A screenshot from a visualization of the orbit of the Gaia BH3 system as a whole through the Milky Way. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC- CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO. Acknowledgments: Stefan Jordan with Gaia Sky. The universe we see doesn’t always reflect the universe that is out there. Luckily for us, a lot of dark details can’t stay hidden for long because their motion gives them away. The Gaia spacecraft was launched in 2013 on a mission to measure the precise locations of every point and smudge of light visible to the craft's weird rectangular mirrors. With the ability to see motions across the sky that are...
Euclid releases first images
Just when we thought nothing could be more stunning than the images being released almost weekly by JWST, along comes the newest space telescope on the block - the European Space Agency’s Euclid. The mission launched in July of this year, and as with JWST, has...
Gamma Ray Burst reveals Tellurium
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Levan (IMAPP, Warw), A. Pagan (STScI) One of the awesome things about growing older as an astronomer is you get to see the weird stuff no one understood in your youth become the everyday normal of your middle age. While we still...
Eta Carina gives up 260year Secret to Chandra
Credit: X-ray: NASA/SAO/GSFC/M. Corcoran et al.; Image Processing: L. Frattare, J. Major, N. Wolk (SAO/CXC) Astronomers kind of live to see weird weird objects. While likely always visible to humans, this southern hemisphere star transformed from kind of meh to the...
Pulsar releases highest measured Gamma rays
Credit: Science Communication Lab for DESY Ultimately, our universe is far more diverse in its reality than humans tend to be in our theorizing. Over and over, we have found remarkable things just by turning a new instrument skyward. From the discovery of cold...
New Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient
Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Garlick/M. Zamani To me it feels like our biggest unknowns are often part of the high-energy universe - those processes and objects rise to the highest temperatures and give off the bluest of light. As an example, back in 2018, researchers...
Colliding neutron stars are the new Standard Candle
Credit: Dana Berry, SWIFT/NASA The most important factor about our Universe that we should be able to measure is its expansion rate. In 1929, Edwin Hubble provided the first observational evidence of an expanding universe when he demonstrated that galaxies that are...
Extra Light from Dark Matter in Pulsars… maybe?
credit: NASA/CXC/ASU/J. Hester et al., HST/ASU/J. Hester et al. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: the universe is an improv artist that likes to say “Yes, and”. I really wouldn’t be surprised if the effects we see are due to both a stuff we’ll collectively...
Janus: White Dwarf Edition
The results of science are often weirder than anything humans can imagine. As researchers, we dedicate our lives to taking data and knowing that whatever we may want to believe, we have to accept the reality of what our data shows us. And sometimes the data is...
A new kind of star is discovered
An artist’s impression of the ultra-long period magnetar—a rare type of star with extremely strong magnetic fields that can produce powerful bursts of energy. Credit: ICRAR. The more we look at the universe, the more we’ll be able to find rare and wonderful things. In...
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:...