Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

When galaxies collide: Hubble showcases six beautiful galaxy mergers

It is during rare merging events that galaxies undergo dramatic changes in their appearance and in their stellar content. These systems are excellent laboratories to trace the formation of star clusters under extreme physical conditions.

January 7, 2021 Read more

How large are neutron stars?

An interdisciplinary research team has identified new, narrower limits on the radii of neutron stars. The team determined the radius of a typical neutron star to be close to 11 kilometers.

December 30, 2020 Read more

Primordial black holes and the search for dark matter from the multiverse

Astrophysicists describe a novel scenario for PBH formation and showed that the black holes from the 'multiverse' scenario can be found using the Hyper Suprime-Cam of the 8.2m Subaru Telescope.

December 28, 2020 Read more

How nearby galaxies form their stars

The star-formation activity of typical, nearby galaxies is found to scale proportionally with the amount of gas present in these galaxies. This points to the net gas supply from cosmic distances as the main driver of galactic star formation.

December 22, 2020 Read more

Looking for dark matter near neutron stars with radio telescopes

The targets of this search were two nearby neutron stars known to have strong magnetic fields, as well as the Milky Way's center, which is estimated to host half a billion neutron stars. Since no signal was seen, the team was able to impose the strongest limits to date on axion dark matter particles of a few micro electron-volt mass.

December 21, 2020 Read more

Key building block for organic molecules discovered in meteorites

Scientists have confirmed the presence in meteorites of a key organic molecule which may have been used to build other organic molecules, including some used by life. The discovery validates theories of the formation of organic compounds in extraterrestrial environments.

December 18, 2020 Read more

Colliding stars reveal fundamental properties of matter and space-time

Combining various observational data of neutron-star collisions with nuclear-physics calculations, astrophysicists made a breakthrough in constraining the size of a typical neutron star and in measuring the expansion rate of our Universe, determined by the Hubble constant.

December 18, 2020 Read more

On the hunt for a missing giant black hole

Despite searching with the Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have no evidence that a distant black hole estimated to weigh between 3 billion and 100 billion times the mass of the sun is anywhere to be found. This missing black hole should be in the enormous galaxy in the center of the galaxy cluster Abell 2261, which is located about 2.7 billion light-years from Earth.

December 18, 2020 Read more

Smart fabric collects space dust on International Space Station

A smart fiber being tested on the International Space Station could be used to develop space dust telescopes and allow astronauts to feel through their pressurized suits.

December 17, 2020 Read more

Longest intergalactic gas filament discovered

Astrophysicists have for the first time observed a gas filament with a length of 50 million light years. Its structure is strikingly similar to the predictions of computer simulations.

December 17, 2020 Read more

Astronomers detect possible radio emission from exoplanet

By monitoring the cosmos with a radio telescope array, an international team of scientists has detected radio bursts emanating from the constellation Booetes. The signal could be the first radio emission collected from a planet beyond our solar system.

December 16, 2020 Read more

A pair of lonely planet-like objects born like stars

Astronomers discovered an exotic binary system composed of two young planet-like objects, orbiting around each other from a very large distance. Although these objects look like giant exoplanets, they formed in the same way as stars, proving that the mechanisms driving star formation can produce rogue worlds in unusual systems deprived of a Sun.

December 16, 2020 Read more

Researchers identify where giant jets from black holes discharge their energy

New study determines that black holes discharge the energy in their plasma jets much farther away from the black hole's center than previously thought, resolving long-standing debate and offering clues to jet formation and structure.

December 15, 2020 Read more

Fertilizer made from urine could enable space agriculture

Researchers report a cheap and efficient method to make liquid fertilizer (ammonia) from simplified artificial urine, serving an ideal dual purpose of growing food and treating waste.

December 15, 2020 Read more

The farthest galaxy in the universe

Chemical signatures give away the distance to the most distant galaxy.

December 15, 2020 Read more

No longer 'faster than permitted by our galaxy'...

Physicists have resolved a long-lasting discrepancy between the measured velocities of interstellar oxygen atoms and other elements in our galaxy: a difference of 380 km/s, which astrophysical measurements of X-ray absorption by oxygen atoms gave, had given astrophysicists a headache.

December 14, 2020 Read more

Can pizza help address the dark matter mystery?

Researchers developed a novel multiple-cell cavity design, dubbed 'pizza cavity'. Just like pizzas are cut into several slices, multiple partitions vertically divide the cavity volume into identical pieces (cells). With almost no volume to be lost, this multiple-cell haloscope enables the meaningful output of high-frequency region scanning.

December 11, 2020 Read more

Hubble identifies strange exoplanet that behaves like the long-sought 'Planet Nine'

The 11-Jupiter-mass exoplanet called HD106906 b occupies an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away and it may be offering clues to something that might be much closer to home: a hypothesized distant member of our Solar System dubbed 'Planet Nine'.

December 10, 2020 Read more