The glittering globular cluster Terzan 12—a vast, tightly bound collection of stars—fills the frame of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The location of this globular cluster, deep in the Milky Way ...
Astronomy
Sep 7, 2023
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There's an unusual object near the Milky Way's heart that astronomers call "The Brick." It's a massive cloud of gas called an infrared dark cloud (IDC). The Brick is dense and turbulent like others of its type, but for some ...
Astronomy
Sep 7, 2023
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RR Lyrae stars are old, pulsating stars that burn helium in their cores for fuel. Their progenitors were similar to our sun, but they are now much larger and brighter than our sun. We know of hundreds of thousands of RR Lyrae ...
Astronomy
Sep 7, 2023
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Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, by far. More than 90% of the atoms in the universe are hydrogen. Ten times the number of helium atoms, and a hundred times more than all other elements combined. It's ...
Astronomy
Sep 6, 2023
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Millisecond pulsars are amazing astronomical tools. They are fast-rotating neutron stars that sweep beams of radio energy from their magnetic poles, and when they are aligned just right we see them as rapidly flashing radio ...
Astronomy
Sep 4, 2023
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Using NASA's Kepler and ESA's Gaia spacecraft, an international team of astronomers has conducted an astroseismic investigation of six giant stars in the open cluster NGC 6866. The study, presented August 24 on the pre-print ...
A University of Kansas survey of a swath of the cosmos using the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed active galactic nuclei (AGN)—supermassive black holes that are rapidly increasing in size—are rarer than many astronomers ...
Astronomy
Aug 23, 2023
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This week on Phys.org, we published news about ancient anarchists, a hidden phase transition, dark matter developments, hot oceans and pollution taxes.
Just how dark is the night sky?
Astronomy
Aug 17, 2023
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In a new study, researchers have taken an important step toward understanding how exploding stars can help reveal how neutrinos, mysterious subatomic particles, secretly interact with themselves.
General Physics
Aug 15, 2023
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