Astronomy

Shortly after the Big Bang, after the CMB was released, there was a time that's tricky to observe called Cosmic Dark Ages. Clouds of hydrogen could be detected at that time using a specific frequency of radio waves, but Earth's radiation introduces too much noise. Researchers are proposing a CubeSat called Cosmo Cube that could orbit the Moon, observing when it's in the quiet radio shadow cast by the Moon. It could help detect the first structures coming together, leading to the formation of the first galaxies.

Satellite data suggests cloud darkening is responsible for much of the warming since 2001, and the good news is that it is a temporary effect due to a drop in sulphate pollution

Satellite data suggests cloud darkening is responsible for much of the warming since 2001, and the good news is that it is a temporary effect due to a drop in sulphate pollution

While bariatric surgery can result in significant weight loss, weight stigma can persist years after the surgery.

Gravitational wave detectors have "heard" the ripples in space caused by the most massive black hole merger yet. One "forbidden" by current theoretical models.

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This image tells the story of redemption for one lonely star. The young star MP Mus (PDS 66) was thought to be all alone in the Universe, surrounded by nothing but a featureless band of gas and dust called a protoplanetary disc. In most cases, the material inside a protoplanetary disc condenses to form new planets around the star, leaving large gaps where the gas and dust used to be. These features are seen in almost every disc – but not in MP Mus’s.

When astronomers first observed it with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), they saw a smooth, planet-free disc, shown here in the right image. The team, led by Álvaro Ribas, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge, UK, gave this star another chance and re-observed it with ALMA at longer wavelengths that peer even deeper into the protoplanetary disc than before. These new observations, shown in the left image, revealed a gap and a ring that had been obscured in previous observations, suggesting that MP Mus might have company after all.

Meanwhile, another piece of the puzzle was being revealed in Germany as Miguel Vioque, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory, studied this same star with the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Gaia mission. Vioque noticed something suspicious – the star was wobbling. A bit of gravitational detective work, together with insights from the new disc structures revealed by ALMA, showed that this motion could be explained by the presence of a gas giant exoplanet. 

Both teams presented their joint results in a new paper published in Nature Astronomy. In what they describe as “a beautiful merging of two groups approaching the same object from different angles”, they show that MP Mus isn’t so boring after all.

[Image description: This is an observation from the ALMA telescope, showing two versions (side-by-side) of a protoplanetary disc. Both discs are bright, glowing yellow-orange objects with a diffused halo against a dark background. The right disc is more smooth and blurry looking. The left disc shows more detail, for example gaps and rings within it.]

Source: ESO

A puzzling gravitational wave was detected, and astronomers have determined that it comes from a record-breaking black hole merger

A puzzling gravitational wave was detected, and astronomers have determined that it comes from a record-breaking black hole merger

It came from outer space.

The private Ax-4 astronaut mission will undock from the International Space Station on Monday morning (July 14), and you can watch the action live.

Planetary construction sites around other stars are filled with pebbles, and for the first time radio telescopes have detected these tiny chunks of rock that stick together to form planets.

With the universe constantly expanding, scientists have a hard time finding where its center is.

The winners will be announced during a ceremony in September.

"It is incredible that modern telescopic surveys have the ability to detect such small objects up to millions of kilometers away."

SpaceX launched a mystery satellite to geostationary transfer orbit from Florida's Space Coast early Sunday morning (July 13).

A team of international researchers led by Tomas Stolker in the Netherlands has imaged a young gas giant exoplanet near a 12-million-year-old star. The planet is orbiting a star whose planet formation has finished, while a same-aged companion star in this double star system still has a planet-forming disk.

In a recent study, a team of astronomers examined 27 confirmed and candidate exoplanets identified by TESS for signs of radio transmissions during star-planet occultations. The purpose was to see if radio signals from these targets of interest (TOIs) were interrupted as they passed behind their stars, thereby indicating that they were artificial in origin.

Cosmic dust does far more than float through space. It's the raw material from which stars, planets and possibly even life emerge. Yet astronomers have long puzzled over where this vast amount of dust comes from and what it's made of.