Category Astronomy/Space

Fast radio bursts are brief and brilliant explosions of radio waves emitted by extremely compact objects such as neutron stars and possibly black holes. These fleeting fireworks last for just a thousandth of a second and can carry an enormous amount of energy—enough to briefly outshine entire galaxies.

Since the first fast radio burst (FRB) was discovered in 2007, astronomers have detected thousands of FRBs, whose locations range from within our own galaxy to as far as 8 b...

NASA’s upcoming Artemis II mission is slated to return astronauts to the moon no sooner than April 2026. Astronauts were last on the moon in 1972 during the Apollo 17 mission.

Artemis II will utilize NASA’s Space Launch System, which is an extremely powerful rocket that will enable human space exploration beyond Earth’s atmosphere. The crew of four will travel in an Orion spacecraft, which the agency launched around the moon and successfully returned during the Artemis I mission.

But before Artemis II, NASA will send two missions to scout the surface of the lunar south pole for resources that could sustain human space travel and e...

Using the Very Large Array (VLA), an international team of astronomers have observed a nearby galaxy merger known as CIZA J0107.7+5408. Results of the observational campaign, presented December 20 on the preprint server arXiv, could help us better understand the merging processes that take place between galaxy clusters.

Galaxy clusters contain up to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity. They generally form as a result of mergers and grow by accreting subclusters...

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has detected a new grand-design spiral galaxy as part of the PANORAMIC survey. The newfound galaxy, named Zhúlóng, is extremely massive and appears to be the most distant spiral galaxy identified so far. The finding was detailed in a paper published December 17 on the pre-print server arXiv.

Grand-design spiral galaxies are characterized by their prominent, well-defined arms, which circle outwards from a clear core. It is assumed that the arms in such galaxies are actually overdense regions of the disk which trigger star formation as incoming material is compressed in that region.

It is still not well understood when ...