News
A Quasar at Cosmic Dawn Flickers into View
1+ day, 9+ hour ago (83+ words) Astronomers have detected a flickering quasar called J0439+1634 as it appeared only 850 million years after the Big Bang. That discovery raises fresh questions about black hole formation and activity in the early Universe. The flickering light of this distant cosmic lighthouse…...
What Would Happen if the Sun Stopped? Part 2: Kelvin and Helmholtz at the Ready
2+ week, 4+ day ago (436+ words) (This is Part 2 of a series on what would happen if the Sun stopped. Read Part 1 first.) When you crank up your stove to heat a pan to cook your eggs, you have to wait a while. It takes time…...
What Would Happen if the Sun Stopped? Part 1: The Infernal Reservoir
2+ week, 4+ day ago (362+ words) If the Sun's fusion shut off right now, you would not notice for a very long time. The first stop is understanding the Sun itself: a vast pile of gravitating matter where fusion is so absurdly inefficient that, pound for…...
Venus" Strange Rotation Was Likely Triggered By A High Velocity Moon-Sized Impactor
1+ week, 2+ day ago (663+ words) We wanted to explore the possibility that an impact would have modified the rotation of the planet, Cedric Gillmann, the paper's lead author and a planetary scientist at ETH Zurich, told me in Vienna. But it would have had to…...
JWST Studies a Dark and Airless Super-Earth
3+ week, 5+ day ago (59+ words) There's a planet out there called LHS 3844 b, orbiting a star about 48 light-years away. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) found it in 2018 when the planet transited across the face of its star. The James Webb Space Telescope zxeroed in…...
Three Stars, One Extraordinary System and a Drama Still to Come
4+ week, 10+ hour ago (150+ words) Many stars like Alcor and Mizar are part of binary or multiple star systems (Credit: Chuck Ayoub) TIC 295741342 outer body eclipse. The TESS flux is shown in black points, with horizontal dashed red lines indicating the depths of the 'shoulders…...
The Sun Just Did Something Nobody Expected and it Kept Going For 19 Days
4+ week, 10+ hour ago (102+ words) The Sun's magnetic field drives events such as this filament eruption arching out into space (Credit: U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) This one, however, didn't stop. Days passed. Then more days. When it finally ended, the radio burst had lasted…...
When the Sun Tries to Explode and Fails
4+ week, 10+ hour ago (80+ words) Image artefacts (diffraction spikes and vertical streaks) appearing in a CCD image of a major solar flare due to the excess incident radiation (Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre) "This strong flare should have produced a big eruption but instead,…...
Astronomers from Western University Discover the Birthplace of Cosmic "Buckyballs"
1+ mon, 2+ week ago (780+ words) Universe Today They are known as "buckyballs," ball-shaped molecules that resemble a hollow sphere, and are found in space. These strange customers were first observed by Professor Jan Cami and a team from Western University in 2010 using the Spitzer Space…...
The Mechanics of Alien Waves
2+ mon, 16+ hour ago (139+ words) Figure from the paper showcasing the different forces used to calculate wave height. Credit - U. G. Schneck et al. A second theoretical test case was LHS 1140-b, which was the subject of some close scrutiny by the James Webb Space Telescope recently....