Category: space – Page 14
Giant Alien World Found Hiding in Plain Sight for 11 Years
A giant planet spent more than a decade concealed inside one of astronomy’s most closely watched star systems.
Astronomers have discovered a planet named Beta Pictoris d orbiting a young star just 63 light-years from Earth. The gas giant is about 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b, the first planet found in the system, making it the faintest exoplanet ever directly imaged from the ground. Researchers later discovered that it had been hiding in telescope observations for as long as 11 years.
“This was a serendipitous discovery,” says Ben Sutlieff, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, and co-lead of one of two studies published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We initially wanted to look more at a known planet in the system, Beta Pictoris b, to see how it changed over time,” he adds.
Astronomers finally measure the full size of the largest known galaxy
Researchers have obtained the deepest images ever taken of IC 1101, allowing them to identify the galaxy’s outer edge for the first time. The observations confirm it as the largest known galaxy, spanning roughly 520 kiloparsecs, or about 1.7 million light-years, and containing an estimated 3.4 trillion solar masses in stars. The paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on July 16.
Nearby rocky may be replenishing helium from atmosphere, study finds
Nearly a decade after the discovery of LHS 1140b, a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of a nearby low-mass star, a new study reveals that the object may have its own atmosphere.
University of Florida Assistant Professor of Astronomy Jason Dittmann first discovered the planet in 2016. Now, he is a co-author of the new study, published in Science, that uses helium escape to explain a potential atmosphere.
“The exciting part about this paper, and why I think it was accepted into Science, was that this is the first time that we’re seeing a rocky, Earth-like planet that could still have an atmosphere,” Dittmann said.
Neutron star collisions may forge gold more slowly than expected
Where do gold, platinum and uranium come from? This question has fascinated astrophysicists and nuclear physicists for decades. A research team from Technische Universität Darmstadt has now taken an important step toward understanding the origin of heavy elements. Their findings are published in Physical Review Letters.
Approximately half of all elements heavier than iron are produced through the rapid neutron-capture process, commonly known as the r-process. This process occurs under extreme conditions, such as during the collision of two neutron stars. In these events, atomic nuclei are bombarded with neutrons at an extraordinary rate, enabling the formation of increasingly heavier elements.
A major challenge is that many of the nuclei involved are extremely neutron-rich and cannot be studied experimentally in laboratories. Scientists therefore rely on theoretical models, whose predictions often diverge significantly when applied to regions far from experimentally known nuclei. Some of these exotic nuclei can be produced at research facilities such as GSI/FAIR, but many remain beyond experimental reach.
New images reveal Betelgeuse’s buddy star
A century of hints has suggested the famed red supergiant had a star pal but seeing it amid Betelgeuse’s brightness has been hard — until now.
Finally! After 20 Years, Major Quantum Entanglement Theory Has Been Experimentally Confirmed
Quantum mechanics is so odd that even the visionary genius who described the secrets of the Universe seemed to dismiss certain aspects as eerie.
“Spooky action at a distance” is how Albert Einstein described quantum entanglement, a weird connection between particles that classical physics cannot explain.
From our classical perspective, it seems to allow instantaneous communication, thereby breaking the speed of light and garnering Einstein’s ire.
Hubble shows star formation in Andromeda galaxy is winding down
A new study using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope finds that star formation in the nearby Andromeda galaxy has undergone a 500-million-year decline, with an even steeper drop in the last 40 million years. Andromeda, a spiral galaxy comparable in size to our Milky Way, is close enough to be seen with the unaided eye from areas with dark skies. Located about 2.5 million light-years from Earth—practically our cosmic backyard—Andromeda offers an opportunity for astronomers to examine its stellar populations in detail, leading to a better understanding of the past of galaxies like our own.
The results were published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal.