Category Astronomy/Space

A hidden companion star may finally explain why deadly-hot dust survives where planets shouldn’t. A mysterious cloud of ultra-hot dust around Kappa Tucanae A may finally have an explanation: a hidden companion star. The star’s extreme orbit carries it straight through the dust zone, strongly suggesting it plays a key role in keeping the dust alive. This finding could help astronomers untangle one of the biggest challenges in imaging Earth-like exoplanets. It also opens the door to discovering similar hidden companions around other stars.

About 70 light-years from Earth, a star known as Kappa Tucanae A has long puzzled astronomers. It is surrounded by dust heated to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, glowing intensely while orbiting extremely close to the star...

Our universe is filled with galaxies, in all directions as far as our instruments can see. Some researchers estimate that there are as many as 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. At first glance, these galaxies might appear to be randomly scattered across space, but they’re not. Careful mapping has shown that they are distributed across the surfaces of giant cosmic “bubbles” up to several hundred million light-years across. Inside these bubbles, few galaxies are found, so those regions are called cosmic voids. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will allow us to measure these voids with new precision, which can tell us about the history of the universe’s expansion.

“Roman’s ability to obse...

Rocky planets like our Earth may be far more common than previously thought, according to new research published in the journal Science Advances. It suggests that when our solar system formed, a nearby supernova (the massive explosion of a star near the end of its life) bathed it in cosmic rays containing the radioactive ingredients to make rocky, dry worlds. This mechanism could be ubiquitous across the galaxy.

Earth-like planets are thought to form from planetesimals (objects made of rock and ice) that were dried out early in the solar system’s history...

In a glimpse of the early universe, astronomers have observed a galaxy as it appeared just 800 million years after the Big Bang—a cosmic Jekyll and Hyde that loo...