Astronomers Find and Confirm 44 New Extrasolar Planets
An international team of astronomers has confirmed the existence of 44 new extrasolar planets. The planets were first spotted by the astronomers through data gathered from Campaign #10 of NASA’s Kepler K2 mission. According to NASA’s Kepler and K2 webpage, campaign #10 ran from July 6, 2016, to September 20, 2016. To verify their findings, […]
Lowest Frequency Fast Radio Burst Detected
Fast radio bursts or FRB’s are brilliant, powerful but quick pulses of electromagnetic energy at radio wavelengths. Scientists think these rare and mysterious radio pulses, which are said to last no more than 5 milliseconds, travel across the universe from sources billions of light-years away. In a posting to the Astronomer’s Telegram website, scientists working […]
Astronomers Discover A Dozen New Jovian Moons
As a team of astronomers was looking beyond Pluto for the mysterious Planet 9. So far they haven’t located the giant hypothetical planet, but they did wind up discovering a dozen new moons orbiting Jupiter. “Jupiter just happened to be in the sky near the search fields where we were looking for extremely distant Solar System […]
Scientists: It’s New Era In Space Research
Members of the science community are proclaiming a new era in space research after discovering the first verified source of a super-energetic subatomic particle called a high-energy neutrino. Researchers from the Pennsylvania State University say that these neutrinos contain energies that are thousands to millions of times greater than those generated by particle colliders/accelerators such […]
Astronomers Discover Ancient Galactic Collision that Reshaped the Milky Way
A team of astronomers found evidence of a cataclysmic collision between the Milky Way and a dwarf galaxy some 8 to 10 billion years ago. The astronomers refer to this galactic crash as a ‘defining event’ in the early history of the Milky Way. They say the collision between our galaxy, and what is being […]
Astronomers Snap First Baby Picture of Newborn Exoplanet
An international group of astronomers has captured what is being called the first confirmed image of a planet forming near a young dwarf star. The group, led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, found the newborn planet making its way through a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas that […]
Oumuamua: It’s a Comet, It’s an Asteroid, No, wait, It’s a Comet
An odd rocky cigar-shaped object called Oumuamua made news late last year when it was determined to be of interstellar origin. It was touted as the solar system’s first visitor from another star system. Some scientists first pegged Oumuamua as a comet soon after its discovery. A few months later studies indicated that it was […]
Astronomers Detect Nanodiamonds in Three Baby Star Systems
Astronomers have detected swirls of diamonds, hundreds of thousands of times smaller than a grain of sand, in the protoplanetary or circumstellar disks of three baby star systems in the Milky Way – V892 Tau, HD 97048, and MWC 297. After conducting a series of observations with the US National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope […]
First Detection of Helium in an Exoplanet Atmosphere
Scientists say for the first several hundred thousand years or so after the Big Bang, there were virtually only two elements in the universe, hydrogen, and helium. A hydrogen atom is made of only one proton and one electron, and a helium atom has two each of protons, electrons, and neutrons. Hydrogen and then helium are […]
Galaxy Megamergers 1.4 – 1.5 Billion Years after the Big Bang
Two teams of astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), in Chile, to observe dense concentrations of so-called “starburst” galaxies. With these galaxies packing together so closely, the scientific teams realized that they were getting ready to violently collide and merge with each other, which would eventually […]