Category Astronomy/Space

New COMAP radio survey will peer beneath the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of galaxies to unveil a hidden era of star formation. Sometime around 400 million years after the birth of our universe, the first stars began to form. The universe’s so-called dark ages came to an end and a new light-filled era began. More and more galaxies began to take shape and served as factories for churning out new stars, a process that reached a peak about 4 billion years after the Big Bang.

Luckily for astronomers, this bygone era can be observed. Distant light takes time to reach us, and our telescopes can pick up light emitted by galaxies and stars billions of years ago (our universe is 13.8 billion years old)...

The clear and periodic pattern of fast radio bursts may originate from a distant neutron star. Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have detected a strange and persistent radio signal from a far-off galaxy that appears to be flashing with surprising regularity.

The signal is classified as a fast radio burst, or FRB — an intensely strong burst of radio waves of unknown astrophysical origin, that typically lasts for a few milliseconds at most. However, this new signal persists for up to three seconds, about 1,000 times longer than the average FRB...

The first ever exoplanets were discovered 30 years ago around a rapidly rotating star, called a pulsar. Now, astronomers have revealed that these planets may be incredibly rare. The new work will be presented tomorrow (Tuesday 12 July) at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2022) by Iuliana Nițu, a PhD student at the University of Manchester.

The processes that cause planets to form, and survive, around pulsars are currently unknown...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the distinct signature of water, along with evidence for clouds and haze, in the atmosphere surrounding a hot, puffy gas giant planet orbiting a distant Sun-like star.

The observation, which reveals the presence of specific gas molecules based on tiny decreases in the brightness of precise colors of light, is the most detailed of its kind to date, demonstrating Webb’s unprecedented ability to analyze atmospheres hundreds of light-years away.

While the Hubble Space Telescope has analyzed numerous exoplanet atmospheres over the past two decades, capturing the first clear detection of water in 2013, Webb’s immediate and more detailed observation marks a giant leap forward in the quest to characterize potentially habitable planets b...