Category Astronomy/Space

The asteroid 16 Psyche, which NASA intends to visit with a spacecraft in 2026, may be less heavy metal and more hard rock than scientists have surmised, according to a new study by researchers from Brown and Purdue universities.

Psyche, which orbits the sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is the largest of the M-type asteroids, which are composed chiefly of iron and nickel as opposed to the silicate rocks that make up most other asteroids. But when viewed from Earth, Psyche sends mixed signals about its composition.

The light it reflects tells scientists that the surface is indeed mostly metal...

In a new Nature Astronomy study, an international team led by astrophysicists from the University of California, Irvine and Pomona College report how, when tiny galaxies collide with bigger ones, the bigger galaxies can strip the smaller galaxies of their dark matter—matter that we can’t see directly, but which astrophysicists think must exist because, without its gravitational effects, they couldn’t explain things like the motions of a galaxy’s stars.

It’s a mechanism that has the potential to explain how galaxies might be able to exist without dark matter—something once thought impossible.

It started in 2018 when astrophysicists Shany Danieli and Pieter van Dokkum of Princeto...

A team of German astronomers, led by Professor Klaus Werner of the University of Tübingen, have discovered a strange new type of star covered in the by-product of helium burning. It is possible that the stars might have been formed by a rare stellar merger event.The fascinating results are published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

While normal stars have surfaces composed of hydrogen and helium, the stars discovered by Werner and his colleagues have their surfaces covered with carbon and oxygen, the ashes of helium burning — an exotic composition for a star...

A team of astronomers have made the discovery of a lifetime that will help answer burning questions on the evolution of stars. The group is led by Evolutionary Studies Initiative member and Stevenson Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Keivan Stassun.

Stassun’s team generated a new model that greatly improved the way stars are measured in 2017.

“Being able to combine all of the different types of measurements into one coherent analysis was certainly key to being able to decipher the various unusual characteristics of this star system,” Stassun said.

The model helps predict the types of planets orbiting distant stars—called exoplanets...