Category Astronomy/Space

Iota Orionis. Credit: Image by Danielle Futselaar

Using the world’s smallest astronomical satellites, researchers have detected the biggest stellar heartbeat ever. Astronomers are hopeful that this discovery will provide the initiative to search for other such systems, creating a fundamental shift in how we study the evolution of massive stars. This is important, since massive stars are laboratories of elements essential to life.

Astronomers from the BRITE (BRight Target Explorer) Constellation project and Ritter Observatory have discovered a repeating 1% spike in the light of a very massive star which could change our understanding of such stars. Iota Orionis is a binary star system and is easily visible with the naked eye, being the brightest star in the constellation Orion’s sword...

This artist’s impression shows what the very distant young galaxy A2744_YD4 might look like. Observations using ALMA have shown that this galaxy, seen when the Universe was just 4 percent of its current age, is rich in dust. Such dust was produced by an earlier generation of stars and these observations provide insights into the birth and explosive deaths of the very first stars in the Universe. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Astronomers have used ALMA to detect a huge mass of glowing stardust in a galaxy seen when the Universe was only 4% of its present age. This galaxy was observed shortly after its formation and is the most distant galaxy in which dust has been detected. This observation is also the most distant detection of oxygen in the Universe...

A thankfully rare event: an asteroid hits the Earth. (Visualisations: iStock / Solarseven)

Do mass extinctions, like the fall of the dinosaurs, and formation of large impact craters on Earth occur together at regular intervals? “This question has been under discussion for more than 30 years now,” says Matthias Meier, ETH Zurich’s Institute of Geochemistry and Petrology. As late as 2015, US researchers indicated that impact craters were formed on Earth around every 26 million years. “We have determined, however, that asteroids don’t hit the Earth at periodic intervals,” says Meier, refuting the popular hypothesis.

In the past, researchers have even postulated the existence of a companion star to the Sun...

This is one hour of GOES-16’s Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) lightning data from Feb. 14, when GLM acquired 1.8 million images of the Earth. It is displayed over GOES-16 ABI full disk Band 2 imagery. Brighter colors indicate more lightning energy was recorded; color bar units are the calculated kilowatt-hours of total optical emissions from lightning. The brightest storm system is located over the Gulf Coast of Texas, the same storm system in the accompanying video. This is preliminary, non-operational data. Credits: NOAA/NASA

Detecting and predicting lightning just got a lot easier...