NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has made the first direct measurements of both the chemical composition and physical conditions of a possible moon-forming disk surrounding a massive exoplanet. The carbon-rich disk encircles the planet known as CT Cha b, located about 625 light-years from Earth. While no moons were detectedContinue Reading
Pulsars may be revealing that extremely low-frequency gravitational waves are moving through the universe. Observations reported in 2023 by international pulsar timing array collaborations could be caused by either a background of overlapping gravitational waves from countless distant sources or a single pair of nearby supermassive black holes orbiting eachContinue Reading
The most distant and most powerful ‘odd radio circle’ (ORC) known so far has been discovered by astronomers. These curious rings are a relatively new astronomical phenomenon, having been detected for the first time just six years ago. Only a handful of confirmed examples are known – most of whichContinue Reading
The universe is full of different types of radiation and particles that can be observed here on Earth. This includes photons across the entire range of the electromagnetic spectrum, from the lowest radio frequencies all the way to the highest-energy gamma rays. It also includes other particles such as neutrinosContinue Reading
After the formation of the Solar System, it took a maximum of three million years for the chemical composition of the Earth’s precursor to be completed. This is shown by a new study by the Institute of Geological Sciences at the University of Bern. At this time, however, there wereContinue Reading
While it may appear unassuming at first glance, just another spiral galaxy among thousands in the Universe, this subject of this Hubble Picture of the Week has plenty to study. NGC 7456 is its name, located over 51 million light-years away in the constellation Grus (the Crane). In this imageContinue Reading
If you think a galaxy is big, compare it to the size of the Universe: it’s just a tiny dot which, together with a huge number of other tiny dots, forms clusters that aggregate into superclusters, which in turn weave into filaments threaded with voids — an immense 3D skeletonContinue Reading
A Rutgers-led team of scientists has uncovered evidence of how galaxies expand by tracing the invisible scaffolding of the universe created by a mysterious substance known as dark matter. In a newly published study in Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers used what they said are the largest-ever samples of special galaxiesContinue Reading
In 2009, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory released a captivating image: a pulsar and its surrounding nebula that is shaped like a hand. i> X-rays from Chandra have been combined with radio data obtained by the Australian Telescope Compact Array to reveal new structures. At the center of this image isContinue Reading
The size of our universe and the bodies within it is incomprehensible for us lowly humans. The sun has a mass that is more than 330,000 that of our Earth, and yet there are stars in the universe that completely dwarf our sun. Stars with masses more than eight timesContinue Reading
