Astronomy

Magnificent spiral galaxy

How soon do jets form when a supernova gives birth to a neutron star?

Its surface is the most densely cratered in the Solar System -- but what's inside?

What created this unusual planetary nebula?

This sparkling scene of star birth was captured by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. What appears to be a craggy, starlit mountaintop kissed by wispy clouds is actually a cosmic dust-scape being eaten away by the blistering winds and radiation of nearby, massive, infant stars.

Radio astronomy took another step forward recently, with the completion of Phase III of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Western Australia. We’ve reported before on how the MWA has investigated everything from SETI signals to the light from the earliest stars. WIth this upgrade, the MWA will continue to operate with much needed improvements while the radio astronomy awaits the completion of the successor it helped enable - the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).

Jupiter hosts the brightest and most spectacular auroras in the Solar System, and its largest moons (the Galileans) create their own auroral signatures known as “satellite footprints” in the planet’s atmosphere. Until now, astronomers had detected the auroral signatures of three Galileans (Io, Europa, and Ganymede), but not Callisto. Thanks to an international team, close-up images of Callisto's footprints have been seen at last.

The JWST is performing a new multi-wavelength survey called MINERVA (Medium-band Imaging with NIRCam to Explore ReVolutionary Astrophysics). It'll study four extragalactic fields in greater detail and depth, and will help us understand the Cosmic Dawn.

Astronomers struggle to detect small exoplanets directly. One tool they use is to search for the effects these planets have on debris disks around stars. Clues in these disks tell astronomers where they can find sub-Jupiter mass exoplanets.

Live in the eastern hemisphere? If skies are clear, you have a chance to see a remarkable sight this Sunday night into Monday morning: the ‘Blood Moon’ of a total lunar eclipse. The eclipse favors the Indian Ocean region in its entirety. Europe sees the eclipse already underway at Moonrise, while Australia catches it in progress at Moonset. Only the Americas sit this one out in person... though you can still catch it live online.

One of the most difficult parts of astronomy is understanding how time affects it. The farther away you look in the universe, the farther back you look in time. One way this complicates things is how objects might change over time. For example, a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy in the early universe might appear one way to our modern telescopes, but the same supermassive black hole might appear completely differently a few billion years later. Understanding the connection between the two objects would be difficult to say the least, but a new paper from researchers at the University of Science and Technology in South Korea describes one potential parallel, between the recently discovered “Little Red Dots” of the early universe and “BlueDOGs” of the slightly later universe.

An international team of astronomers led by Matus Rybak (Leiden University, Netherlands) has proven, thanks to accidental double zoom, that millimetre radiation is generated close to the core of a supermassive black hole. Their findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The so-called Butterfly star gets its name from its edge-on appearance. The star's protoplanetary disk blocks out starlight revealing a nebula, or butterfly wing, on each side. Deeper JWST observations show the disk is tilted and asymmetrical, which affects how planets form.

Water is key to life as we know it. But that doesn’t mean its key to life everywhere. Despite the fact that the ability to house liquid water is one of the key characteristics we look for in potentially habitable exoplanets, there is nothing written in stone about the fact that life has to use water as a solvent as opposed to other liquid options. A new paper from researchers at MIT, including those who are developing missions to look for life on Venus, shows there might be an alternative - ionic liquids that can form and stay stable in really harsh conditions.

Images taken with the MIRI infrared camera on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have made it possible to observe the first galaxies in long-wavelength infrared light for the first time. Alongside a recent study published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, these images provide new insights into how the first galaxies formed over 13 billion years ago.