A newly discovered visitor to the outer edges of our Solar System has been shown to be the largest comet ever, thanks to the rapid response telescopes of Las Cumbres Observatory. The object, which is named Comet C/2014 UN271 Bernardinelli-Bernstein after its two discoverers, was first announced on Saturday, June 19, 2021. C/2014 UN271 was ...
It is believed that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled to launch in November, will be sensitive enough to observe the birth of galaxies directly during what is known as cosmic dawn. This is according to a study, led by researchers at UCL and the University of Cambridge, published in the Monthly Notices of the ...
A dynamo mechanism could explain the incredibly strong magnetic fields in white dwarf stars according to an international team of scientists, including a University of Warwick astronomer. One of the most striking phenomena in astrophysics is the presence of magnetic fields. Like the Earth, stars and stellar remnants such as white dwarfs have one. It ...
Harvard & Smithsonian astronomers have detected the first Jupiter-like planet without clouds or haze in its observable atmosphere. The findings were published this month in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Named WASP-62 b, the gas giant Jupiter-like planet was first detected in 2012 through the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) South survey. Its atmosphere, however, had never been closely studied ...
The universe is getting hotter, a new study has found. The study, published in the Astrophysical Journal, probed the thermal history of the universe over the last 10 billion years. It found that the mean temperature of gas across the universe has increased more than 10 times over that time period and reached about 2 million degrees ...
Massive explosions of energy happening thousands of light-years from Earth, known as supernovas, may have left traces in our planet’s biology and geology, such as tree rings, according to new research by CU Boulder geoscientist Robert Brakenridge. The study, published this month in the International Journal of Astrobiology, probes the impacts of supernovas, some of the most ...
On Oct. 29, mission operators sent a series of commands to NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft for the first time since mid-March. The spacecraft has been flying solo while the 70-meter-wide (230-foot-wide) radio antenna used to talk to it has been offline for repairs and upgrades. Voyager 2 returned a signal confirming it had received the “call” and ...
Our Galaxy may be teeming with rogue planets, gravitationally unbound to any star. An international team of scientists, led by Polish astronomers from the University of Warsaw, has announced the discovery of the smallest Earth-sized free-floating planet found to date. Over 4,000 extrasolar planets have been discovered to date. Although many of the known exoplanets ...
What do Albert Einstein, the Global Positioning System (GPS), and a pair of stars 200,000 trillion miles from Earth have in common? The answer is an effect from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity called the “gravitational redshift,” where light is shifted to redder colors because of gravity. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have discovered ...
To understand the significance of the Spitzer Space Telescope in the understanding of our Solar System, think of what the steam engine meant for the industrial revolution. A national team of scientists published in the journal Nature Astronomy two papers that provide an inventory of the major discoveries made possible thanks to the Spitzer Space ...
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