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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Magnetic fields can map the universe—here’s how

    April 23, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Running Chicken Nebula Credit: ESO

    Who knew that magnetic fields could be so useful? Astronomers are able to use magnetic fields to map our environment within the Milky Way using a technique called Faraday rotation.

    It works like this. There’s a bunch of dust—literal dust grains—floating within the galaxy.

    Well, I say there’s a lot of dust, but it’s at very, very low densities. Thankfully, the volumes within interstellar space are so vast that the total amount of dust can really add up. And all these little dust grains have little magnetic fields associated with them, because all the grains are made of electric charges and they’re spinning around themselves.

    When light from distant sources passes through the dust, that light encounters all these little magnetic fields...

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    Astronomers confirm the existence of a lone black hole

    April 21, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Astronomers confirm the existence of a lone black hole
    A 2.′′⁡4×2.′′⁡0 WFC3 F814W field showing the OGLE-2011-BLG-0462 field at the final epoch in 2022. The source star and its brighter neighbor are labeled. A faint star lies just to the southeast of the neighbor, but it has little effect on astrometry of the source. For each star, an open green circle shows its location at E1 in 2011, and an open red circle marks its location at E11 in 2022. Stars in this Galactic-bulge field typically move about 1 WFC3/UVIS pixel (0.′′⁡040) over the course of 11 yr. Credit: The Astrophysical Journal (2025). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/adbe6e

    A team of astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute, working with one colleague from the University of St Andrews’ Center for Exoplanet Science and another from the European Southern Observ...

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    Rare exoplanet orbits twin stars in ‘Star Wars’-like twist

    April 18, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Astronomers find rare twist in exoplanet's twin star orbit
    A hypothetical office overlooking the Paranal Observatory in Chile, with the European Southern Observatory’s VLT visible with its laser on the hill, and the four small SPECULOOS telescopes nearer the foreground. In the sky is a depiction of the orbital configuration of the 2M1510 system with the two brown dwarf stars in red orbiting one another, and the inferred exoplanet on a polar orbit in white. Within the office, a poster celebrating the original discovery of 2M1510’s two brown dwarfs is on the wall, while diagrams and patterns showing the apsidal precession of the brown dwarf’s orbit caused by the planets are shown on the table the roof and the floor. Credit: University of Birmingham / Amanda Smith

    Astronomers have discovered a planet that orbits at a 90-degree angle around a rare...

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    Our closest neighboring galaxy may be being torn apart

    April 16, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Velocities of massive star candidates within the SMC shown as vectors. The colors of the arrows represent the direction of motion. Relative to the LMC, located at the bottom left of the image, most red arrows show movement towards the LMC, whereas most light blue arrows show movement away from the LMC, suggesting they are being pulled apart. (credit: Satoya Nakano)

    Our closest neighboring galaxy may be being torn apart. Is the nearest galaxy to ours being torn apart? Research suggests so. A team led by Satoya Nakano and Kengo Tachihara at Nagoya University in Japan has revealed new insights into the motion of massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a small galaxy neighboring the Milky Way...

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