Teardrop star reveals hidden supernova doom
Astronomers have made the rare sighting of two stars spiraling to their doom by spotting the tell-tale signs of a teardrop-shaped star.
Astronomers have made the rare sighting of two stars spiraling to their doom by spotting the tell-tale signs of a teardrop-shaped star.
Astronomy
Jul 12, 2021
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Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology and elsewhere report the detection of a new eclipsing detached double white dwarf binary. The system, designated ZTF J2243+5242 has an orbital period of below 10 minutes, ...
Social media around the world lit up over the weekend, discussing the possibility that an asteroid (known as 2018 VP₁) could crash into Earth on November 2.
Astronomy
Aug 24, 2020
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On August 16, the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a robotic survey camera located at Palomar Observatory near San Diego, spotted an asteroid that had, just hours earlier, traveled only 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) above ...
Astronomy
Aug 19, 2020
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Observations made with a new instrument developed for use at the 2.1-meter (84-inch) telescope at the National Science Foundation's Kitt Peak National Observatory have led to the discovery of the fastest eclipsing white dwarf ...
Astronomy
Jul 24, 2019
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Astronomers have spotted an unusual asteroid with the shortest "year" known for any asteroid. The rocky body, dubbed 2019 LF6, is about a kilometer in size and circles the sun roughly every 151 days. In its orbit, the asteroid ...
Space Exploration
Jul 9, 2019
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Galaxies grow by accumulating gas from their surroundings and converting it to stars, but the details of this process have remained murky. New observations, made using the Keck Cosmic Web Imager (KCWI) at the W. M. Keck Observatory ...
Astronomy
Jul 1, 2019
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The results are rolling in from Caltech's newest state-of-the-art sky-surveying camera, which began operations at the Palomar Observatory in March 2018. Called the Zwicky Transient Facility, or ZTF, the new instrument has ...
Astronomy
Feb 7, 2019
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In two recently published scientific papers, an international team of astronomers has presented the detection of two new tidal disruption events (TDEs). Using the Palomar Observatory located near San Diego, California, the ...
Mansi Kasliwal (PhD '11), a new assistant professor of astronomy, searches the night sky for astrophysical transients—flashes of light that appear when stars become a million to a billion times as bright as our sun and ...
Astronomy
Feb 15, 2016
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