Imagine listening to the cosmos itself pulsing with life. Scientists have discovered something extraordinary in the vast darkness of space: binary star systems that literally beat like hearts. These celestial objects, aptly named s, are rewriting our understanding of stellar behavior and the intricate dance between gravitational forces in the universe. When plotted over time, ...
Some stars don’t go out with fireworks. They simply fade, as if a cosmic switch flips and the universe swallows the evidence. Astronomers have spent the past decade chasing these quiet endings, hunting “failed supernovae” that collapse straight into black holes with barely a whisper. The mystery is both maddening and magnetic: if there’s no ...
Radio astronomers keep stumbling on a paradox: some distant radio galaxies look as if their story is running in reverse. Jets brighten in the “wrong” order, hotspots seem younger farther from the core, and knots of plasma appear to race ahead of the light that reveals them. It’s the kind of riddle that makes ...
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found one of the strangest things in the vast cosmic menagerie: a celestial owl staring back at us from 11 billion light-years away. This strange structure is not just any old galactic formation; it is known as the “Cosmic Owl.” It’s the result of two very rare ring ...
The extraordinary features of a rapidly moving celestial object are scintillating astronomers’ interest. Upon initial discovery, A11pl3Z was given a name but recently NASA has confirmed it as 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object out of four comets or asteroids discovered. Unlike the comets or asteroids which are bound to the sun’s asteroid belt and viewable ...
Jupiter-sized exoplanets which emerge as a proxy for accelerating self-sabotage by instigating tremendous outbursts from their parent stars seem as violations to the conventional structure of planetary systems; astronomers have identified such a diabolic planet, HIP 67522 b. Located within its parent star’s magnetic field, HIP 67522 b’s orbital position subjects it to flare beams ...
Astronomers have found a rare Jupiter-sized planet hiding at the edge of the Milky Way using a phenomenon that Albert Einstein predicted more than a hundred years ago. This is part of a cosmic detective story that has been going on for years. Gravitational microlensing, which uses the bending of space-time itself, found the exoplanet ...
Behind clouds of interstellar dust, a cosmic drama is playing out deep in the southern constellation of Chamaeleon. The Chamaeleon I dark cloud is one of the closest places to Earth where stars are born. It is only 550 light-years away. In this “stellar nursery,” newborn stars break through the darkness and light up huge ...
Astronomers have been trying to fit the cosmic puzzle of how the universe changed from a dark, featureless void into a glittering expanse of stars and galaxies for decades. Now, a faint whisper from the dawn of time, a radio signal emitted just 100 million years after the Big Bang has given scientists an unheard-of ...
Water in the great, cold nurseries where stars birth has a cosmic fingerprint. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have found, for the first time, a rare form of water ice surrounding a young star remarkably similar to our infant Sun. Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, this finding implies that some of ...
