#astronomers

#astronomers

I began reading Scientific American at a single-digit age.My first mind-blowing article was Allan R. Sandage's The Red-Shift in 1956.SciAm has gone through ups and downs, but in my view, in the past few years it has been better than ever.Bravo to all of you!CHRISTOPHER CLARK Houston, Tex.SOLAR STORMS VS.

Astronomers have witnessed the largest explosion in space.The explosive event labeled AT2021lwx was observed to be ten times brighter than any known supernova, the explosions that occur as massive stars die.And whereas supernova explosions only last a few months, this explosive event has been raging for at least three years.

This artist's impression shows a hazy sub-Neptune-sized planet recently observed with the James Webb Space Telescope.NASA/JPL-Caltech/R.Hurt (IPAC) An enigmatic, cloud-enshrouded planet that has puzzled astronomers for years turns out to be less hot than expected and surprisingly shiny.That's what the James Webb Space Telescope revealed when it peered at a so-called mini-Neptune that astronomers have been trying to understand ever since it was first discovered around another star over a decade ago, according to a new report published by the journal Nature.

Michael RostonEditing space and astronomy news.Scientists used a radio observatory to peer below the clouds of Uranus and capture signs of a strong cyclone at the planet's north pole.It's one new view of the cosmos captured by astronomers, spacecraft and photographers this month.Here are five more images from May The James Webb Space Telescope recorded new views of the bright star Fomalhaut.

There have been some incredible first-time sights captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) since it launched into space in 2021.The latest released image shows "unprecedented detail" of a Wolf-Rayet star "going supernova."According to NASA, the latest image shows a Wolf-Rayet star, which is "among the most luminous, most massive, and most briefly detectable stars known."

A star that exploded in a galaxy just 21 million light-years from Earth is a red supergiant, an UK astrophysicist has said.The explosion was detected around 10 days ago and made headlines as astronomers raced to observe the once-in-a-decade supernova.Red supergiants are very large stars approaching the later stages of their stellar life.

An explosion the size of our solar system has baffled scientists, as its shape similar to that of an extremely flat disc challenges everything they know about explosions in space.Astronomers observed the explosion 180 million light years away, and they say it is much flatter than ever thought possible.

Saturn is the jewel of the solar system, with its magnificent rings and retinue of weird moons.It's the faintest of the naked-eye planetstechnically Uranus is sometimes bright enough to see, though you need good eyesight and a very dark sitebut still fairly easy to pick out among the stars.If you're an early riser (or a late partier), then now is a decent time to look for Saturn, not because it's brighter or closer to Earth than usual but because it's made some news recently.

Where do you point the world's most powerful space telescope?It's not an easy question.The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in December 2021, has amazed astronomers since it began sending back its first science data in July 2022.It has seen galaxies breathtakingly close to the dawn of time, probed the atmospheres of exoplanets in unprecedented detail and provided stunning new views of worlds in our solar system.

Comet 238P/Read is a strange rock.Its location just past Mars in the main asteroid belt is an unusual spot for a comet in our Solar System.And it's missing frozen carbon dioxide, frequently found on comets.Comet Read's most compelling quirk, however, is that it definitely has water.In a new study published Monday in the journal Nature, astronomers directed the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) to study Comet 238P/Read using its Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec).

The world's most powerful space telescope has captured an unprecedented glimpse of a young star system that contains clues about the existence of extraterrestrial life, reports a new study.The results shed light on the potential habitability of planets that form around red dwarf stars, which are much smaller and far more common than stars like the Sun.

An aging star dubbed ZTF SLRN-2020 has been caught in the act of swallowing a planet.Credit: K. Miller/R.Hurt (Caltech/PAC)

Roughly five billion years from now, our Sun will end, not with a bang but with a whimper.That's when it finally burns through all the fuel in its core and puffs outward into a red giant, swallowing all the inner planets of our Solar System in the process, including Earth.

Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter.Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.In 2017, Oumuamua became the first observed interstellar object to zip through our solar system, and its appearance sparked questions scientists are still trying to answer.

The astronomers operating the Pan-STARRS1 telescope on the island of Maui were not expecting to hit cosmic paydirt on Oct. 19, 2017but they did.On what was otherwise an ordinary night of skygazing, they suddenly spotted what is easily the oddest comet ever detected.Its high speed87 km per second (54 mi. per second)and highly elliptical angle indicated that it originated from deep space, the first known interstellar object ever to enter our solar system.

Astronomers had long assumed that Saturn's distinctive rings formed around the same time as the planet some 4.5 billion years ago in the earliest days of our Solar System.That assumption received a serious challenge from a 2019 analysis of data collected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, suggesting that the rings were just 10 million to 100 million years ago-a mere blink of an eye on cosmic time scales.

It was only last October that telescopes spotted a gamma ray burstcaused by the collapse of a black holethat was so powerful astronomers quickly dubbed it BOAT, for Brightest of all Time.That was a fair enough nickname for such a sensational emissionfor a little while anyway.But BOAT has just been busted to second most powerful.

Saturn has regained its crown as the planet with the most moons in the solar system, just months after being overtaken by its fellow gas giant Jupiter.The leap-frog comes after the discovery of 62 new moons of Saturn, bringing its official total to 145.Jupiter, which added 12 moons to its tally in February, has 95 moons that have been formally designated by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

The science of black holes can often pay massive dividends.On Friday, for instance, two universities announced that their researchers have analyzed "the brightest cosmic explosion ever seen" around one ancient behemoth.The data required to find events like this is hard-won.First, an astronomer must direct instruments to peer into the deep Universe, using light's finite speed to search for superbright events of the past.

In the red corner, Jupiter, the largest planet orbiting our sun, which shaped our solar system with its gravitational bulk.In the blue corner, Saturn, the magnificent ringed world with bewildering hexagonal storms at its poles.These two giant worlds are late in their bout for satellite-based supremacy.

It's a dog-eat-dog cosmos.Not two weeks ago, on May 3, astronomers reported observing a star that was in the process of swallowing one of its own planets.Just two days earlier, another team had described black holes that were ripping stars apart and consuming them in a process known as tidal disruption event, or T.D.E.

Like basketball scouts discovering a nimble, super-tall teenager, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope reported recently that they had identified a small, captivating group of baby galaxies near the dawn of time.These galaxies, the scientists say, could well grow into one of the biggest conglomerations of mass in the universe, a vast cluster of thousands of galaxies and trillions of stars.

Scientists have discovered the biggest explosion ever observed in outer space, a blinding blast that is 10 times brighter than any known supernova and that has continued erupting for years since it was first detected in 2020, reports a new study.The radiant event is likely fueled by the consumption of a gigantic gas cloud by a supermassive black hole about eight billion light years from Earth.

It started as an unremarkable flicker in the night sky.But closer observations revealed that astronomers had captured the largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed, an event thought to have been triggered by a giant cloud of gas being gobbled up by a supermassive black hole.The flare-up, traced to 8bn light years away, is more than 10 times brighter than any known supernova and has so far lasted more than three years, making it the most energetic explosion on record.

A 60-year-old prediction just helped astronomers measure the expansion of the universe.Astronomers recently used the light of a distant supernova to calculate how fast the universe is expanding.But one of the biggest challenges for modern astronomy is that we seem to have too many answers to that question.

In our Solar System, the planetary orbits all have a similar orientation.Their orbital planes vary by a few degrees, but roughly the planets all orbit in the same direction.This invariable plane, as it's known, also has an orientation within a few degrees of the Sun's rotational plane.Most planetary systems have a similar arrangement, where planetary orbits and stellar rotation are roughly aligned.

In late 2017, our Solar System received its very first known interstellar visitor: a bizarre cigar-shaped object hurtling past at 44 kilometers per second, dubbed 'Oumuamua (Hawaiian for "messenger from afar arriving first").Was it a comet?An asteroid?A piece of alien technology?Scientists have been puzzling over the origin and unusual characteristics of 'Oumuamua ever since, most notably its strange orbit, and suggesting various models to account for them.

A pair of scientists may have figured out interstellar asteroid 'Oumuamua's secret - and it's not an alien spaceship after all.When the first known interstellar object passed through our Solar System in 2017, it got a lot of attention.Astronomers noticed that it was accelerating away from the Sun in a way that shouldn't have been possible, leading to wild speculation from some big names who suggested it might even be part of an alien spacecraft.

How fast is the universe expanding?It depends on who you ask.Cast your gaze to the relatively nearby stars and galaxies that surround us in space, and you'll arrive at a certain number for this value, known as the Hubble constant.But look into the far more distant universe, and you'll get a slightly different number.

Astronomers recently watched a supermassive black hole rip apart an unwary star much like our Sun.Just before a star falls into a black hole, the tremendous gravity of the black hole pulls the star apart and stretches it into a thin stream of blazing hot gas.Astronomers call this act of cosmic destruction a tidal disruption event.

Left: A butterfly from the Saurona group of butterflies.(B.Huertas (c) Trustees Natural History Museum); right, a depiction of the Eye of Sauron from "Lord of the Rings."(From left: B. Huertas (c) Trustees Natural History Museum; iStock)Scientists have named a new group of butterflies with dark eye-shaped patterns on their orange wings after Sauron, the omnipresent evil lord in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" novels - what the Natural History Museum in London called an "homage to an eye-conic villain."

The James Webb Space Telescope is stirring up more space mysteries with the discovery of an additional pair of debris belts around a young nearby star long believed to have only one.As opposed to having just one dusty ring roughly twice the size of the solar system's Kuiper Belt around it, JWST used the Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI, to spot two more dust belts nestled within the outer belt surrounding the star Fomalhaut.

About a year and a half ago, the United Arab Emirates announced an ambitious deep space mission to explore the asteroid belt, with the aim of visiting seven different asteroids.The Arab country, working with the University of Colorado Boulder, aimed to launch the mission as soon as 2028.It envisioned the probe as a suitable follow-up to the successful launch and flight of the Emirates Mars Mission, which reached orbit around Mars in early 2021 and is continuing to study the red planet's thin atmosphere and seasonal weather variations.

About 25 light years away from Earth lies Fomalhaut, one of the brightest stars in the night sky.The Fomalhaut system has captivated astronomers for decades, but it's only now that we're developing a better understanding of it thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope.In a study published in the journal on Monday, a group of scientists made up primarily of astronomers from the University of Arizona and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory say the Fomalhaut system is far more complex than previously thought.

While astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets (other worlds orbiting other stars beyond our Sun), they've caught very few in the act of being born.In fact, until recently, they'd only found two - PDS b and PDS c, gas giant exoplanets orbiting a dwarf star about 370-light years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus.

Two blazing galaxies play gravitational tug of war with stars and streamers of gas in the latest image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.The two galaxies are so closely linked that they share a single number in catalogs of astronomical objects: AM 1214-255 (or ESO 505-31, if you're not a fan of the Catalog of Southern Peculiar Galaxies, but who isn't?).

K. Miller/R.Hurt (Caltech/IPAC)
Scientists know that a dying star will become a giant that swallows all the planets within a certain radius, but they've never seen it happen... before now, that is.Astronomers at Caltech, Harvard, MIT and other schools have detected a star consuming one of its orbiting planets as it turns into a red giant.

Astronomers have caught their first-ever tantalizing glimpse of a star in the act of swallowing its planet, a harbinger of Earth's likely fate.It's the first time the actual gulp has been observed, though astronomers have seen before-and-after signs of such phenomena, researchers said in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Whether we like it or not, someday, our Sun will swell outward and engulf our planet like a fiery amoeba.That's the fate of most worlds around middleweight stars, according to physics.And astronomers recently witnessed it for the first time in a star system 12,000 light years away.They published their findings in the journal Nature.

An artist's impression of an aging star swelling up and beginning to engulf a planet, much like the Sun will do in about 5 billion years.K. Miller/R.Hurt (Caltech/IPAC) Astronomers have gotten a sneak peek at what could be Earth's ultimate fate in about 5 billion years when the sun reaches the end of its life and engulfs the solar system's inner planets including our own.

Astronomers have been looking for the source of the matter that makes up early galaxies for decades.Now, for the first time, astronomers have observed the cold, steady streams of gas that make up the raw material for stars.Despite the name, the filamentary stream surrounding and heading into the galaxy 4C 41.17- more than 10 billion light years away - is immense: a thin stream of cold carbon gas 100 kiloparsecs, or half a million light years, wide, and as massive as 140 billion suns.

Recent observations with the James Webb Space Telescope suggest that the innermost world of the TRAPPIST-1 system has no atmosphere - or at most, it's extremely thinly veiled with the tattered remnants of its original atmosphere.That's not surprising, given how closely the planet orbits a star with a wild past.

Astronomers are just beginning to unpack the treasure trove of information that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has siphoned from a nearby world that orbits two stars.So far, they've already learned that the clouds of this world rain sand.These particles are very hot; a description of the new research from JWST's managerial base at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Maryland says that the high atmosphere of exoplanet VHS 1256 b is a place where "temperatures reach a scorching 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit (830 degrees Celsius)."

"Lights Out: Recovering Our Night Sky," an exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History, explores the impact of light pollution on different organisms.(Avalon.red/AlamyStock Photo)One of the darkest places in daytime Washington at the moment is a tribute to the night sky.The notably low-lit exhibition "Lights Out: Recovering Our Night Sky" is the National Museum of Natural History's effort to illustrate what's been lost as artificial illumination bleaches out the heavens.

MIT professor and AI researcher Max Tegmark is pretty stressed out about the potential impact of artificial general intelligence (AGI) on human society.In a new essay for Time, he rings the alarm bells, painting a pretty dire picture of a future determined by an AI that can outsmart us."Sadly, I now feel that we're living the movie 'Don't Look Up' for another existential threat: unaligned superintelligence," Tegmark wrote, comparing what he perceives to be a lackadaisical response to a growing AGI threat to director Adam McKay's popular climate change satire.

For the first time, astronomers have captured the powerful jets spewing out of a black hole and the black hole itself in the same image.Until now, they'd only been able to capture them in separate images.As detailed in a new paper in Nature, the image shows the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, also known as M87, and was put together using 2018 data collected by telescopes across the world, including the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile.

Ultraviolet light blasting the atmosphere of giant exoplanet WASP-39b is producing a toxic gas called sulfur dioxide.WASP-39b, an exoplanet about 700 light years away, is about as massive as Saturn, but it orbits its Sun-like star on a scorchingly close four-day orbit.Its hellishly hot 1600°F atmosphere contains carbon dioxide, water, and a noxious chemical called sulfur dioxide.

On the morning of October 9, 2022, multiple space-based detectors picked up a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) passing through our Solar System, sending astronomers around the world scrambling to train their telescopes on that part of the sky to collect vital data on the event and its aftermath.Dubbed GRB 221009A and deemed likely to be the "birth cry" of a new black hole, the gamma-ray burst is the most powerful yet recorded.

Spin Kick
Last year, NASA rammed its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft into a tiny moonlet called Dimorphos, demonstrating a promising way to redirect a potential incoming killer asteroid to save life on Earth.Now, given the huge amount of scrutiny following the collision, scientists have made another surprising discovery: Dimorphos' much larger companion Didymos is spinning so fast, they say, that it's capable of shooting pieces of rubble into space, a puzzling conclusion that highlights the fact that asteroids aren't necessarily the inert lumps of rock they're often thought of, Scientific American reports.

One promising planet turned out not to have an atmosphere.But there are six more where it came from.Several years ago, astronomers pointed a telescope at another star and discovered something remarkable: seven planets, each one about the same size as Earth.The planets were quite close to their small star-all seven of their orbits would fit inside Mercury's.

Move Over, Oumuamua
Remember Oumuamua, that weird and allegedly alien object that flew past Earth back in 2017, when we were all so young and starry-eyed?Now, some scientists have a new and boring explanation for what it was - and reader, it may have nothing to do with aliens.In a new study published in the journal Nature this week, astronomy researchers out of Cornell and Berkeley suggested that Oumuamua, the interstellar interloper that whizzed past Earth in 2017 and has puzzled, mesmerized, and frustrated astronomers ever since, may well have been a gas-propelled comet with a tail so faint that we couldn't see it.

An asteroid big enough to wipe out a city will pass harmlessly between Earth and the moon's orbit this weekend, missing both, while providing scientists a chance to study the object close up.Asteroid flybys are common but Nasa said it was rare for one so big to come so close and that events like this occurred only about once a decade.

The cigar-shaped 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object in recorded human history to whizz through the Solar System, is a comet after all, a pair of astronomers declared in research published in Nature on Wednesday.In 2017, 'Oumuamua captured the imagination of scientists and space fans with its peculiar characteristics.

Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter.Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has detected churning clouds of dust on a distant planet that orbits two stars.Known as VHS 1256 b, the exoplanet is about 40 light-years away from Earth and orbits at a long distance from its stars, ideal conditions for fine grained observation with Webb, according to Brittany Miles, a fellow at the University of Arizona and coauthor of the new research.

Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter.Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.Telescopes around the world were watching when a NASA spacecraft intentionally crashed into an asteroid in September 2022.New images released Tuesday by astronomers who used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile reveal detailed views of debris streaming away from the collision created by the Double Asteroid Redirect Test.

Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter.Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a rare and tumultuous sight 15,000 light-years away from Earth.The space observatory captured a scintillating image of a Wolf-Rayet star called WR 124 in the Sagittarius constellation.

NASA's DART mission successfully changed the course of a small asteroid, but it also shed some light on the makeup and evolution of the early Solar System.When NASA crashed its DART spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos (a small asteroid orbiting a larger one called Didymos), the agency proved that it's possible to knock an incoming asteroid off its course.

JWST captures incredible image of WR124 going supernova (Image: skyatnightmagazine.com)JWST has captured some of the best images of the cosmos ever seen- but first we need to understand just how amazing it is, which arises the question of: What is JWST?The James Webb space telescope was launched on Christmas day 2021, set to go "back to the edge of time itself" 1.5 million km away at the lagrarian point L2- a place inside Earth's orbit which allows for objects such as space telescopes to remain in a stable orbit, without any added energy, around Earth's orbit.

Astronomers have uncovered the first evidence of an active volcano on Venus, using computer images captured more than 30 years ago by a NASA spacecraft.Launched in May 1989, the Magellan probe became the first of its kind to image almost the entire surface of Venus (like, 98 percent) using radar.The spacecraft no longer exists - it was crashed into the planet in 1994.

Final Blossom
Turning its sights to the constellation Sagittarius, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured a spectacular image of a star in its death throes some 15,000 light years away, NASA announced on Tuesday.The image shows the star ejecting astronomical amounts of material as it's getting ready to explode in a supernova, a rare sight captured in incredible detail by the observatory.