Some of the apparent quirks of Uranus may be due to bad timing. In 1986, the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past the planet, recording the mysteries of its magnetic field. It turns out that Uranus may have been in an unusual state. A solar wind event days before the flyby compressed the giant planet’s magnetosphere,…
Some massive stars can go out with a bang, not a bang. A star that blinked out of view may be a “failed supernova,” a stellar explosion that died down instead of fully exploding, a new study reports. If true, the failed supernova would mark the birth of a black hole. At the end of…
The opposing fountains of plasma and particles spanning 23 million light-years are the longest pair of black hole jets ever seen. That’s far enough away to affect the evolution of the universe on a cosmic scale, astronomers report Sept. 18. Nature. “Traditionally, astronomers believed that all jets remain inside, or at least very close to,…
While SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are enabling Internet access and mobile communications around the globe, they are also posing a threat to radio astronomy, a new study suggests. In several wavelength bands, the inadvertent leakage of electromagnetic radiation from the latest generation of satellites is more than 30 times brighter than emissions from earlier versions, Cees…
Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse! The red supergiant that marks Orion’s left shoulder may have a tiny, unseen companion. Two independent studies found evidence of a star the same mass as the sun, orbiting Betelgeuse about once every 2,100 days. “It was very surprising,” says astrophysicist Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge,…
A red dwarf star known as Barnard’s Star, located just six light-years from our solar system, has at least one — and possibly a handful — of small rocky planets orbiting it, a new study suggests. . Barnard’s Star, which is about one-sixth the mass of our sun, is the closest individual star to our…
Satellites interfere with radio astronomy – Scientific news, October 5, 1974 In the past, satellites and probes launched by NASA and others successfully avoided conflict with the radio frequency bands reserved for radio astronomy. But now there is trouble. The offenders are two large US satellites launched in May…. When one of the satellites is…
Dozens of runaway stars were caught escaping from a dense star cluster in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The cluster of fast-moving stars may mean that such runaways had a greater influence on cosmic evolution than previously thought, astronomers report Oct. 9 in Nature. Massive stars are born in new clusters, packed so…
Astronomers have finally found an asteroid that keeps pace with Saturn in its orbit around the sun. Such objects, called Trojan asteroids, are already known for the other three giant planets. “Saturn was kind of the odd man out, if I can call it that, because even though it’s the second most massive planet in…
Planetary astronomer Bonnie Buratti remembers exactly where she was the first time she heard that Jupiter’s icy moon Europa might host life. It was the 1980s, and Buratti was a graduate student at Cornell University studying images of the planet’s moons taken during the Voyager 1 and 2 flybys in 1979. Even in those first…
