Category Astronomy/Space

Like most galaxies, the Milky Way hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. Called Sagittarius A*, the object has captured astronomers’ curiosity for decades. And now there is an effort to image it directly.

Catching a good photo of the celestial beast will require a better understanding of what’s going on around it, which has proved challenging due to the vastly different scales involved...

The find could be a big clue about the nature of fast radio bursts. Astronomers have discovered an activity cycle in another fast radio burst, potentially unearthing a significant clue about these mysterious deep-space phenomena.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are extragalactic flashes of light that pack a serious wallop, unleashing in a few milliseconds as much energy as Earth’s sun does in a century. Scientists first spotted an FRB in 2007, and the cause of these eruptions remains elusive nearly a decade and a half later; potential explanations range from merging superdense neutron stars to advanced alien civilizations.

Scientists have expanded our understanding of potentially habitable planets orbiting distant stars by including a critical climate component – the presence of airborne dust.

The researchers suggest that planets with significant airborne dust – similar to the world portrayed in the classic sci-fi Dune – could be habitable over a greater range of distances from their parent star, therefore increasing the window for planets capable of sustaining life.

The team from the University ...

Discovery resolves longstanding question.
Some young, still-forming stars are surrounded by regions of complex organic molecules called ”hot corinos.” In some pairs of young stars forming together as binary pairs, astronomers found a hot corino around one, but not the other. Guessing that the unseen one might be obscured by dust, researchers studied such a pair with the VLA at radio wavelengths that readily pass through dust, and found the other one.

Astronomers acting on a hunch have likely resolved a mystery about young, still-forming stars and regions rich in organic molecules closely surrounding some of them. They used the National Science Foundation’s Karl G...