A brand new telescope has completed on Maui’s Haleakala, and it has just one job: to watch the Sun in unprecedented detail. It’s called the Daniel K. Inouye telescope, and the engineering involved to get this telescope operational are matched by the incredible resolution of its first images.
We’ve been following this story for more than a decade, so it’s great to finally have an answer to the question, why was supernova 2006gy so insanely bright? Astronomers originally thought it was an example of a supermassive star exploding, but new evidence provides an even more fascinating answer.
Red dwarfs are the longest lived stars in the Universe, the perfect place for life to hang out for trillions of years. But they’re tempestuous little balls of plasma, hurling out catastrophic flares that could wipe away life. Are they good or bad places to live?
Now astronomers can study objects in both visible light, neutrinos, gravitational waves and more. The era of multi-messenger astronomy is here.
There are already 180 Starlinks in orbit, & thousands more are coming. What will be the impact on astronomy & what can we do about it?
