Astronomers Worldwide ‘Troubled’ By New ‘Cell Phone Tower in Space’ ...
A sprawling new satellite built to connect directly with mobile phones on the surface is brighter than most of the stars in the night sky, according to astronomers who are calling it a threat to their work and humanity's view of the universe. The offending orbital object is AST SpaceMobile's Bluewalker 3, which was launched…
Astronomers Saw This Spectacular Fireball Coming Before It Lit Up the...
For just the sixth time in history, astronomers managed to spot a small asteroid shortly before it smacked into our planet in dramatic fashion. On Saturday, Astronomer David Rankin spotted a 2.3-foot-long (0.7 meter) asteroid in observations from the Mount Lemmon sky survey in Arizona. That's not very big as far as asteroids go, but…
Astronomers Discover ‘Cataclysmic’ Star Pair, Confirming Decades-Old Prediction ...
Searching through more than 1.2 billion stars across the cosmos with a powerful algorithm, astronomers have pinpointed a most unusual pairing: Two stars locked in a cosmic dance. That sounds benign enough, but this "cataclysmic variable" sees one star feasting on another, stripping away its outer layers like it's peeling an onion.That's not science journalist…
Astronomers Catch New Meteor Shower in an Outburst ...
We think of space as an empty vacuum, but it's also a very dynamic place with plenty of objects passing through the inner solar system all the time, stirring things up. Sometimes we can even see the way our cosmic neighborhood is changing from down here on Earth under the safety blanket we call an…
Astronomers catch massive stellar flares on nearby small star AD Leonis
An illustration of the stellar flares on AD Leonis 16 light-years away. Its lower temperature makes it a prime target to study flares and the more explosive "superflare." National Astronomical Observatory of Japan Recently, astronomers in Japan trained one of their newest telescopes on the red dwarf star AD Leonis, just 16 light-years from Earth,…
Astronomers discover a bizarre, naked planet in the ‘Neptune desert’
TOI-849b is so close to its star one "year" takes 18 hours. Bless. University of Warwick/Mark Garlick If there's one thing we can all agree on about 2020, it's this: it would be perfect if it only lasted 18 hours. On TOI-849b, an exoplanet around 730 light-years from Earth, that dream "year" is a reality.…
Astronomers puzzled by collision between black hole and ‘mysterious object’
GW190814: A black hole and a neutron star colliding, or something even more unusual? Carl Knox/OzGrav ARC Centre of Excellence On Aug. 14, 2019, a gravitational wave -- a massive ripple through the fabric of space-time -- washed over the Earth. The wave was detected by sophisticated, fine-tuned lasers in the US and Italy. And…
Astronomers just discovered the youngest ever ‘baby’ dead star
An artist's illustration of a magnetar and it's magnetic field lines. ESA A suite of space-based telescopes operated by NASA and the European Space Agency have discovered the youngest known magnetar to date. At just 240 years old, this extreme, cosmic infant could help astronomers understand how these dead, dense stars come to be and…
Astronomers watch a dead star ‘power up’ for the first time
An accreting pulsar slowly eats its companion star because of its intense gravitational field. NASA/JPL-Caltech Stars are voracious eaters. That's a fact of life in the harsh wilderness of space. Debris, planets and even other stars are all on the menu at the Universe Buffet. And pulsars, a kind of neutron star, can be messy…
Astronomers get first look at a baby planet being born
The twist at the center of the disc could be the location of a new planet one day. ESO/Boccaletti et al. Scientists are seeing signs that a new planet could be forming about 520 lightyears away from Earth.Images from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) show a "dense disc of dust and…