Category Astronomy/Space

Artist’s conceptions of the most-distant supermassive black hole ever discovered, which is part of a quasar from just 690 million years after the Big Bang. It is surrounded by neutral hydrogen, indicating that it is from the period called the epoch of reionization, when the universe’s first light sources turned on. Image: Robin Dienel (Courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science)

Findings present a puzzle as to how such a huge object could have grown so quickly. A team of astronomers, including two from MIT, has detected the most distant supermassive black hole ever observed. The black hole sits in the center of an ultrabright quasar, the light of which was emitted just 690 million years after the Big Bang...

searchers at the Centre for Planetary Sciences have found that K2-18b could very well be a scaled-up version of Earth. They also discovered it has a neighbour. (Illustration by Alex Boersma)

New ESO research has revealed that a little-known exoplanet called K2-18b could well be a scaled-up version of Earth. Just as exciting, the same researchers also discovered for the first time that the planet has a neighbor. “Being able to measure the mass and density of K2-18b was tremendous, but to discover a new exoplanet was lucky and equally exciting,” says lead author Ryan Cloutier, a PhD student in U of T Scarborough’s Centre for Planet Science, U of T’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Université de Montréal Institute for research on exoplanets (iREx).

Both planets orbit K2-18, a ...

Mars may have been enveloped in a thick, steamy atmosphere as the planet’s crust cooled and solidified. That steam bath could have created many of the clay mineral deposits that have long been attributed to water flow on or just beneath the surface. Credit: Courtesy of Kevin Cannon

Planetary scientists from Brown University have proposed a new scenario for the formation of ancient clay minerals on Mars that, if shown to be true, could rewrite the early history of the red planet. There are thousands of ancient phyllosilicate outcrops on the Martian surface...

Artist impression of a pair of galaxies from the very early universe. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF; D. Berry

New observations push back the epoch of massive-galaxy formation even further by identifying two giant galaxies seen when the universe was only 780 million years old, or about 5% its current age. Astronomers expect that the first galaxies, those that formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, would share many similarities with some of the dwarf galaxies we see in the nearby universe today. These early agglomerations of a few billion stars would then become the building blocks of the larger galaxies that came to dominate the universe after the first few billion years.

Ongoing observations with ALMA however, have discovered surprising examples of massive, star-filled galaxies...