The universe was created about 13.8 billion years ago in a blaze of light: the big bang. Roughly 380,000 years later, after matter (mostly hydrogen) had cooled enough for neutral atoms to form, light was able to traverse ...
Astronomy
Oct 8, 2021
82
1053
Most stars including the sun generate magnetic activity that drives a fast-moving, ionized wind and also produces X-ray and ultraviolet emission (often referred to as XUV radiation). XUV radiation from a star can be absorbed ...
Astronomy
Oct 4, 2021
0
191
Astronomers analyzing 3D maps of the shapes and sizes of nearby molecular clouds have discovered a gigantic cavity in space.
Astronomy
Sep 22, 2021
4
8829
When a fast solar wind stream erupts from a coronal hole (a cooler region in the Sun's atmosphere) and overtakes a slower moving solar wind stream, a stream interaction region (SIR) can form. In the SIR, a density "pileup" ...
Astronomy
Sep 20, 2021
0
79
In 1929, Edwin Hubble published observations that galaxies' distances and velocities are correlated, with the distances determined using their Cepheid stars. Harvard astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt had discovered that a ...
Astronomy
Sep 13, 2021
0
253
The Kuiper Belt is a disk of small icy bodies, thought to be remnants of the early Solar System, that circles the Sun from the orbit of Neptune (about 30 astronomical units, AU, from the Sun) to about 50 AU. KBOs orbit at ...
Astronomy
Sep 7, 2021
0
432
Magnetic fields in space are sometimes called the last piece in the puzzle of star formation. They are much harder to measure than the masses or motions of star-forming clouds, and their strength is still uncertain. If they ...
Astronomy
Aug 31, 2021
0
756
In 2019, astronomers spotted something incredible in our backyard: a rogue comet from another star system. Named Borisov, the icy snowball traveled 110,000 miles per hour and marked the first and only interstellar comet ever ...
Astronomy
Aug 23, 2021
7
1865
Every massive galaxy is believed to host a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at its center. Its mass is correlated with the mass of the inner regions of its host (and also with some other properties), probably because the SMBH ...
Astronomy
Aug 20, 2021
4
1280
Planets form as the dust grains in a protoplanetary disk grow into pebbles and then finally into planets. Because small dust grains interact with gas (via the drag it imparts), the gas in protoplanetary disks influences the ...
Astronomy
Aug 9, 2021
6
1134
