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Water ice leaves the same characteristic fingerprints wherever it is. Point an infrared telescope at it and it takes bites out of the sunlight it reflects: two shallow ones near 1.5 and 2.0…
Two astronomers at the University of Cambridge have put ages on six nearby red dwarf stars that host planets, and they report that a star's rotation dates it far more tightly than its motion through…
A team led from the University of Birmingham re-analyzed 45 iron-poor stars and the 64 planets orbiting them and found no statistically significant correlation between a star's chemistry and what its…
A team led from the University of Tokyo has found a giant planet that circles a hot star every 2.17 days on an orbit still stretched into an oval rather than round. Noriharu Watanabe and colleagues…
Astronomers using the NASA and JAXA observatory XRISM have measured gas pouring off a giant star and falling onto the small, collapsed star that orbits it, at about 335,000 miles per hour. The team,…
Astronomers at Trinity College Dublin used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to track one full rotation of SIMP J013656.5+093347, a free-floating brown dwarf that orbits no star, and applied…
Astronomers studying stars torn apart by supermassive black holes have found that the trigger for jet formation is the same fraction of a black hole's maximum feeding rate, about 2%, regardless of…
Cosmological simulations published Sept. 16 in Nature propose that JWST's so-called Little Red Dots are an early, short-lived phase in the formation of supermassive black holes, one explanation among…
Researchers at Florida State University's National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory have used the world's highest-field mass spectrometer and single-molecule atomic…
A white dwarf that abruptly reignited in 1996 has now been confirmed as a Wolf-Rayet-type star, with new spectroscopy from the Very Large Telescope providing the first direct measurement of its…
A black hole the mass of a star is, by the standards of this subject, in a hurry. Gas spirals in, the system brightens over weeks and fades over months, and somewhere on the way down a jet of plasma…
Every planet in the solar system with a magnetic field also has an aurora, and every one of those aurorae is a radio transmitter. Jupiter's was found by accident, by astronomers who were looking at…