The international CTAO LST Collaboration has released remarkable findings from observations of GRB 221009A—the brightest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever recorded.

The results were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The publication presents in-depth observations conducted in 2022 with the Large-Sized Telescope (LST) prototype, the LST-1, during its commissioning phase at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the CTAO-North site in La Palma, Spain. The observations revealed a hint of an excess in the gamma-ray flux, which helps provide new insights into the enigmatic and complex nature of GRBs at very high energies.

Looking at the universe in long and short wavelengths confirmed where the missing matter was hiding.

A mysterious new interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, was discovered in July. It turns out that wasn’t the first time our telescopes spotted it.

Earth is spinning faster this summer, making the days marginally shorter and attracting the attention of scientists and timekeepers.

July 10 was the shortest day of the year so far, lasting 1.36 milliseconds less than 24 hours, according to data from the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and the US Naval Observatory, compiled by timeanddate.com. More exceptionally short days are coming on July 22 and August 5, currently predicted to be 1.34 and 1.25 milliseconds shorter than 24 hours, respectively.

The length of a day is the time it takes for the planet to complete one full rotation on its axis —24 hours or 86,400 seconds on average. But in reality, each rotation is slightly irregular due to a variety of factors, such as the gravitational pull of the moon, seasonal changes in the atmosphere and the influence of Earth’s liquid core. As a result, a full rotation usually takes slightly less or slightly more than 86,400 seconds — a discrepancy of just milliseconds that doesn’t have any obvious effect on everyday life.

Using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has detected a new exoplanet orbiting a nearby star. The newfound alien world, designated TOI-2431 b, is comparable in size to Earth and has a very short orbital period. The finding was reported in a research paper published July 11 on the pre-print server arXiv.

NASA’s TESS monitors about 200,000 bright stars near Earth, looking for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. Since its launch in April 2018, the satellite has identified more than 7,600 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOI), of which 638 have been confirmed so far.

Now, a team of astronomers led by Kaya Han Taş of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, reports the confirmation of another TOI monitored by TESS. According to the paper, a transit signal has been detected in the light curve of TOI-2431—a star of spectral type KV7 located some 117 light years away. The planetary nature of this signal was confirmed by follow-up ground-based observations.

Astronomers have just solved a long-standing mystery about a rare, rapidly spinning neutron star known as PSR J1023+0038. Using NASA’s IXPE telescope and a fleet of observatories, scientists discovered that the system’s intense X-rays don’t come from its glowing accretion disk as previously belie