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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Undead Planets: The nusual Conditions of the First Exoplanet Detection

    July 13, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The artist's impression shows a blue and white hued pulsar in the background and a large dark planet in the foreground.
    Artist impression of the pulsar-planet system PSR B1257+12 detected in 1992. The pulsar and three radiation-doused planets are all that remains of a dead star system.
    Credit
    NASA/JPL-Caltech
    Licence type
    Attribution (CC BY 4.0)

    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...

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    Webb reveals Steamy Atmosphere of Distant Planet in Detail

    July 13, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    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...

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    The Ultimate Fate of a Star Shredded by a Black Hole

    July 12, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    If a star (red trail) wanders too close to a black hole (left), it can be shredded, or spaghettified, by the intense gravity. Some of the star’s matter swirls around the black hole, like water down a drain, emitting copious X-rays (blue). Recent studies of these so-called tidal disruption events suggest that a significant fraction of the star’s gas is also blown outward by intense winds from the black hole, in some cases creating a cloud that obscures the accretion disk and the high-energy events happening within. (Image credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss)

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

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    Citizen scientist leads discovery of 34 Ultracool Dwarf Binaries

    July 12, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    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.
    llustration of an ultracool dwarf with a companion white dwarf

    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...

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