Category Astronomy/Space

Astronomers find first signs they can also form like a planet. Brown dwarfs fill the “gap” between stars and the much smaller planets – two very different types of astronomical objects. But how they originate has yet to be fully explained. Astronomers from Heidelberg University may now be able to answer that question...

Images reveal supermassive black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy. An international team of over 200 astronomers, including scientists from MIT’s Haystack Observatory, has captured the first direct images of a black hole...

Rocky, Earth-like planets orbiting our closest stars could host life, according to a new study that raises the excitement about exoplanets. When rocky, Earth-like planets were discovered orbiting in the habitable zone of some of our closest stars, excitement skyrocketed – until hopes for life were dashed by the high levels of radiation bombarding those worlds.

Proxima-b, only 4.24 light years away, receives 250 times more X-ray radiation than Earth and could experience deadly levels of ultraviolet radiation on its surface...

For the first time scientists have been able to prove a decades old theory on stars thanks to a revolutionary high-speed camera. Scientists at the University of Sheffield have been working with HiPERCAM, a high-speed, multicolour camera, which is capable of taking more than 1,000 images per second, allowing experts to measure both the mass and the radius of a cool subdwarf star for the first time.

The findings published today (8 April 2019) in Nature Astronomy have allowed researchers to verify the commonly used stellar structure model – which describes the internal structure of a star in detail – and make detailed predictions about the brightness, the colour and its future evolution.

Scientists know that old stars have few...