Category Astronomy/Space

In 2019 tidal disruption, much of star’s mass ended up in symmetrical cloud that hid a black hole...

How often do stars live alone? For brown dwarfs — objects that straddle the boundary between the most massive planets and the smallest stars — astronomers need to uncover more examples of their companions to find out. Ace citizen scientist Frank Kiwy has done just that by using the Astro Data Lab science platform at NSF’s NOIRLab to discover 34 new ultracool dwarf binary systems in the Sun’s neighborhood, nearly doubling the number of such systems known.

A citizen scientist has searched NSF’s NOIRLab’s catalog of 4 billion celestial objects, known as NOIRLab Source Catalog DR2, to reveal brown dwarfs with companions...

The moon sustained twice as many impacts as can be seen on its surface, scientists find. Researchers find that, early in its history, the moon was highly porous, which was likely a result of early, massive impacts that shattered much of the crust. They reached their conclusions with simulations and data from NASA’s GRAIL mission.

Around 4.4 billion years ago, the early solar system resembled a game of space rock dodgeball, as massive asteroids and comets, and, later, smaller rocks and galactic debris pummeled the moon and other infant terrestrial bodies. This period ended around 3.8 billion years ago...

The mystery of how the first quasars in the universe formed—something that has baffled scientists for nearly 20 years—has now been solved by a team of astrophysicists whose findings are published in Nature.

The existence of more than 200 quasars powered by supermassive black holes less than a billion years after the Big Bang had remained one of the outstanding problems in astrophysics because it was never fully understood how they formed so early.

The team of experts led by Dr. Daniel Whalen from the University of Portsmouth have found that the first quasars naturally formed in the violent, turbulent conditions of rare reservoirs of gas in the early universe.

Dr...