A white dwarf star can explode as a supernova when its mass exceeds the limit of about 1.4 solar masses. A team led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching and involving the University of ...
Astronomy
Mar 24, 2023
1
5395
For the first time, astronomers have detected the presence of complex organic molecules, the building blocks of life, in a protoplanetary disk surrounding a young star, suggesting once again that the conditions that spawned ...
Astronomy
Apr 8, 2015
78
6182
Gregory Laughlin and Malena Rice weren't exactly surprised a few weeks ago when they learned that a second interstellar object had made its way into our solar system.
Astronomy
Sep 26, 2019
8
1567
Our solar system sure seems like an orderly place. The orbits of the planets are predictable enough that we can send spacecraft on multi-year journeys to them and they will reliably reach their destinations. But we've only ...
Astronomy
Apr 22, 2016
1
36
What happens inside a black hole stays inside a black hole, but what happens inside a black hole's "sphere of influence"—the innermost region of a galaxy where a black hole's gravity is the dominant force—is of intense ...
Astronomy
Aug 7, 2019
0
666
Using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), an international team of astronomers has probed the inner dusty ring of a young star known as CI Tauri (or CI Tau for short). Results of the study, published May 14 on the arXiv pre-print ...
Dr. Lu Xing, an associate researcher from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with collaborators from Yunnan University, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, ...
Astronomy
Jun 2, 2022
0
173
The origin of Earth and the solar system inspires scientists and the public alike. By studying the present state of our home planet and other objects in the solar system, researchers have developed a detailed picture of the ...
Astronomy
Jan 8, 2024
0
2995
A new theory for how rocky planets form could explain the origin of so-called "super-Earths"—a class of exoplanets a few times more massive than Earth that are the most abundant type of planet in the galaxy.
Planetary Sciences
Jan 12, 2023
1
592
Astronomers have successfully peered through the 'amniotic sac' of a star that is still forming to observe the innermost region of a burgeoning solar system for the first time.
Astronomy
Sep 13, 2015
0
1579
