Category Astronomy/Space

Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope to confirm that supermassive black holes can starve their host galaxies of the fuel they need to form new stars. The results are reported in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The international team, co-led by the University of Cambridge, used Webb to observe a galaxy roughly the size of the Milky Way in the early universe, about two billion years after the Big Bang. Like most large galaxies, it has a supermassive black hole at its center. However, this galaxy is essentially ‘dead’: it has mostly stopped forming new stars.

“Based on earlier observations, we knew this galaxy was in a quenched state: it’s not forming many stars given its size, and we expect there is a link between the black hole and the end of star formation...

Researchers have invented a technique that enables low Earth orbit satellite antennas to manage signals for multiple users at once, slashing costs and simplifying designs for communication satellites.

Low-orbit satellites could soon offer millions of people worldwide access to high-speed communications, but the satellites’ potential has been stymied by a technological limitation – their antenna arrays can only manage one user at a time.

The one-to-one ratio means that companies must launch either constellations of many satellites, or large individual satellites with many arrays, to provide wide coverage. Both options are expensive, technically complex, and could lead to overcrowded orbits.

For example, SpaceX went the “constellation” route...

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K...

An AI-powered tool can distinguish dark matter’s elusive effects from other cosmic phenomena, which could bring us closer to unlocking the secrets of dark matter.

Dark matter is the invisible force holding the universe together – or so we think. It makes up around 85% of all matter and around 27% of the universe’s contents, but since we can’t see it directly, we have to study its gravitational effects on galaxies and other cosmic structures. Despite decades of research, the true nature of dark matter remains one of science’s most elusive questions.

According to a leading theory, dark matter might be a type of particle that barely interacts with anything else, except through gravity...