High-speed gas shooting from the galaxy M87 is causing stars to go nova, a study suggests, and no one knows how. A nova occurs after a dense star known as a white dwarf receives gas from an orbiting star (SN: 2/12/21). As the white dwarf’s intense gravity squeezes the gas, it heats up and explodes, […]
‘Polar ring’ galaxies might not be as rare as once thought
It’s big. It’s beautiful. It looks a bit like a sparkly, starry, slightly smooshed Eye of Sauron. It’s the galaxy NGC 4632, and new radio telescope images suggest that it sports a rare “polar ring” — a halo of mostly hydrogen gas tilted about 90 degrees from the plane of the galaxy’s disk. These spectacular […]
JWST’s hunt for distant galaxies keeps turning up surprises
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 […]
Astronomers call for renaming the Magellanic Clouds
Names have significance, especially when they’re written in the stars. A group of astronomers is coalescing around an idea to rename two neighbors of the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Named after explorer Ferdinand Magellan, the satellite galaxies are visible with the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere. But Magellan’s name is […]
Active supermassive black holes may be rarer than previously thought
Fewer supermassive black holes may undergo growth spurts than astronomers had suspected. Every known large galaxy hosts a gargantuan black hole at its center. Some of those behemoths experience bursts of beefing up, during which time they blaze brightly. But recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope turned up far fewer of these active […]
This extreme star might have huge tidal waves
Like ocean surf smashing on a sandy beach, enormous waves of plasma may crash onto the surface of one massive star. The star is part of a pair, stretched and pulled by its companion’s gravity. That gravitational tug-of-war causes the star’s brightness to change drastically and rhythmically. Now, a computer simulation suggests that this steady […]
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 — […]
Spiral galaxies might have been lentil-shaped before becoming starry whirls
The Milky Way might have once looked more like a legume than a starry whirlpool. Over their unfathomably long lifetimes, spiral galaxies like the Milky Way are generally thought to morph into lentil-shaped “lenticular” galaxies and then into elliptical blobs (SN: 4/23/18). But an analysis of nearby galaxies suggests that our galaxy, and others like […]
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 […]