Category Astronomy/Space

Researchers find high-energy oxygen and sulfur ions in Jupiter’s inner radiation belts — and a previously unknown ion source. Nearly 20 years after the end of NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter, scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany have unlocked a new secret from the mission’s extensive data sets. For the first time, the research team was able to determine beyond doubt that the high-energy ions surrounding the gas giant as part of its inner radiation belt are primarily oxygen and sulfur ions...

The Earth sits in a 1,000-light-year-wide void surrounded by thousands of young stars — but how did those stars form?

In a paper appearing Wednesday in Nature, astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) reconstruct the evolutionary history of our galactic neighborhood, showing how a chain of events beginning 14 million years ago led to the creation of a vast bubble that’s responsible for the formation of all nearby, young stars.

“This is really an origin story; for the first time we can explain how all nearby star formation began,” says astronomer and data visualization expert Catherine Zucker who completed the work during a fellowship at the CfA.

The paper’s central figure, a 3...

Using observations of Centaurus A, a nearby elliptical galaxy, obtained with the Gaia space telescope and ground-based instruments under the PISCeS survey, a team of astronomers presents an unprecedented number of globular cluster candidates in the outer regions of the galaxy. The findings provide astronomers with an even more detailed picture of galactic architecture and history of collisions and mergers.

A survey completed using a combination of ground and space-based telescopes yielded a ...

The discovery of a supermassive black hole in a relatively small galaxy could help astronomers unravel the mystery surrounding how the very biggest black holes grow.

Researchers used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to identify a black hole containing about 200,000 times the mass of the Sun buried in gas and dust in the galaxy Mrk 462.

Mrk 462 contains only several hundred million stars, making it a dwarf galaxy. By contrast, our Milky Way is home to a few hundred billion stars. This is one of the first times that a heavily buried, or “obscured,” supermassive black hole has been found in a dwarf galaxy.

“This black hole in Mrk 462 is among the smallest of the supermassive, or monster, black h...