Exomoons are a hot topic in the science community, as none have been confirmed with astronomers finding new and creative ways to identify them. But while astronomers have searched for exomoons orbiting exoplanets around single stars like our Sun, could exomoons exist around exoplanets orbiting binary stars? This is what a recent study submitted to …

Continue reading "Could Planets Orbiting Two Stars Have Moons?"

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Astronomers have used JWST to weigh a galaxy in the early Universe, finding that it has roughly the same mass as the Milky Way should have had at the same time in the Universe's history. The galaxy was seen in a gravitational lens and contains a collection of star clusters, so astronomers have nicknamed it the "Firefly Sparkle Galaxy." The galaxy also contains companion dwarf galaxies, similar to the Milky Way's Magellanic Clouds, which probably merged with it.

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When a massive star dies as a supernova, it can leave behind a pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star. The fastest pulsars can spin upwards of 700 times a second, blasting out regular pulses of energy. In a new paper, researchers propose that the fastest-spinning pulsars could contain quark matter in their cores. This would be even denser matter than neutrons and help explain how surprisingly massive neutron stars can spin so rapidly, maybe reaching 1,000 Hz.

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Space largely seems quite empty! Yet even in the dark voids of the cosmos, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are streaming through space. The rays contain 10 million times as much energy as the Large Hadron Collider can produce! The origin of the rays though is still the source of many a scientific debate but they are …

Continue reading "Another Clue About the Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays: Magnetic Turbulence"

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NASA?s Ingenuity helicopter sent its final signals to Earth in the earlier part of the year. Engineers have been studying these and have started to piece together a picture of events that led up to its final flight. They concluded that data provided by the navigation system was inaccurate leading to a chain of events …

Continue reading "NASA Thinks it Knows Why Ingenuity Crashed on Mars"

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Not long ago, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) peered into Cosmic Dawn, the cosmological period when the first galaxies formed less than one billion years after the Big Bang. In the process, it discovered something rather surprising. Not only were there more galaxies (and brighter ones, too!) than expected, but these galaxies had supermassive …

Continue reading "New Research may Explain how Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe Grew so Fast"

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When the Earth was struck by a Mars-sized planet in its early history, it ejected a debris cloud that led to the formation of the Moon. In the beginning, the Moon was extremely close to the Earth, but then conservation of angular momentum led to the Moon drifting away from the Earth - it's still doing it today. Because the Earth was covered in oceans of magma, researchers think the Moon moved quickly away from the Earth, getting to 25 Earth radii within 100,000 years.

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Currently, 5,788 exoplanets have been confirmed in 4,326 star systems, while thousands more candidates await confirmation. So far, the vast majority of these planets have been gas giants (3,826) or Super-Earths (1,735), while only 210 have been “Earth-like” – meaning rocky planets similar in size and mass to Earth. What’s more, the majority of these …

Continue reading "Could the ESA’s PLATO Mission Find Earth 2.0?"

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Most galaxies are thought to play host to black holes. At the center of Centaurus A, a galaxy 12 million light years away, a jet is being fired out into space. Images that have been captured by NASA?s Chandra X-ray observatory show that the high energy particles have struck a nearby object creating a shockwave. …

Continue reading "Zap! A Black Hole Scores a Direct Hit With its Jet"

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Do we have a planetary bias when it comes to understanding where life can perpetuate? It’s only natural that we do. After all, we’re on one. However, planets may not be necessary for life, and a pair of scientists from Scotland and the USA are inviting us to reconsider the notion. We focus on planets …

Continue reading "Does Life Really Need Planets? Maybe Not"

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