Category Astronomy/Space

Researchers have achieved a breakthrough in solar physics by providing the first direct evidence of small-scale torsional Alfvén waves in the sun’s corona—elusive magnetic waves that scientists have been searching for since the 1940s.

The discovery, published in Nature Astronomy, was made using unprecedented observations from the world’s most powerful solar telescope, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii.

The findings could finally explain one of the sun’s greatest mysteries—how its outer atmosphere, the corona, reaches temperatures of millions of degrees while its surface is only around 5,500°C.

Alfvén waves, named after Nobel Prize winner Hannes Alfvén who predicted their existence in 1942, are magnetic disturbances tha...

An international team of astronomers has created the first-ever large-scale maps of a mysterious form of matter, known as CO-dark molecular gas, in one of our Milky Way’s most active star-forming neighborhoods, CygnusX. Their findings, using the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), are providing crucial new clues about how stars formed in the Milky Way.

For decades, scientists have known that most new stars are born inside clouds of cold molecular hydrogen gas. Much of this molecular hydrogen is invisible to most telescopes—it doesn’t give off light that can easily be detected.

Traditionally, astronomers have hunted for these clouds by looking for carbon monoxide (CO), a molecule that acts like a flashing sign for star-building regions...

Astronomers have made a groundbreaking discovery of a colossal bridge of neutral hydrogen gas linking two dwarf galaxies. Scientists at The University of Western Australia’s node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) have made a remarkable discovery: a massive structure stretching about 185,000 light-years between two galaxies, NGC 4532 and DDO 137, located some 53 million light-years from Earth.

According to a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the team also detected a huge tail of gas extending another 1.6 million light-years beyond the bridge, making it the largest feature of its kind ever recorded.

Lead researcher Professor Lister Staveley-Smith from ICRAR UWA explained that the finding provides an important n...

A powerful new telescope has captured its first glimpse of the cosmos, and could transform our understanding of how stars, galaxies and black holes evolve.

The 4MOST (4-meter Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope), mounted on the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope in Chile, achieved its ‘first light’ on 18 October 2025: a milestone marking the start of its scientific mission.

Unlike a typical telescope that takes pictures of the sky, 4MOST records spectra—the detailed colors of light from celestial objects—revealing their temperature, motion and chemical makeup. Using 2,436 optical fibers, each thinner than a human hair, the telescope can study thousands of stars and galaxies at once, splitting their light into 18,000 distinct color components.

“This is an out...