When Brant Robertson saw a new measurement of the distance to a familiar galaxy, he laughed out loud. For more than a decade, the galaxy had been a contender for the most distant ever observed. In 2012, Robertson and colleagues used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to show that the galaxy’s light had shone […]
Meet Jane Rigby, senior project scientist for JWST and advocate for LGBTQ+ astronomers
One of a telescope operator’s primary jobs is to keep any stray light out of the instrument. Earthly and other unwelcome photons can swamp the cosmic light from distant stars and galaxies. During more than a decade as a project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, Jane Rigby obsessed over minimizing light leaks — […]
Ryugu asteroid samples are sprinkled with stardust older than the solar system
Samples of the asteroid Ryugu contain bits of stardust that predate the birth of our solar system. Slivers of Ryugu material, snagged by the Japanese Hayabusa2 spacecraft, appear to come from the solar system’s frozen fringes, rather than from the asteroid itself, scientists report July 14 in Science Advances. These foreign fragments could illuminate details […]
Coronal rain has been seen splashing on the sun
Plasma rain in the sun’s atmosphere makes a splash when it lands. New observations from the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter have revealed previously unseen details of how this coronal rain falls, including bright fireball effects and sudden upward surges in plasma. “These are the highest resolution images we have ever obtained from the solar […]
200 years ago, the Milky Way’s central black hole briefly awoke
Sometime between the American Revolution and the California gold rush, the black hole at the Milky Way’s heart woke up. The black hole, called Sagittarius A*, has been quiet and dim since it was discovered in the 1990s. It’s thought to have been mostly quiescent for eons. But roughly 200 years ago, the black hole, […]
A star cluster in the Milky Way appears to be as old as the universe
One of the oldest known objects in the universe is wandering around the Milky Way. Star cluster M92, a densely packed ball of stars roughly 27,000 light-years from Earth, is about 13.8 billion years old, researchers report in a paper submitted June 3 to arXiv.org. The newly refined age estimate makes this clump of stars […]
In a first, JWST detected starlight from distant galaxies with quasars
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — For the first time, astronomers have detected starlight from distant galaxies that host extremely bright supermassive black holes called quasars. Data from the James Webb Space Telescope reveal that four of these galaxies are massive, compact and possibly disk-shaped, astronomers report June 12 at the JWST First Light meeting. Studying the galaxies […]
A supermassive black hole orbiting a bigger one revealed itself with a flash
A long-suspected black hole may have finally come out of hiding. A monstrously massive black hole in a distant galaxy probably has a smaller companion that orbits it every 12 years. But that tiny partner has never been detected. Now, astronomers claim to have seen a flash of light coming directly from the smaller black […]
Black holes resolve paradoxes by destroying quantum states
MINNEAPOLIS — Don’t try to do a quantum experiment near a black hole — its mere presence ruins all quantum states in its vicinity, researchers say. The finding comes from a thought experiment that pits the rules of quantum mechanics and black holes against each other, physicists reported April 17 at a meeting of the […]