#astrophysics

#astrophysics

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.

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.

NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez
The James Webb Telescope has been giving us clearer views of celestial objects and exposing hidden features since it became operational last year.Now, according to a study conducted by an international team of astrophysicists, it may also completely change our understanding of the cosmos.

Behold Messier 92, a dense place in the nearby Universe where more than 300,000 stars live with their siblings.Messier 92 is located within the Milky Way galaxy about 27,000 light-years away in the Hercules constellation.Astronomers define stellar hubs like Messier 92 as globular clusters, home to hundreds of thousands of huddled stars born roughly at the same time.

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).

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.

Though nebulae host swaths of bright stars, they still find a way to obscure their secrets.Thick dust and gas clouds, which are the lifeblood of these stellar nurseries, cast a murky haze over newly-forming stars.At visible wavelengths, dust seems to cover all.But some telescopes can view nebulas at infrared wavelengths to cut through the haze.

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.

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.

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.

A small icy world far beyond Neptune possesses a ring like the ones around Saturn.Perplexingly, the ring is at a distance where simple gravitational calculations suggest there should be none.That's very strange, said Bruno Morgado, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.Dr. Morgado is the lead author of a paper published in the journal Nature on Wednesday that describes the ring that encircles Quaoar, a planetary body about 700 miles in diameter that orbits the sun at a distance of about four billion miles.

A 16-year-old killed at a TTC station last weekend will be mourned at a candlelight vigil at High Park on Thursday night.Gabriel Magalhaes was sitting on a bench at Keele subway station when a stranger stabbed him in what Toronto police have called an "unprovoked" incident.A 22-year-old man of no fixed address has been charged in connection with his death.

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.

A new study found evidence of volcanic activity as recently as the early 1990s on the north side of Venus's Maat Mons, which is seen in this image from the JPL Multimission Image Processing Laboratory.(NASA/JPL)During the pandemic, planetary scientist Robert Herrick took advantage of hours of Zoom meetings to do some extraterrestrial multitasking - and discovered evidence that, as recently as 1991, a volcano erupted on Venus.

Image: Theo O'Neill and the Milkyway3d.orgteam You may not realize it in your day-to-day life, but we are all enveloped by a giant superbubble that was blown into space by the explosive deaths of a dozen-odd stars.Known as the Local Bubble, this structure extends for about 1,000 light years around the solar system, and is one of countless similar bubbles in our galaxy that are produced by the fallout of supernovas.

Formed between 500 and 700 million years after the Big Bang, objects at the extreme limits of human observation have showed up on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), designed to uncover the early life of the 13.8 billion-year-old universe.The observations are part of the first release of data from NASA's $10 billion space gadget that show galaxies more massive than had been expected for this early point in time.

The bright, churning heart of ancient galaxy 3C 297, visible just right of center in a new NASA image, has fascinated astronomers.And when Valentina Missaglia, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics at FORTH in Greece, led a team to peer into the invisible world of X-ray and radio emissions surrounding the galaxy, she found something unexpected.

Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter.Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.An incredibly bright flash that appeared in the night sky in February was the result of a star straying too close to a supermassive black hole, meeting its untimely end there as it was ripped to shreds.

Research published this week shows increasing interference with astronomical images caused by commercial satellites, adding to concern over the effects of the private space industry on science.Using deep learning algorithms to scan historic images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between 2002 and 2021, researchers found 2.7 ± 0.2 percent of images with a typical exposure time of 11 minutes contained at least one satellite trail.

The James Webb space telescope has detected what appear to be six massive ancient galaxies, which astronomers are calling universe breakers because their existence could upend current theories of cosmology.The objects date to a time when the universe was just 3% of its current age and are far larger than was presumed possible for galaxies so early after the big bang.

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Such an event happens only a few times every 100,000 years in a galaxy with a dormant black hole at its center, but recently, one such event was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.While some stars reach the end of their lives with a bang, exploding in an enormous supernova, others end in a whimper, puffing up and throwing off material before shrinking and cooling to a small core.

Scottish podcasting company The Podcast Host has announced a new, free online event, IndyPod Summit, designed for independent podcasters that will take place on February 2nd, with speakers including Elsie Escobar (She Podcasts and Libsyn), Arielle Nissenblatt (Squadcast.fm), and Jeremy Enns (Podcast Marketing Academy), among others.

In a star system 2,600 light years away, a Jupiter-like exoplanet called Kepler-1658b is spiraling toward a fiery collision with its star, and it could shed light on the terrible fate that awaits our own cozy world.Astronomers would have remained blissfully ignorant of the exoplanet's fate without a tiny clue: a minuscule change in its orbit, revealed only by comparing more than a decade of data from several telescopes.

Nobody knows for certain what the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi did or didn't say at the lunch with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico that took place in 1950.But as the perhaps apocryphal story has it, Fermi was holding forth on the sheer number of stars in the sky and the sheer number of intelligent civilizations the planets orbiting them might harbor, and puzzling out why we've never seen or heard any sign of them.

In the zoo of subatomic particles, neutrinos are strange beasts.Unlike more familiar particles such as electrons and protons, ghostly neutrinos barely interact with normal matter at all: they can fly right through a planet as if it weren't even there.This makes them irritatingly difficult to detect and, for neutrinos streaming in from cosmic objects in the sky, even harder to know exactly where they come from.

There's more than one way to uncover what a planet is made of.Scientists suspect that two exoplanets orbiting a red dwarf star may be mostly water, according to a recent study using data from two NASA telescopes.But before you start picturing Kevin Costner in Water World or even the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, pause: These two exoplanets are far stranger than that.

A clutch of upcoming space missions will give scientists unprecedented views of some of the oddest objects in the solar system.Why it matters: The solar system is still a largely mysterious place.Scientists aren't sure exactly how planets came together billions of years ago or how life developed on Earth - and whether it took hold on other worlds.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has repeatedly proven that the technology is incredible, and with it, scientists are learning so much more about our universe-and beyond.NASA recently shared two new images taken from the telescope that have the potential to change everything that we know about our universe.

Nasa's James Webb space telescope is finding bright, early galaxies that until now have been hidden from view, including one that may have formed just 350m years after the big bang.Astronomers said Thursday that if the results were verified, this newly discovered throng of stars would beat the most distant galaxy identified by the Hubble space telescope  a record-holder that formed 400m years after the universe began.

Space is so hot right now.The uncrewed Artemis I mission is on its way to lunar orbit, the first in a series of missions that plans to return humans to the moon by the end of the decade.A spacewalk at theInternational Space Station went down this week, and it was streamed live.We're hucking shit at asteroids to prove we can.

Almost but not quite in time for Halloween, astronomers announced on Friday that they had discovered the closest known black hole.It is a biggie, a shell of yawning emptiness 10 times as massive as the sun, orbiting as far from its own star as the Earth is from ours.Not to worry, however: This black hole is 1,600 light-years away, in the constellation Ophiuchus; the next nearest known black hole is about 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros.

Astronomers have discovered the closest known black hole to Earth, just 1,600 light years away.cientists said on Friday that this black hole is 10 times bigger than our sun and three times closer than the previous record-holder.It was identified by observing the motion of its companion star, which orbits the black hole at about the same distance as Earth orbits the sun.

ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs.Scientists have discovered a huge extragalactic structure hidden behind the Milky Way in a mysterious area of the sky known as the zone of avoidance because it is obscured by our own galaxy's opaque bulge, according to a new preprint study.

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The European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express orbiter may be old - it launched back in 2003 - but it's still uncovering new clues.Equipped with a new software upgrade to its Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) instrument, the veteran spacecraft has now taken a deeper look into Phobos, one of Mars' moons whose origins remain an enigma to astronomers.