Tag Archives: astronomers

Colliding Neutron Stars

The universe doesn’t always cooperate. Science has puzzled over gamma-ray bursts since they were first detected in the 1960s, and just when we think we have the basics solidified, something happens to upend conventional wisdom. Astronomers have spent the last year studying a gamma-ray burst dubbed GRB 211211A. Based on …

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World’s Largest Camera 3.2 Gigapixel

Digital imaging technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last few decades. You can buy a smartphone that fits in your pocket with a whopping 200MP of camera resolution, but sometimes you just have to go big. Engineers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California are putting …

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Dazzling Galactic Collision

Most galaxies in the observable universe have a comfortable buffer from their neighbors, but that’s not the case for NGC 4568 and NGC 4567. A new image from the Gemini North observatory in Hawaii shows these enormous spiral galaxies barreling into each other in a preview of what may await …

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Nearby Super-Earths

  The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been in space for about six months, which is just a fraction of the time NASA spent designing and building it. All that effort is about to pay off, though. Webb will begin science operations this summer, and some of its first …

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Blasting Through Space

When we talk about astronomers spotting something in the far-off corners of the cosmos, it’s usually a galaxy, a star, or some other celestial object. Not this time. A team from South Africa has discovered an ultra-powerful radio-wave laser, a phenomenon known as a megamaser. At more than five billion …

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Potential Exomoon Spotted

In the last few decades, astronomers have slowly but surely added to the number of known exoplanets. Even the largest planets can be hard to spot, though, and moons are even smaller. Well, usually. A team working with data from the dearly departed Kepler space telescope has reported a possible …

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Pluto’s A Planet Again

Like many people, I grew up in a solar system of nine planets. It’s the same solar system we live in now, of course, but the definition of a “planet” changed in 2006 to exclude poor little Pluto and its frosty kin. That was before we’d even seen the little …

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Planet Orbiting Dead Star

Humanity has existed for 300,000 years, give or take a millennium. That might sound like a long time when the average human lives at most a few decades, but it’s really just a cosmic blink of the eye. Even if Homo sapiens exceeds all expectations and survives both political strife …

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Star Forming Clouds

A pair of molecular clouds known as Taurus and Perseus are famous among astronomers. These star-forming regions are just 400 and 1,000 light-years from Earth, respectively, offering a glimpse of how stars come to be in the galaxy. Now we know a bit more about the origin of these clouds …

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