Category Astronomy/Space

As NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft traveled through the Kuiper Belt at a distance of 438 million miles from Earth, an international team of astronomers used the far-flung probe to conduct an unprecedented experiment: the first-ever successful demonstration of deep space stellar navigation.

A paper describing the results was accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal. The pre-print is available on the server arXiv.

As a proof-of-concept test, the researchers took advantage of the spacecraft’s unique vantage point as it traveled toward interstellar space to image two of our nearest stellar neighbors, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light-years from Earth, and Wolf 359, which is 7.86 light-years away.

From New Horizons’ perspective, the two nearby stars shifted their app...

Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s Cheops mission have caught an exoplanet that seems to be triggering flares of radiation from the star it orbits. These tremendous explosions are blasting away the planet’s wispy atmosphere, causing it to shrink every year.

This is the first-ever evidence of a “planet with a death wish.” Though it was theorized to be possible since the nineties, the flares seen in this research are around 100 times more energetic than expected.

The work is published in the journal Nature.

This planet’s star makes our sun look sleepy
Thanks to telescopes like the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS...

New high-resolution images of protoplanetary disks in the Ophiuchus star-forming region, created with improved analysis. The resolution is shown by the white ellipse in the lower left of each panel, with a smaller ellipse indicating higher resolution. The white line in the lower right of each panel indicates a scale of 30 au. The evolution stage of the central stars progresses from left to right, and from top to bottom in the same row. (Credit: ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), A. Shoshi et al.)

In a stellar nursery 460 light-years away, astronomers sharpened old ALMA data and spotted crisp rings and spirals swirling around 27 infant stars—evidence that planets start taking shape just a few hundred thousand years after their suns ignite, far earlier than anyone expected.

Signs of planet fo...

The birth, growth and future of our universe are eternally fascinating. In the last decades, telescopes have been able to observe the skies with unprecedented precision and sensitivity.

Our research team on the South Pole Telescope is studying how the universe evolved and has changed over time. We have just released two years’ worth of mapping of the infant universe over 1/25th of the sky.

These observations have sharpened our understanding of the nature of dark energy and the rate at which the universe is expanding.

What is the current theory of how our universe began?
Our current model for the early universe is known as the “hot Big Bang.”

It describes the first stage of our universe as a primordial fireball...