Focus: Space Channel Featured Story 2

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Astronomers have discovered the shortest-ever gamma-ray burst (GRB) caused by the implosion of a massive star. Using the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, astronomers identified the cause of this 0.6-second flurry of gamma rays as a supernova explosion in a distant galaxy. GRBs caused by supernovae are usually more than twice as long, which suggests that some short GRBs might actually be imposters — supernova-produced GRBs in disguise.

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A co-investigator on NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter, Prof. Yohai Kaspi and his team have made discoveries about the gas giant’s climate: Each pole has several Australia-sized cyclones that rarely change their size, number, or position because massive polar storms keep them at bay, and strong jet streams won’t let them form below a certain latitude.

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Astronomers have imaged the heart of Centaurus A in unprecedented detail and pinpointed the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, revealing how a gigantic jet is born. Most remarkably, only the outer edges of the jet seem to emit radiation, which challenges current theoretical models of jets.

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Researchers examine a 4.6 billion- year-old rock to better understand the solar system’s beginning, and a modern mystery.

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Jupiter’s clouds have water conditions that would allow Earth-like life to exist, but this isn’t possible in Venus’ clouds, according to the groundbreaking finding of new research led by a Queen’s University Belfast scientist.

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A new analysis of known exoplanets has revealed that Earth-like conditions on potentially habitable planets may be much rarer than previously thought.

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Researchers at the University of Notre Dame have identified the first eclipsing magnetic propeller in a cataclysmic variable star system, according to research forthcoming in the Astrophysical Journal.

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An investigation carried out by the astrophysicists of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) ?ofia Chrobáková, a doctoral student at the IAC and the University of La Laguna (ULL), and Martín López Corredoira, questions one of the most interesting findings about the dynamics of the Milky Way in recent years: the precession, or the wobble in the axis of rotation of the disc warp is incorrect.

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Astronomers are on the trail of one of the universe's most enigmatic events: powerful bursts of radio waves that disappear in the blink of an eye. Using Hubble, they have traced the radio bursts to the spiral arms of distant galaxies.

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In 2018, astronomers announced that they had discovered an exoplanet orbiting Barnard’s star, our solar system’s second-closest stellar neighbor, but further analysis by an international group of researchers headed by a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine has cast doubt on the finding.

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Astronomers have found two close pairs of quasars in the distant Universe. Follow-up observations with Gemini North spectroscopically resolved one of the distant quasar pairs, after their discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope and Gaia spacecraft. These quasars are closer together than any pair of quasars found so far away, providing strong evidence for the existence of supermassive black hole pairs as well as crucial insight into galaxy mergers in the early Universe.

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Astronomers have detected X-rays from Uranus for the first time, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This result may help scientists learn more about this enigmatic ice giant planet in our solar system.

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Billions of years ago, the Red Planet was far more blue; according to evidence still found on the surface, abundant water flowed across Mars and forming pools, lakes, and deep oceans. The question, then, is where did all that water go?

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A new study that characterizes the climate of Mars over the planet’s lifetime reveals that in its earliest history it was periodically warmed, yet remained relatively cold in the intervening periods, thus providing opportunities and challenges for any microbial life form that may have been emerging.

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Hubble astronomers are investigating the dimming of one of the most colossal stars ever seen, VY Canis Majoris. Big enough to swallow our solar system out to Saturn’s orbit, the faded star is expelling huge dust clouds late in its life.

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Hubble snapped this image of the young comet-like object P/2019 LD2 as it orbits near Jupiter’s captured ancient asteroids, which are called Trojans. The icy object is the first comet astronomers have spotted near the Trojan population.

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The latest star data from the Gaia space observatory has for the first time allowed astronomers to generate a massive 3D atlas of widely separated binary stars within about 3,000 light years of Earth -- 1.3 million of them.

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Hubble astronomers have retraced the expanding gaseous debris from a nearby exploded star to estimate the location and time of the stellar detonation. Their analysis reveals that the light from the supernova blast reached Earth about 1,700 years ago.

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The most distant quasar known has been discovered. The quasar, observed just 670 million years after the Big Bang, is 1000 times more luminous than the Milky Way. It is powered by the earliest known supermassive black hole, which weighs in at more than 1.6 billion times the mass of the Sun. Seen more than 13 billion years ago, this fully formed distant quasar is also the earliest yet discovered, providing astronomers with insight into the formation of massive galaxies in the early Universe. The result was released today at the January 2021 meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

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In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope stared at a blank patch of the sky for 10 straight days. The resulting Deep Field image captured thousands of previously unseen, distant galaxies. The Roman Space Telescope will be able to photograph an area of sky 100 times larger than Hubble with the same exquisite sharpness. As a result, a Roman Ultra Deep Field would collect millions of galaxies, including hundreds that date back to just a few hundred million years after the big bang.

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A combination of astrophysical measurements has allowed researchers to put new constraints on the radius of a typical neutron star and provide a novel calculation of the Hubble constant that indicates the rate at which the universe is expanding.

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Are we alone in the universe? Research by Dr. Gary Zank at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of the University of Alabama System, and collaborators from UAH and other institutions has helped to inform the search for planets that could harbor life.

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Data from the Kepler space telescope, launched more than a decade ago, is still helping astronomers who study planets outside of our own solar system — exoplanets — and unravel the mysteries of planetary systems. Initially, astronomers were surprised that Kepler found so many exoplanets, including hundreds of planetary systems with multiple planets orbiting close to their host star. As astronomers developed models to explain the abundance of inner exoplanets, they encountered a new mystery: “Why did Kepler detect just one planet around so many stars, instead of planetary systems with multiple planets?"

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Earth just got 7 km/s faster and about 2000 light-years closer to the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. But don't worry, this doesn't mean that our planet is plunging towards the black hole.

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On November 18 scientists from the US National Science Foundation’s National Solar Observatory predicted the arrival of a large sunspot just in time for Thanksgiving. Using a special technique called helioseismology, the team has been “listening” to changing sound waves from the Sun’s interior which beckon the arrival of a large sunspot.

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An international team of astronomers using Gemini North’s GNIRS instrument have discovered that CK Vulpeculae, first seen as a bright new star in 1670, is approximately five times farther away than previously thought. This makes the 1670 explosion of CK Vulpeculae much more energetic than previously estimated and puts it into a mysterious class of objects that are too bright to be members of the well-understood type of explosions known as novae, but too faint to be supernovae.

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In 2004, scientists with NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer spotted an object unlike any they'd seen in our Milky Way Galaxy: a large, faint blob of gas that seemed to have a star at its center.

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A new agreement hopes to speed along a nuclear reactor technology that could be used to fuel deep-space exploration and possibly power human habitats on the Moon or Mars. Los Alamos National Laboratory has signed an agreement to license the “Kilopower” space reactor technology to Space Nuclear Power Corporation (SpaceNukes), also based in Los Alamos, NM.

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Humankind’s next giant step may be onto Mars. But before those missions can begin, scientists need to make scores of breakthrough advances, including learning how to grow crops on the red planet.

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Merging galaxies often appear lit up like a fireworks display. The meeting of their gas flows accelerates star formation and feeds their central black holes. However, much of this activity, particularly where they are interacting, is shrouded by dust. Webb’s significantly more sensitive, sharper observations in infrared light will be able to see through the dust, leading to high-resolution data that will reveal far more about what’s happening at the cores of these galaxies.

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New light has been shed on a mysterious and long-standing conundrum at the very heart of our galaxy.

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Whether it’s a surprise asteroid, colorful aurora or a heart-stopping eclipse, the landscape of the night sky is constantly changing. When a new visitor appears in view, it’s guaranteed to grab the attention of professional astronomers and casual sky gazers alike. Well, consider the Hubble Space Telescope the paparazzi of the sky, as it’s managed to snap the closest images yet of the sky’s latest visitor to make headlines, comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE), after it passed by the Sun. Comet NEOWISE is considered the brightest visible from the Northern Hemisphere since 1997’s Hale-Bopp. It’s estimated to be traveling at a whopping 40 miles per second, or 144,000 miles per hour. The comet’s closest approach to the Sun took place on July 3 and it’s now heading back to the outer parts of the solar system, not to pass through again for another 7,000 years or so.

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Just how old is the universe? Astrophysicists have been debating this question for decades.

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Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are the first to study presolar materials that landed on a planet-like body. Their findings may help solve the mystery: where did all the water on Earth come from?

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They say variety is the spice of life, and now new discoveries from Johns Hopkins researchers suggest that a certain elemental ‘variety’—sulfur—is indeed a ‘spice’ that can perhaps point to signs of life.

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An international team of astronomers used two of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world to create more than three hundred images of planet-forming disks around very young stars in the Orion Clouds. These images reveal new details about the birthplaces of planets and the earliest stages of star formation.

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NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered its first Earth-size planet in its star's habitable zone, the range of distances where conditions may be just right to allow the presence of liquid water on the surface.

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In the 1980s, Saul Perlmutter at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and his collaborators realized that they could use data about supernovae to research the history of the universe. They expected to see that very distant supernovae appear a bit brighter than they would in an expanding universe that wasn’t slowing in its growth. The data revealed something else entirely.

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An international study lead by Université de Montréal astronomer Björn Benneke has detected water vapour on the planet K2-18b; this represents a major discovery in the search of alien life.

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Modeling the shape and movement of near-Earth asteroids is now up to 25 times faster thanks to new Washington State University research.

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University of California and Princeton scientists have been collaborating on a computational astrophysics project to learn more about the recent discovery of a black hole, which sits in the middle of a galaxy called Messier 87 (M87), approximately 55 million light years from Earth.

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A nearby system hosts the first Earth-sized planet discovered by NASA's Transiting Exoplanets Survey Satellite, as well as a warm sub-Neptune-sized world, according to a new paper from a team of astronomers that includes Carnegie's Johanna Teske, Paul Butler, Steve Shectman, Jeff Crane, and Sharon Wang.

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For over a century and a half, Eta Carinae has been one of the most luminous – and most enigmatic – stars of the southern Milky Way.

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Swirling dense metallic hydrogen dominates the interiors of Jupiter, Saturn and many extra-solar planets. Building precise models of these giant planets requires an accurate description of the transition of pressurized hydrogen into this metallic substance – a long-standing scientific challenge. In a paper published by Science, a research team led by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory describes optical measurements of the insulator-to-metal transition in fluid hydrogen, resolving discrepancies in previous experiments and establishing new benchmarks for calculations used to construct planetary models. The multi-institution team included researchers from the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, University of Edinburgh, University of Rochester, Carnegie Institution of Washington, University of California, Berkeley and The George Washington University.

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With new and compelling evidence for water existing beneath the south pole of Mars, a West Virginia University professor says this underground lake is likely to be extremely salty and more acidic than battery acid. Life forms that can survive in extreme physical and geochemical conditions are found in abundance in acid salt lakes such as those in Chile and western Australia, she said.

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NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Probes program has awarded $496 million to fund the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe mission concept.

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Astronomers have given one of Einstein’s predictions on gravity its most stringent test yet. By precisely tracking the meanderings of three stars in a single system – two white dwarf stars and one ultra-dense neutron star – the researchers determined that even phenomenally compact neutron stars “fall” in the same manner as their less-dense counterparts

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Experiments conducted at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory helped to confirm that samples of interplanetary particles – collected from Earth’s upper atmosphere and believed to originate from comets – contain dust leftover from the initial formation of the solar system.

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GALAXY 13.28 BILLION LIGHT-YEARS AWAY SHOWS SURPRISING SIGNS OF CHEMICAL MATURITY