One of the most extreme stars in the Milky Way just got even more wack. Scientists have measured the mass of a neutron star named PSR J0952-0607, and found that it’s the most massive neutron star discovered yet, clocking in at a whopping 2.35 times the mass of the Sun. If true, this is very … Read more
Not all stars are happy to just hang around, orbiting the galactic center with all the other stars. Some stars go rogue, punted out across the Milky Way with significant force. These are the runaway stars, and we can trace their trajectories to understand violent events that can take place in the Universe. One such … Read more
There’s something very odd about this image from the Hubble Space Telescope. If you look closely, you can see two almost-mirror image, orange-colored galaxies, seemingly connected by a long filament. Fascinatingly, that’s not two galaxies at all, but one, named SGAS J143845+145407. It just appears to be two, thanks to the way the gravity of … Read more
It looks a bit like neon artwork from the ’80s. But what the image above really shows is much, much cooler. It’s a star, and the first light image captured by the newest instrument on the Gemini South telescope, the Gemini High-resolution Optical SpecTrograph, or GHOST. What it shows is the entire optical spectrum of … Read more
In the early 1990s, planetary history was made. In 1992, two astronomers, Alexander Wolszczan and Dale Frail, published a paper in Nature announcing the discovery of the very first planets outside the Solar System. These two extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, were immediately intriguing. They were rocky worlds 4.3 and 3.9 times the mass of Earth, … Read more
What happens when a star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole? The obvious story is that it gets sucked in, never to be seen again. Some of its material gets superheated on the way in and that gives off huge amounts of radiation – usually X-rays. That’s not a wrong explanation, just incomplete. … Read more
Far out in the Milky Way, roughly 22,000 light years from Earth, a star unlike any other roars with a magnetic force that beats anything physicists have ever seen. At a whopping 1.6 billion Tesla, a pulsar called Swift J0243.6+6124 smashes the previous records of around 1 billion Tesla, discovered surrounding the pulsars GRO J1008-57 … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has already expanded humanity’s vision further into time and space than ever before, giving a breathtaking sneak peek of the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the early Universe to date. Now, NASA has just unveiled five more stunning full-color images captured by the most ambitious telescopes humanity has … Read more
A newly discovered star is so close to our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole that it completes an orbit in just four years. That’s the shortest orbit yet for one of the stars looping around the Sagittarius A*. It’s an oval-shaped journey around the black hole that brings the star to orbital velocities over 2.5 … Read more
Three-dimensional models of astronomical objects can be ridiculously complex. They can range from black holes that light doesn’t even escape to the literal size of the Universe and everything in between. But not every object has received the attention needed to develop a complete model of it, but we can officially add another highly complex … Read more