AstroNews - Page 3

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If we want to discover signs of life on an exoplanet, our best option is to study its atmosphere, which is easier said than done. The exoplanets whose atmospheres have been studied so far don’t seem to have what we would consider ‘life-friendly’ conditions. But our observatories are always improving, and now astronomers have analyzed […]

According to a new study, a major revision of the Milky Way is necessary. A team of Japanese, South African and Italian astronomers has discovered a large region of our galaxy which lacks any young stars. In a research, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the researchers looked for a specific […]

A new-born star cloaked in a golden veil stands starkly against the black filament of the Circinus cloud. While it might sound like the beginning of a fantasy novel, this is simply the description of this spectacular Hubble Image The Space Telescope caught a phenomenal view of a young star, IRAS 14568-6304, as it emerges […]

The wonderful thing about astronomy is that you might discover amazing things even when you’re not looking for them. This is the case for a team of Australian astronomers who were testing a new radio telescope and stumbled on an incredible finding. The researchers discovered a 3.8 billion solar-mass black hole at the centre of […]

Today, in my day job I wrote about the momentous discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO. There are four major discoveries associated with the detection: First of all, today it was announced that on 14th September 2015 gravitational waves were observed by both LIGO detectors. This is the first time an experiment has been able […]

NASA’s discovery of water on Mars Billions of years ago, Mars looked more welcoming to life than Earth was at the time. We have seen evidence of ancient lakes and river beds, but nowadays water on the surface of Mars exist almost entirely as ice. In 2007, scientists observed some dark lines forming in the […]

The Japanese X-ray satellite SUZAKU has looked at the distribution of gas around the Virgo cluster, a large galaxy cluster close to the Milky Way and the second brightest in X-rays. It discovered that the elements needed to make living organisms, planets and spiced-up stars are equally distributed across the cosmos. The study analysed how […]

In the almost 20 years since the discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star, we have gone from thinking that planets are a cosmic curiosity to a common feature of the Universe. The race is on to find a true Earth twin, to measure an exoplanet atmosphere or, when the James Webb Space […]

We all get the munchies, but when you’re a supermassive black hole (SMBH) your hunger might have dire consequences. And just like that an SMBH has outgrown its galaxy and jumped to the top of the heavyweight objects in the universe.

About 12 billion light years from us, there is a galaxy called CID-947. It has a mass similar to our own Milky Way (about 1000 billion times the mass of the Sun) and it was only remarkable because it had an active galactic nucleus (AGN, i.e. an accreting SMBH).

Pluto, not to be confused with Micky Mouse’s dog, is going to be in the news a lot soon, as we are finally going to take a closer look to the elusive dwarf planet. Pluto Stats: Discovered by Clyde Tombaugh on the 18th of February 1930, it is smaller than our Moon with a 1184 […]

I have a mathematician friend who believes that anything that it is mathematically possible exists somewhere in the multiverse. She believes that there are some features that are so beautiful, that it would be a crime if they were simply quirks of the Universal language.

We were in Wales to catch this partial eclipse of the Sun