Category Astronomy/Space

Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have discovered the absence of an unstable massive star in a dwarf galaxy. Scientists think this could indicate that the star became less bright and partially obscured by dust. An alternative explanation is that the star collapsed into a black hole without producing a supernova. “If true,” says team leader and PhD student Andrew Allan of Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, “this would be the first direct detection of such a monster star ending its life in this manner.”

Between 2001 and 2011, various teams of astronomers studied the myster...

The second-most distant quasar ever discovered now has a Hawaiian name. Astronomers have discovered the second-most distant quasar ever found using three Maunakea Observatories in Hawai’i: W. M. Keck Observatory, the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, and the University of Hawai’i-owned United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT). It is the first quasar to receive an indigenous Hawaiian name, Poniua’ena, which means “unseen spinning source of creation, surrounded with brilliance” in the Hawaiian language.

Poniua’ena is only the second quasar yet detected at a distance calculated at a cosmological redshift greater than 7...

A mysterious object roughly 800 million light-years from Earth detected using gravitational wave sensors is either one of the smallest black holes or one of the la...

The young star HBC 672 is known by its nickname of Bat Shadow because of its wing-like shadow feature. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has now observed a curious “flapping” motion in the shadow of the star’s disc for the first time. The star resides in a stellar nursery called the Serpens Nebula, about 1300 light-years away.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured a striking observation of the fledgling star’s unseen, planet-forming disc in 2018...