Topic: Pamela Gay
A Star’s Death in Three Acts

A Star’s Death in Three Acts

While monitoring the sky with optical systems, we’ve found some really weird stuff. Back in 2018, the All Sky Automated Survey for Super Novae discovered a brightening galaxy. Follow -up observations in the X-Ray found the kinds of high energy light that signals a black hole is tearing apart and feeding on a star. When the light faded away, it was assumed the star was gone and the excitement was over, but… it returned about 1200 days later. This second flare wasn’t as impressive as the first, but it was enough to let researchers calculate the shredded stars orbit and predict when what ever...

read more
How Rivers Flow: Here, Mars & Titan

How Rivers Flow: Here, Mars & Titan

This false-color image shows Titan’s second-largest body of liquid, Ligeia Mare, in the moon’s northern hemisphere. Scientists think that rivers flowing into large bodies of liquids like this one should form deltas. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell New research...

Found: Stars blowing donuts in early universe

Found: Stars blowing donuts in early universe

Left: Dust is shown in red, oxygen in green, and starlight (from HST) in blue. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Y. Tamura et al., NASA/ESA HST). right: ALMA shows just dust emissions, including a vertically elongated elliptical cavity- a possible super bubble. Credit:...

Found: Galaxies lining up in early universe

Found: Galaxies lining up in early universe

This deep galaxy field from Webb's Near-Infrared Camera shows an arrangement of 10 distant galaxies (white circles) in a diagonal. NASA, ESA, CSA, Feige Wang/University of Arizona and Joseph DePasquale/STScI Currently, a lot of the research we see coming from JWST is...

Found: Time slows with distance

Found: Time slows with distance

Before we go to break, I want to highlight one more piece of news. In a new paper in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers Geraint Lewis and Brendon Brewer show evidence for time appearing to tick slower in the early universe. According to relativity, as our...

Yes (maybe) 2 planets can share an orbit

Yes (maybe) 2 planets can share an orbit

A planet and its Trojan orbiting a star in the PDS 70 system (annotated) Credit: ALMA A whole fair amount of astronomy consists of theorists coming up with mathematically valid ideas of what is possible and then everyone debating if the universe would actually do...