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Category: cosmology

Active supermassive black holes may help form massive planets

A popular myth about black holes is that they act like giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, sucking in everything around them. But Wladimir Lyra’s research found a new mechanism around supermassive black holes that is more like a cosmic nursery, giving birth to planets more massive than Jupiter.

“We’re finding objects that are a thousand times the mass of the Earth, but built of pure dust,” Lyra said. “And not only that, but also some of these objects are approaching the mass of the sun.”

Lyra, an associate professor of astronomy at New Mexico State University, began this line of research as a postdoctoral fellow collaborating with Barry McKernan, Saavik Ford and Mordecai-Mark Mac Low at the American Museum of Natural History in 2010.

JWST Finds a “Star” 100 Billion Times Brighter Than Any Star Should Be

Something in the young universe is shining like a star that should not be possible.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected a compact red object so luminous that ordinary nuclear fusion cannot plausibly explain it. Although the source has a star-like appearance and may be surrounded by gas on the scale of the solar system, it radiates roughly 100 billion times more energy than any known star could physically produce.

The leading explanation is far stranger: the glow may come from a rapidly feeding black hole buried inside an enormous, dense envelope of hydrogen.

Dark energy and quantum gravity may be deeply intertwined

For close to a century, physicists have pursued a way to unite gravity with quantum mechanics. Known as quantum gravity, this goal has remained frustratingly out of reach so far. Similarly elusive is the force of dark energy, which is believed to be driving the universe’s accelerating expansion.

But through new research published in Physical Review D, physicist Savvas Koushiappas of Brown University has proposed a new explanation suggesting that these two phenomena might not be separate at all. Instead, dark energy could be a natural side effect of quantum gravity, acting on the geometry of space itself.

Something Mysterious Just Passed Between Earth and a Distant Star

A mysterious object dubbed Phoebe may be a primordial black hole from the early universe, detected only because it briefly magnified the light of a distant star.

On the night of 18 December 2019, a star in our satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, briefly got brighter. Not dramatically nor explosively, just a smooth, symmetrical rise and fall in brightness lasting about an hour, as though something had passed in front of it and bent its light toward us. Then it returned to normal and was never seen to vary again.

That something has been named Phoebe. And working out what it actually is turns out to be one of the most intriguing puzzles in modern astronomy. The phenomenon at the heart of the story is called gravitational microlensing, and it’s one of the most elegant predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

A Star Near the Milky Way’s Black Hole Is Losing Mass at an Astonishing Rate

New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope show that IRS 3, a star near the center of the Milky Way, is losing vast amounts of mass, causing its surrounding envelope to expand continuously.

Near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, a mature star is shedding enormous amounts of gas and dust into space. Observations of IRS 3 suggest that this material has created an exceptionally large envelope, and within it astronomers have detected water molecules despite the extreme environment surrounding the galactic center.

The research was led by PD Dr. Florian Peißker of the University of Cologne’s Institute for Astrophysics. Peißker’s group, which participates in the European James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) consortium studying nearby galaxies, investigates the region surrounding Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Mysterious Cygnus Bubble may trace back to microquasar, astronomers suggest

Astronomers have proposed a new explanation for the mysterious Cygnus Bubble, a vast cloud of ultra-high-energy gamma rays stretching thousands of light-years across the sky. While the bubble has generally been linked to the Cygnus X star-forming region, the new study argues that a microquasar more naturally explains its highest-energy emission. The results were published in a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 21.

For years, astronomers have puzzled over the sources of the highest-energy cosmic rays in our galaxy—particles accelerated to a quadrillion electron volts, or a petaelectronvolt (PeV; that’s 15 zeros after 1). These sources are called Galactic PeVatrons, and they are notoriously hard to pin down. In principle, all kinds of astrophysical objects violent enough to accelerate particles to extreme energies could be PeVatrons: supernova remnants, pulsar wind nebulae, star clusters or binary star systems.

The accelerated particles travel outward and light up with ultra-high-energy gamma rays wherever they eventually slam into ambient gas, sometimes hundreds to thousands of light-years from their true source. One of the most striking gamma-ray structures in the sky, the “Cygnus Bubble,” has long been attributed to a nearby cluster of massive, young stars in the Cygnus X star-forming region, some 4,600 light-years away.

Astronomers Caught a Star Exploding Almost the Instant It Began

Astronomers witnessed a star’s death almost from the instant it began, catching an extraordinarily rare X-ray flash as a supernova erupted 500 million light-years away.

Astronomers rarely get to watch a star die from the beginning. Usually, a supernova is discovered only after the explosion is already well underway.

SN 2026gzf was different.

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