SKA tagged posts

Studying exoplanets has given astronomers insights into the characteristics that could help them find life beyond Earth. For years, astronomers thought an exoplanet’s location in a star’s habitable zone was enough to make it an Earth-like world. But some stars are more active than our sun, exposing planets in their habitable zones to far more radiation than Earth receives. Astronomers have increasingly recognized that a planet’s magnetic field, which shields Earth from harmful radiation, could be a key characteristic in identifying Earth-like worlds.

Now, an international team of scientists is shedding light on how to study exoplanet magnetic fields in a chapter published in Advancing Astrophysics with the SKA II, a 2026 science book sponsored by the Square Kilometer Array Observat...

Astronomers have spotted centimeter-sized “pebbles” swirling around two infant stars 450 light-years away, revealing the raw ingredients of planets already stretching to Neptune-like orbits...

Astronomers have uncovered a vast cloud of energetic particles—a “mini halo”—surrounding one of the most distant galaxy clusters ever observed, marking a major step forward in understanding the hidden forces that shape the cosmos.

The mini-halo is at a distance so great that it takes light 10 billion years to reach Earth, making it the most distant ever found, doubling the previous dista...

Understanding how the universe transitioned from darkness to light with the formation of the first stars and galaxies is a key turning point in the universe’s development, known as the Cosmic Dawn. However, even with the most powerful telescopes, we can’t directly observe these earliest stars, so determining their properties is one of the biggest challenges in astronomy.

Now, an international group of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge has shown that we will be able to learn about the masses of the earliest stars by studying a specific radio signal—created by hydrogen atoms filling the gaps between star-forming regions—originating just a hundred million years after the Big Bang.

By studying how the first stars and their remnants affected this signal, called the 2...