In our most basic understanding of our Solar System, planets are drawn into the orbit of our massive star, the Sun. But what happens to planet-sized objects that don’t have a star? A team of astronomers studying Jupiter-mass binary objects (JuMBOs) in the Orion Nebula are gaining a new understanding of these unusual systems.
Employing massive data sets collected through NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a research team led by a Rutgers University–New Brunswick astronomer is unearthing clues to conditions existing in the early universe. The team has catalogued the ages of stars in the Wolf–Lundmark–Melotte (WLM) galaxy, constructing the most detailed picture of it yet, according to the researchers.
Astronomers using Hubble observed the smallest exoplanet where water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere.
Since the 1980s, the planetary system around the star Beta Pictoris has continued to fascinate scientists. Even after decades of study, it still holds surprises.
Although the Crab Nebula is one of the most well-studied supernova remnants, questions about its progenitor and the nature of the explosion that created it still remain unanswered. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is on the case as it sleuths for any clues that remain within the supernova remnant. Webb’s infrared sensitivity and spatial resolution are offering astronomers a more comprehensive understanding of the still-expanding scene.
Within a neighboring dwarf galaxy known as the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) lies a dramatic region of star birth – NGC 346, shown here. As the brightest and largest star-forming region in the SMC, it has been studied intensely by a variety of telescopes. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope showed a visible-light view filled with thousands of stars. More recently, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope offered a near-infrared vista highlighting both cool and warm dust. Now, Webb has turned its mid-infrared gaze to NGC 346, revealing streamers of gas and dust studded with bright patches filled with young protostars.
Carbon-bearing molecules have been discovered in the atmosphere of the habitable zone exoplanet K2-18 b by an international team of astronomers using data from the NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. These results are consistent with an exoplanet that may contain ocean-covered surface underneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere. This discovery provides a fascinating glimpse into a planet unlike anything else in our Solar System, and raises interesting prospects about potentially habitable worlds elsewhere in the Universe.
A new research finding shows that a likely large Earth-like granite system is present on the Moon. The finding, details of which are published in a Nature paper, may help expand knowledge of geothermal lunar processes.
An international team has found that the water on one of Saturn’s moons harbors high concentrations of phosphates, a key building block of life. The team detected evidence of phosphates in particles ejected from the ice-covered global ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
Enceladus—a tiny, icy moon of Saturn—is one of the most intriguing objects in the search for signs of life beyond our own planet.
New pictures of Jupiter and Uranus from Hubble reveal complex weather activities on these remote gas giant planets. The forecast for Jupiter is blustery winds, while the outlook for Uranus is smoggy as northern summer approaches.
Dust launched from the moon’s surface or from a space station positioned between Earth and the sun could reduce enough solar radiation to mitigate the impacts of climate change.
“A combination of geological interpretations and thermal-orbital evolution models implies that Charon had a subsurface liquid ocean that eventually froze,” said SwRI’s Dr. Alyssa Rhoden, a specialist in the geophysics of icy satellites, particularly those containing oceans, and the evolution of giant planet satellite systems.
An asteroid roughly the size of Rome’s Colosseum — between 300 to 650 feet (100 to 200 meters) in length — has been detected by an international team of European astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The object, shown in this artist’s conception, is likely the smallest observed to date by Webb. The detection was serendipitous — the asteroid was found in calibration images of a different asteroid. The lucky finding suggests Webb can detect many such objects.
Working with data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, Michigan State University has helped discover an Earth-sized exoplanet — a planet outside of our solar system.
Shockwaves resulting from the violent collision between an intruder galaxy and Stephan’s Quintet are helping astronomers to understand how turbulence influences gas in the intergalactic medium. New observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed that a sonic boom several times the size of the Milky Way has kickstarted a recycling plant for warm and cold molecular hydrogen gas. What’s more, scientists uncovered the break-up of a giant cloud into a fog of warm gas, the possible collision of two clouds forming a splash of warm gas around them, and the formation of a new galaxy. The observations were presented today in a press conference at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle, Washington.
The condemned planet could help answer questions about the fate of other worlds as their solar systems evolve.
Twilight observations with the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF's NOIRLab, have enabled astronomers to spot three near-Earth asteroids (NEA) hiding in the glare of the Sun. These NEAs are part of an elusive population that lurks inside the orbits of Earth and Venus. One of the asteroids is the largest object that is potentially hazardous to Earth to be discovered in the last eight years.
From high atop a mountain in the Chilean Andes, the Dark Energy Camera has snapped more than one million exposures of the southern sky. The images have captured around 2.5 billion astronomical objects, including galaxies and galaxy clusters, stars, comets, asteroids, dwarf planets and supernovae.
Using highly detailed simulations, a collaborative team led by researchers from the University of Texas at Austin has made a breakthrough discovery that star formation is a self-regulatory process, knowledge that may allow researchers to understand star formation within our own and far away galaxies.
The Cartwheel Galaxy, a rare ring galaxy once shrouded in dust and mystery, has been unveiled by the imaging capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s high-precision instruments resolved individual stars and star-forming regions within the Cartwheel, and revealed the behavior of the black hole within its galactic center. These new details provide a renewed understanding of a galaxy in the midst of a slow transformation.
President Biden unveiled the image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, known as Webb’s First Deep Field, during a White House event on Monday, July 11. NASA and its partners will release a series of Webb's first full-color images and data, known as spectra, Tuesday, July 12th during a live NASA TV broadcast.
How often do stars live alone? For brown dwarfs — objects that straddle the boundary between the most massive planets and the smallest stars — astronomers need to uncover more examples of their companions to find out. Ace citizen scientist Frank Kiwy has done just that by using the Astro Data Lab science platform at NSF’s NOIRLab to discover 34 new ultracool dwarf binary systems in the Sun's neighborhood, nearly doubling the number of such systems known.
Nearly half of Sun-size stars are binary. According to University of Copenhagen research, planetary systems around binary stars may be very different from those around single stars. This points to new targets in the search for extraterrestrial life forms.
A team of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers led by physics professor Charles Gammie is part of a large international collaboration that unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
At simultaneous press conferences around the world, including at a National Science Foundation-sponsored press conference at the US National Press Club in Washington, D.C., astronomers have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. This result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the center of most galaxies. The image was produced by a global research team called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, using observations from a worldwide network of radio telescopes.
Astronomers using Hubble have found a companion star previously hidden in the glare of its partner’s supernova.
Europa is a prime candidate for life in our solar system, and its deep saltwater ocean has captivated scientists for decades. But it’s enclosed by an icy shell that could be miles to tens of miles thick, making sampling it a daunting prospect. Now, increasing evidence reveals the ice shell may be less of a barrier and more of a dynamic system – and site of potential habitability in its own right.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe's birth in the big bang—the farthest individual star ever seen to date. The newly detected star is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it did when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at redshift 6.2.
Astronomers using Hubble and Keck have identified two different cases of "mini-Neptune" planets that are losing their puffy atmospheres and likely transforming into super-Earths.
To understand galaxies, you have to understand how stars form. Over 100 researchers from around the world have collaborated to bring together observations of nearby spiral galaxies taken with the world’s most powerful radio, visible, and ultraviolet telescopes – and will soon add a full suite of high-resolution infrared images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. With this groundbreaking data set, astronomers will be able to study stars as they start to form within dark, dusty gas clouds, untangle when those infant stars blow away that gas and dust, and identify more mature stars that are puffing off layers of gas and dust – all for the first time in a diverse set of spiral galaxies.
An instrument made by scientists and engineers at the Center for Astrophysics has helped verify that — for the first time in history — a spacecraft has entered the corona of the Sun.
Scientists computationally simulated more than 200,000 hypothetical Earth-like worlds all in orbit of stars like our sun, and found that about 90% of these potentially habitable hypothetical worlds lacked partial surface ice like polar caps. When partial ice is present, ice belts — permanent surface ice along the equator — were more common than ice caps.
Hubble delivered a ringside seat to a supernova in the very earliest stage of exploding, giving astronomers an unprecedented view of the first moments of a star’s spectacular death.
Hubble Space Telescope observations of Jupiter's icy moon Europa have revealed the presence of persistent water vapor — but mysteriously, only in one hemisphere.
A variable signal aligned to the heart of the Milky Way is tantalising scientists.
A new Cornell study finds that next-generation telescopes used to see exoplanets could confuse Earth-like planets with other types of planets in the same solar system.
The innermost lane may typically be favored to win a race, but in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the winds in its outermost “lane” are taking the lead! Only Hubble can spot these trends: The observatory acts like a storm tracker for the giant planets in our solar system every year.
In this image, a remote galaxy is greatly magnified and distorted by the effects of gravitationally warped space. After its public release, astronomers used the picture to measure the galaxy's distance of 9.4 billion light-years. This places the galaxy at the peak epoch of star formation in cosmic evolution.
Researchers measured the potassium isotope compositions of Martian meteorites in order to estimate the presence, distribution and abundance of volatile elements and compounds, including water, on Mars, finding that Mars has lost more potassium than Earth but retained more potassium than the Moon or the asteroid 4-Vesta; the results suggest that rocky planets with larger mass retain more volatile elements during planetary formation and that Mars and Mars-sized exoplanets fall below a size threshold necessary to retain enough water to enable habitability and plate tectonics.
Astronomers using Hubble have uncovered burned-out stars that look younger than they really are. After the nuclear furnaces at their cores shut down, the stars continue burning leftover hydrogen on their surface.
Using the powerful 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) in Chile, astronomers just ten days ago discovered an asteroid with the shortest orbital period of any known asteroid in the Solar System.
The feeding patterns of black holes offer insight into their size, researchers report. A new study revealed that the flickering in the brightness observed in actively feeding supermassive black holes is related to their mass.
These early snapshots demonstrate Hubble's return to full science operations, following correction of a computer anomaly aboard the spacecraft. Normal science observations were restarted on July 17, at 1:18 pm EDT.
Some exoplanet searches could be missing nearly half of the Earth-sized planets around other stars. New findings from a team using the international Gemini Observatory and the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory suggest that Earth-sized worlds could be lurking undiscovered in binary star systems, hidden in the glare of their parent stars. As roughly half of all stars are in binary systems, this means that astronomers could be missing many Earth-sized worlds.
A giant comet from the outskirts of our Solar System has been discovered in 6 years of data from the Dark Energy Survey. Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is estimated to be about 1000 times more massive than a typical comet, making it arguably the largest comet discovered in modern times. It has an extremely elongated orbit, journeying inward from the distant Oort Cloud over millions of years. It is the most distant comet to be discovered on its incoming path, giving us years to watch it evolve as it approaches the Sun, though it's not predicted to become a naked-eye spectacle.
As first pointed out by the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild, black holes bend space-time to an extreme degree due to their extraordinary concentration of mass, and heat up the matter in their vicinity so that it begins to glow.
The Orion Bar is a ridge-like feature of gas and dust that is being sculpted by the intense radiation from neighboring, hot, young stars. In reality, the Orion Bar is not really a “bar” at all. Instead, it contains a lot of structure and several distinct zones. For the first time, Webb will be able to separate and study these different zones’ physical conditions.
Scientists have begun the search for extraterrestrial life in the Solar System in earnest, but such life may be subtly or profoundly different from Earth-life, and methods based on detecting particular molecules as biosignatures may not apply to life with a different evolutionary history.
A new study led by University of Chicago planetary scientist Edwin Kite finds Mars could have had a thin layer of icy, high-altitude clouds that caused a greenhouse effect, allowing rivers and lakes to flow.
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