Attention to the Unseen

Quartz reports: Some stars in our very own Milky Way are some of the earliest ever seen, according to research published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The stars are in the Milky Way’s halo, a shroud of stars that surrounds the galactic disk. The stars are also relatively close, at just 30,000 light-years from Earth. The team found that the stars are between 12 billion and 13 billion years old, clocking them to around the…

Read More Read More

The European Space Agency reports: Wading through the wealth of data from ESA’s Gaia mission, scientists have uncovered a ‘sleeping giant’. A large black hole, with a mass of nearly 33 times the mass of the Sun, was hiding in the constellation Aquila, less than 2000 light-years from Earth. This is the first time a black hole of stellar origin this big has been spotted within the Milky Way. So far, black holes of this type have only been observed…

Read More Read More

Nature reports: Stellar detectives have identified seven stars that recently dined on a rocky planet. The study doubles the number of binary stars known to have consumed a planet, and questions the perception that mature solar systems harbouring Earth-like planets are usually stable. The findings, published in Nature on 20 March, show “strong evidence of planet ingestion”, says Jianrong Shi, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing. The planets seem to have been eaten during their stars’ relatively…

Read More Read More

Live Science reports: The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found a galaxy in the early universe that’s so massive, it shouldn’t exist, posing a “significant challenge” to the standard model of cosmology, according to the study authors. The galaxy, called ZF-UDS-7329, contains more stars than the Milky Way, despite having formed only 800 million years into the universe’s 13.8 billion-year life span. This means they were somehow born without dark matter seeding their formation, contrary to what the standard…

Read More Read More

Eric Schwitzgebel and Jacob Barandes write: On recent estimates, the observable universe—the portion of the universe that we can detect through our telescopes—extends about 47 billion light-years in every direction. But the limit of what we can see is one thing, and the limit of what exists is quite another. It would be remarkable if the universe stopped exactly at the edge of what we can see. For one thing, that would place us, surprisingly and un-Copernicanly, precisely at the…

Read More Read More

University of Chicago reports: Scientists have discovered a rare sight in a nearby star system: Six planets orbiting their central star in a rhythmic beat. The planets move in an orbital waltz that repeats itself so precisely it can be readily set to music. A rare case of an “in sync” gravitational lockstep, the system could offer deep insight into planet formation and evolution. The analysis, led by UChicago scientist Rafael Luque, was published Nov. 29 in Nature. “This discovery…

Read More Read More

Live Science reports: The deeper we look into space, the further back in time we see. Light emanating from some of the younger galaxies in our universe has to travel for billions of years to reach us, getting picked up by our instruments, rich with information from the cosmic dawn. And not only can this light tell us where we have come from, but where we might be headed. To understand the evolution of several of these early universe, “teenage”…

Read More Read More

Universe Today reports: A recent study examines how the Earth was hit by blasts from supernovae (plural form of supernova (SN)) that occurred 3 million years ago (Mya) and 7 Mya with the goal of ascertaining the distances of where these blasts originated. Using the live (not decaying) radioactive isotope 60-Fe, which is produced from supernovae, a team of researchers at the University of Illinois was able to determine the approximate astronomical distances to the blasts, which they refer to…

Read More Read More