Since astronomers first measured the size of an extrasolar planet seventeen years ago, they have struggled to answer the question: how did the largest planets get to be so large? Thanks to the recent discovery of twin planets ...
Astronomy
Nov 27, 2017
11
445
In everyday life, ultraviolet, or UV, light earns a bad reputation for being responsible for sunburns and other harmful effects on humans. However, research suggests that UV light may have played a critical role in the emergence ...
Astronomy
Aug 31, 2017
4
344
Astronomers have presented an explanation for the shapes of planetary nebulae. The discovery is based on a set of observations of stellar winds around aging stars. Contrary to common consensus, the team found that stellar ...
Astronomy
Sep 17, 2020
2
691
A team of collaborators from Carnegie and the University of Chicago used red giant stars that were observed by the Hubble Space Telescope to make an entirely new measurement of how fast the universe is expanding, throwing ...
Astronomy
Jul 17, 2019
13
312
The discovery of yet another exoplanet is no longer news. More than 4,000 planets around other stars have now been found since the detection of the first one in 1995. As astronomers long suspected, or at least hoped, it seems ...
Astronomy
Sep 27, 2019
1
73
An ancient, red giant star in the throes of a frigid death has produced the coldest known object in the cosmos—the Boomerang Nebula. How this star was able to create an environment strikingly colder than the natural background ...
Astronomy
Jun 5, 2017
4
298
Two astrophysicists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have suggested a way to observe what could be the second-closest supermassive black hole to Earth: a behemoth 3 million times the mass of the Sun, hosted ...
Astronomy
Nov 28, 2022
1
294
(Phys.org) —NASA's Kepler space telescope has witnessed the effects of a dead star bending the light of its companion star. The findings are among the first detections of this phenomenon—a result of Einstein's theory ...
Astronomy
Apr 4, 2013
16
4
Super-sharp observations with the telescope ALMA have revealed what seems to be a gigantic flare on the surface of Mira, one of the closest and most famous red giant stars in the sky. Activity like this in red giants—similar ...
Astronomy
May 29, 2015
0
105
(Phys.org) —It's a bit like learning the secrets of the family that lived in your house in the 1800s by examining dust particles they left behind in cracks in the floorboards.
Astronomy
Apr 19, 2013
2
0
