Category Astronomy/Space

Comparing data from VLA sky surveys made some two decades apart revealed that the black hole-powered ‘engines’ at the cores of some distant galaxies have launched new, superfast jets of material during the interval between the surveys.

Astronomers using data from the ongoing VLA Sky Survey (VLASS) have found a number of distant galaxies with supermassive black holes at their cores that have launched powerful, radio-emitting jets of material within the past two decades or so. The scientists compared data from VLASS with data from an earlier survey that also used the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to reach their conclusion.

“We found galaxies that showed no evidence of jets before but now show clear indicati...

Astronomers have solved the 16-year-old mystery surrounding the Blue Ring Nebula – an unusual, large, faint blob of gas with a star at its center. This object is unlike any they’d ever seen before in our Milky Way galaxy. The team has discovered the nebula appears to be the first known example of a merged star system at this stage.

In 2004, scientists with NASA’s space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) spotted an object unlike any they’d seen before in our Milky Way galaxy: a large, faint blob of gas with a star at its center...

By studying the site of a spectacular stellar explosion seen in April 2020, a Chalmers-led team of scientists have used four European radio telescopes to confirm that astronomy’s most exciting puzzle is about to be solved. Fast radio bursts, unpredictable millisecond-long radio signals seen at huge distances across the universe, are generated by extreme stars called magnetars — and are astonishingly diverse in brightness.

For over a decade, the phenomenon known as fast radio bursts has excited and...

A new finding about the formation of streaks within the aurora-like STEVE phenomenon brings scientists one step closer to solving the mystery. In 2018, a new aurora-like discovery struck the world. From 2015 to 2016, citizen scientists reported 30 instances of a purple ribbon in the sky, with a green picket fence structure underneath. Now named STEVE, or Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement, this phenomenon is still new to scientists, who are working to understand all its details...