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An artist’s impression shows the sub-Earth-mass planet that was discovered orbiting Barnard’s star, the closest single star to our solar system, in this undated handout. | Photo Credit: Reuters Barnard’s star is a red dwarf, the smallest type of regular star and much smaller and less luminous than our sun. At about 6 light years…
Read More “Small rocky planet detected in orbit about nearby Barnard’s star” »
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, who produced the first ever image of our Milky Way black hole released in 2022, has captured a new view of the massive object at the centre of our Galaxy: how it looks in polarised light. This is the first time astronomers have been able to measure polarisation, a…
Read More “Could rotating black holes be the wind turbines powering the distant future?” »
Earth is going to have its very own mini-moon from September 29 until November 25. The regular Moon’s new, temporary friend is 2024 PT₅, an asteroid captured from the Arjuna asteroid group (called the “Arjunas”). | Photo Credit: AFP Earth is going to have its very own mini-moon from September 29 until November 25. The regular Moon’s…
Read More “Earth is getting a new mini-moon, and it won’t be the first or the last” »
This artist’s concept shows a galaxy with a brilliant quasar, a very bright, distant and active supermassive black hole that is millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, at its center, seen in this undated handout picture. | Photo Credit: Reuters Two mighty beams of energy have been detected shooting in opposite…
Read More “Faraway black hole unleashes record-setting energetic jets” »
The rings of Saturn are some of the most famous and spectacular objects in the Solar System. Earth may once have had something similar. In a paper published last week in Earth & Planetary Science Letters, my colleagues and I present evidence that Earth may have had a ring. The existence of such a ring, forming around…
Read More “Hidden craters suggest earth once had a Saturn-like ring” »
This handout photo provided by SpaceX and Polaris on September 15, 2024 shows the manned Polaris Dawn mission’s “Dragon” capsule aboard the rescue vessel after it splashed down off the coast of Dry Tortugas, Florida, after completing the first human spaceflight mission by non-government astronauts of the Polaris Program. | Photo Credit: AFP Two astronauts…
Read More “Polaris Dawn: why world’s first private spacewalk wasn’t just a vanity project” »
Have you ever wanted to make a $150,000 gamble? If you’re right, you open a new window to the universe. But if you’re wrong, you’ve just wasted a lot of money and time. That is exactly what my team did when we pointed the Keck telescope at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawai’i at what looked…
Read More “New measurements reveal the enormous halos shrouding all galaxies” »
View of Didymos, Dimorphos, and the plume coming off of Dimorphos after the Double Asteroid Redirect Test, or DART mission, purposefully made impact, in this image acquired by ASI’s LICIACube satellite just before its closest approach to the Dimorphos asteroid, September 26, 2022. | Photo Credit: Reuters Launched in 2011, NASA’s NEOWISE mission operated in Earth’s orbit…
Read More “NASA just shut down a planetary defence mission that tracks asteroids. Now what?” »
An artist’s illustration shows the nearest brown dwarf to Earth. ESO-I. Crossfield-N. | Photo Credit: Reuters The weather report is in for the two brown dwarfs – celestial bodies bigger than a planet but smaller than a star – closest to us. It is inclement, to put it mildly: blazingly hot, with a toxic chemical…
Read More “Webb telescope reveals wild weather on cosmic brown dwarfs” »
This artist’s concept envisions what hydrocarbon ice forming on a liquid hydrocarbon sea of Saturn’s moon Titan might look like in this NASA image released on January 8, 2013. | Photo Credit: Reuters NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which explored Saturn and its icy moons, including the majestic Titan, ended its mission with a death plunge into…
Read More “Radar study puts spotlight on Saturn moon Titan’s hydrocarbon seas” »