A possible new “jellyfish” galaxy discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope could deepen our understanding of galaxy evolution and star formation.
Category: space – Page 112
Clingy planets can trigger their own doom, Cheops and TESS suggest
Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s Cheops mission have caught an exoplanet that seems to be triggering flares of radiation from the star it orbits. These tremendous explosions are blasting away the planet’s wispy atmosphere, causing it to shrink every year.
This is the first-ever evidence of a “planet with a death wish.” Though it was theorized to be possible since the nineties, the flares seen in this research are around 100 times more energetic than expected.
The work is published in the journal Nature.
Heaviest tin isotopes provide insights into element synthesis
An international team of researchers, led by scientists from GSI/FAIR in Darmstadt, Germany, has studied r-process nucleosynthesis in measurements conducted at the Canadian research center TRIUMF in Vancouver. At the center of this work are the first mass measurements of three extremely neutron-rich tin isotopes: tin-136, tin-137 and tin-138. The results are published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
The high-precision measurements, combined with nucleosynthesis network calculations, help to better understand how heavy elements are formed in the universe, especially through the rapid neutron capture process (the r-process) occurring in neutron star mergers.
The data reveal the neutron separation energy, which defines the path of the r-process on the nuclear chart. The study found unexpected changes in the behavior of tin nuclei beyond the magic neutron number N=82, specifically, a reduction in the pairing effect of the last two neutrons.
Inbound: Astronomers discover third interstellar object
Astronomy news always seems to break over coffee, on laptop startup. That was the case on Wednesday morning, when word of a curious new object started flashing across the message boards.
AI-powered ChronoFlow uses stellar rotation rates to estimate stars’ ages
Figuring out the ages of stars is fundamental to understanding many areas of astronomy—yet, it remains a challenge since stellar ages can’t be ascertained through observation alone. So, astronomers at the University of Toronto have turned to artificial intelligence for help.
Their new model, called ChronoFlow, uses a dataset of rotating stars in clusters and machine learning to determine how the speed at which a star rotates changes as it ages.
The approach, published recently in The Astrophysical Journal, predicts the ages of stars with an accuracy previously impossible to achieve with analytical models.
Climate satellite MethaneSAT backed by Bezos and Google fails in space after just 1 year
MethaneSAT was designed as a sort of check against commercial climate measurements in order to help policymakers independently verify industry emissions reports. “MethaneSAT is specifically designed to catalyze methane reductions by creating unprecedented transparency,” the mission’s website states.
EDF lists 10 mission partners credited with bringing the $88 million satellite to fruition, including BAE Systems, Harvard University, the New Zealand Space Agency, Bezos Earth Fund, Google and more. Though MethaneSAT is now out of service, mission operators say they’re still committed to turning the data they were able to collect into actionable results.
“We will continue to process data that we have retrieved from the satellite and will be releasing additional scenes of global oil and gas production region-scale emissions over the coming months,” EDT officials said. “To solve the climate challenge requires bold action and risk-taking and this satellite was at the leading edge of science, technology and advocacy. ”
Astronomers discover a super-Earth exoplanet orbiting a nearby star
Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered a new super-Earth exoplanet that orbits a nearby M dwarf star. The newfound alien world, designated TOI-1846 b, is about two times larger and four times more massive than Earth. The finding was detailed in a paper published June 23 on the arXiv preprint server.