Time domain astronomy is a research area focused on observing and characterizing astronomical phenomena as a function of time, emphasizing variability, transients, and dynamic processes across the electromagnetic spectrum and, increasingly, in multi-messenger channels (gravitational waves, neutrinos). It leverages high-cadence surveys, wide-field imaging, and rapid follow-up to study events such as supernovae, tidal disruption events, variable stars, active galactic nuclei, kilonovae, and fast radio bursts. Methodologically, it depends on time-series analysis, real-time alert systems, and automated classification pipelines, integrating large-scale data processing and statistical inference to constrain physical models of transient astrophysical sources and their environments.
There's so little we know about circumbinary planets—planets that orbit two stars instead of one—that they can feel like the stuff of fantasy. And for good reason: to date, we've only confirmed the existence of 18 circumbinary ...
Astronomy
May 11, 2026
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Finding planets used to be a painstaking business. Astronomers would fix their gaze on a handful of carefully chosen stars, watch and wait, and hope to catch the faint dip in starlight that signals a world passing in front ...
Astronomy
Apr 27, 2026
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49
Designed to hunt for new alien worlds, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has serendipitously observed the rising outburst of a black hole X-ray binary known as AT 2019wey. The observations, which may help ...
Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), Chinese astronomers have explored the behavior of a rotating radio transient (RRAT) known as RRAT J1574+4703. The new observations found that this object ...
Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and elsewhere report the discovery of a binary system consisting of two brown dwarfs undergoing stable mass transfer. The detection of the system, designated ...
Using the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), astronomers have discovered a new long-period radio transient source, which received the designation ASKAP J142431.2–612611 (ASKAP J1424 for short). The newfound transient has ...
Anastasios (Andy) Tzanidakis was combing through old telescope data from 2020 when he found an otherwise boring star acting very strangely. The star, named Gaia20ehk, was about 11,000 light-years from Earth near the constellation ...
Planetary Sciences
Mar 11, 2026
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761
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has started releasing its first discoveries: including supernovae, variable stars and asteroids, which will from now on be discovered at an astonishing rate as it begins its Legacy Survey of ...
Astronomy
Mar 3, 2026
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47
It's been about eight months since the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) saw first light. Now the telescope is scanning the night sky to detect transient changes and sending alerts to astronomers and observatories around the world ...
Astronomy
Mar 2, 2026
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104
Thanks to Fink, a software package created by two CNRS engineers, it is now possible to track millions of transient celestial phenomena observed in the sky by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, in real time and with ...
Astronomy
Feb 26, 2026
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