation lasting milliseconds to hundreds of seconds. These catastrophic blasts occur in distant galaxies, billions of light years from Earth.

A sub-type of GRB known as a short-duration GRB starts life when two neutron stars collide...

The Subaru Telescope successfully demonstrated engineering first light with a new instrument that will use about 2400 fiberoptic cables to capture the light from heavenly objects. Full operation is scheduled to start around 2024. The ability to observe thousands of objects simultaneously will provide unprecedented amounts of data to fuel Big Data Astronomy in the coming decade.

In addition to cameras, astronomers also use instruments known as spectrographs to study celestial object. A spectrograph breaks the light from an object into its component colors, in other words it creates a precise rainbow...

An intermediate-mass black hole lurking undetected in a dwarf galaxy revealed itself to astronomers when it gobbled up an unlucky star that strayed too close...