Items tagged with astronomy
An international team of researchers have discovered two super-Earth exoplanets, and one of them may be habitable. One of the planets is located at a distance from its star which potentially means it could hold liquid water on its surface.
The vast majority of exoplanets discovered so far have not proven to be good...
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Astronomers Track A Wobbly Star To A Perplexing Jupiter-Like Planet Holding Keys To How Planets Form
Astronomers were able to detect a Jupiter sized exoplanet by tracing a nearly indistinguishable wobble of the star it orbits. By using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), astronomers produced the first-ever 3 dimensional structure of the orbits of a binary pair of stars and a planet orbiting one of them.
According...
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A European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble telescope picture of the week captures a magnificent view of a dwarf irregular galaxy. The image showcases galactic marvel NGC 1156.
NGC 1156 is not like many other galaxies known to Hubble. While its thousands of brilliant stars conjure up thoughts of a spiral galaxy, it lacks...
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This weekend will provide avid astronomers with a parade of asteroids zipping past Earth. In fact, there will be a total of five airplane-sized asteroids joining the procession between Saturday and Monday.
Just last month, a bus-sized asteroid made its way past Earth on Asteroid Day, the anniversary of the 1908...
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Astronomers may have discovered the youngest planet ever found in our galaxy. The planet is thought to be orbiting AS 209, a young star in the Ophiuchus constellation estimated to be just about 1.6 million years young.
Research recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters using the Atacama Large...
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2022’s final supermoon is bringing some pizazz as it coincides with the Perseids meteor showers this Thursday. August’s so-called sturgeon full moon will reach its peak at 9:36 p.m. Eastern on the 11th.
Supermoons are not perfectly defined. The concept is intended to reflect the times at which the moon enters its...
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A duo of young researchers have detected a "one of a kind" system of three stars, with the tertiary star that is thought to be sixteen times the mass of our own Sun. The system of stars is so bright, that when first found it was thought to be a stellar binary. But the luminous star system may hold a dark secret in...
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A group of volunteers with Galaxy Zoo have been scouring data, using machine learning and an AI assistant, named Zoobot, to locate an unprecedented number of ring galaxies. The cyborg approach has been able to identify 40,000 ring galaxies so far, which is six times more than previously known.
The universe is...
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Comet C/2017 K2 will be at its closest orbital point to Earth later today, and you can watch the cosmic flyby live. The comet was first spotted by astronomers in 2017 and should be visible via a small telescope throughout the summer.
When Comet C/2017 K2 (PanSTARRS) was first located, it was 1.49 billion miles (2.4...
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a white dwarf star that is cannibalizing debris from the system's inner and outer reaches. It is the first time researchers have found a white dwarf star that is feeding off both rocky-metallic and icy material, the ingredients of planets.
Astronomers used archival data...
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NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory captured images of a speeding pulsar in the midst of an exploded star. The pulsar is estimated to be traveling at a speed of well over 1 million miles per hour (MPH).
The stellar speedster captured by Chandra is one of the fastest objects of its kind ever seen, according to a...
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The world's most powerful supercomputer dedicated to astronomy simulations was recently used to simulate the formation of a cluster of baby stars. Astronomers at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) developed the new code in order to accurately simulate how clusters of baby stars form and evolve...
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope continues to deliver, by providing the first direct evidence of a lone black hole in interstellar space. Up until now, all black hole masses have been "inferred statistically", through interactions in binary systems, or in the cores of galaxies.
As the James Webb Space Telescope nears...
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope continues to capture images ahead of the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The 3D-Dash program is a high resolution survey that will allow researchers to locate rare objects and targets for JWST once it becomes fully operational.
Hubble began its journey collecting...
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While Neptune and Uranus are similar in many ways, new observations have revealed why Uranus might be the paler of the two. The new research suggests the reason for the difference in color lies in a haze that exists on both planets and is thicker on Uranus.
Neptune and Uranus are similar in mass, size, and...
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NASA partook in an international exercise to test the operational readiness of limiting, or preventing, global destruction from an incoming asteroid. The exercise included 100 participants from 18 countries, including NASA scientists and the space agency's NEOWISE mission.
While there are not any known asteroid...
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Skywatchers are in for a treat this month, as five planets will align in the early morning sky. In addition to the five planets, the Moon will be joining the party at the end of the month.
April provided amateur astronomers with the opportunity to see four planets aligned in the early morning sky without the need...
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Researchers led by a team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have detected a wealth of previously unnoticed supermassive black holes in dwarf galaxies. The new information could lend valuable insight into the origin story of our very own Milky Way galaxy.
The Milky Way galaxy is believed to have...
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured a tempestuous gravitational dance between two companion galaxies. NGC 3226 and NGC 3227, together known as Arp 94, are located somewhere between 50 and 60 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Leo.
Hubble continues to send back stunning images ahead of the...
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A pair of meteor showers should provide sky watchers plenty to be excited about in the month of May. Eta Aquariids will open up the show of fireballs, with tau Herculids closing out the show at the end of the month.
Meteors entering the Earth's atmosphere are not uncommon, with most being particles that are no larger...
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New data suggests that post-starburst galaxies hold onto and compress large amounts of highly-concentrated, turbulent gas, but not to form stars as expected. The new data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) shows that these galaxies do not scatter all of their star-forming fuel, as previously...
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NASA believes it has solved a 60-year-old mystery pertaining to a process known as magnetic reconnection. Scientists with the space agency's Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, or MMS, have developed a theory they believe explains how the most explosive type of magnetic reconnection occurs.
To put this in...
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