Space

Space
A Full Exoplanet Chemistry Report From a Single JWST Setting
WASP-39 b is one of the most-studied planets outside our solar system, a puffy hot Jupiter roughly 700 light-years away that became a showcase target for JWST early in the telescope's life. So it…
By Kristopher R. Jeffay4h ago2 min read
Space
Iron Is Leaving This Black Hole at a Fifth of Light Speed
A handful of supermassive black holes have been caught doing something no textbook asked them to do. Every few days they switch on, flood their surroundings with X-rays, then switch off again. Days…
By Diana Brinker2 days ago4 min read
Space
A Cosmic Magnifying Glass Reveals Odd Ultraviolet Light From a Distant Supernova
The star blew up when the universe was about a quarter of its present age, and by the time its light reached Earth it should have been a smudge: too faint to take a spectrum of, too faint to follow…
By Kristopher R. Jeffay2 days ago4 min read
Space
Webb Found Signs of Water Ice in All Five Debris Disks It Surveyed
Point a telescope at a nearby star and, mostly, the star is all you get. The ring of rock, boulders and collision dust around it — the leftover scaffolding of planet building, the same kind of belt…
By Victor Kuklin3 days ago4 min read
Space
Models of How the Sun Formed Now Have to Carry a Magnetic Field
A rock came off the East Antarctic Ice Sheet in 2008. Cataloged as DOM 08006, for the Dominion Range where it was collected, it is one of the most primitive meteorites ever recovered, a lump that…
By Kristopher R. Jeffay3 days ago4 min read
Space
Gas Enough for a Small Galaxy, and Not One Star in It
In June a camera on the Gran Telescopio Canarias stared for two nights at a patch of sky beside the spiral galaxy M94. Ignacio Trujillo, who led the observation from the Instituto de Astrofísica de…
By Diana Brinker4 days ago4 min read
Space
Two Tricks of Light Make the Full Moon Brighter Than It Should Be
Follow the Moon through a month and its brightness does something that simple arithmetic cannot account for. It climbs as the lit crescent fattens, roughly in step with the growing area of sunlit…
By Kristopher R. Jeffay4 days ago6 min read
Space
No Radiation Needed: How Peptide Chains Grow in a Freezing Vacuum
A gold-coated copper plate, chilled to 10 kelvin and sitting in an ultra-high vacuum, makes a serviceable stand-in for a grain of interstellar dust. Freeze the right gases onto it, warm it slowly,…
By Victor Kuklin5 days ago5 min read
Space
Five Supernova Remnants Found by Amateur Telescopes, Confirmed by a Professional One
In 2023, the German astrophotographer Marcel Drechsler was working through online hydrogen-alpha sky-survey images of a patch of Sagittarius, far off the plane of the Milky Way, when he noticed a…
By Kristopher R. Jeffay5 days ago4 min read
Space
An Asteroid's Last Salty Water Left Its Nitrogen Behind in the Clay
More than four and a half billion years ago, a lump of ice and dust in the outer Solar System got warm enough to melt inside. Water seeped through the rock, dissolved what it could, and eventually…
By Victor Kuklin6 days ago4 min read
Space
27 Years of Radio Snapshots, Rebuilt Into a Movie of a Black Hole's Jet
Nobody has ever watched a black hole's jet move. The plasma thrown out of the quasar 3C 345, in the constellation Hercules, has been under observation for half a century, but always as stills, an…
By Diana Brinker6 days ago5 min read
Space
One Cosmic Shoreline Becomes Two, and an Airless Valley Opens Between Them
Draw every known rocky planet on one chart, how hard its star bakes it, against how firmly its gravity holds on, and a line appears. Below the line, worlds keep an atmosphere. Above it, they are…
By Kristopher R. Jeffay1w ago4 min read

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Space

A Full Exoplanet Chemistry Report From a Single JWST Setting

Iron Is Leaving This Black Hole at a Fifth of Light Speed

A Cosmic Magnifying Glass Reveals Odd Ultraviolet Light From a Distant Supernova

Webb Found Signs of Water Ice in All Five Debris Disks It Surveyed

Models of How the Sun Formed Now Have to Carry a Magnetic Field

Gas Enough for a Small Galaxy, and Not One Star in It

Two Tricks of Light Make the Full Moon Brighter Than It Should Be

No Radiation Needed: How Peptide Chains Grow in a Freezing Vacuum

Five Supernova Remnants Found by Amateur Telescopes, Confirmed by a Professional One

An Asteroid's Last Salty Water Left Its Nitrogen Behind in the Clay

27 Years of Radio Snapshots, Rebuilt Into a Movie of a Black Hole's Jet

One Cosmic Shoreline Becomes Two, and an Airless Valley Opens Between Them