Category Astronomy/Space

Astronomers discovered eight new echoing black hole binaries in our galaxy, enabling them to piece together a general picture of how a black hole evolves during an outburst. The findings will help scientists trace a black hole’s evolution as it feeds on stellar material.

Scattered across our Milky Way galaxy are tens of millions of black holes — immensely strong gravitational wells of spacetime, from which infalling matter, and even light, can never escape. Black holes are dark by definition, except on the rare occasions when they feed...

Researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) have found an alternative explanation for a mysterious gamma-ray signal coming from the centre of the galaxy, which was long claimed as a signature of dark matter.

Gamma-rays are the form of electromagnetic radiation with the shortest wavelength and highest energy.

Co-author of the study Associate Professor Roland Crocker said this particular gamma-ray signal — known as the Galactic Centre Excess — may actually come from a specific type of rapidly-rotating neutron star, the super-dense stellar remnants of some stars much more massive than our sun.

The Galactic Centre Excess is an unexpected concentration of gamma-rays emerging from the centre of our galaxy that has long puzzled astronomers.

“Our work does not throw ...

An international research team, including scientists at Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, has used a new observation technique to discover the brightest extragalactic pulsar known, and it could even be the most luminous one ever found.

First discovered in 1967, pulsars are remnants of massive stars and offer researchers potential applications in areas like random number generation and guidance systems for spacecraft.

The research team used the ASKAP radio telescope, owned and operated by CSIRO, to apply a new method of seeking out pulsars...

For the past thirty years, the star β Pictoris has fascinated astronomers because it enables them to observe a planetary system in the process of formation. It is made up of at least two young planets, and also contains comets, which were detected as early as 1987. These were the first comets ever observed around a star other than the Sun.

Now, an international research team headed by Alain Lecavelier des Etangs, CNRS researcher at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (CNRS/Sorbonne Université)1, has discovered 30 such exocomets and determined the size of their nuclei1, which vary between 3 and 14 kilometres in diameter...