Gaia galaxy map, image credit: ESA The interstellar medium is not my favorite topic in astronomy. Fundamentally, it is the study of interstellar dust bunnies - those clumps of gas and dust that clog up our skies and block our ability to see more distant stars and galaxies. They don’t vary like the pulsating stars I love most. They don’t have stories that alter how we understand our universe like galaxies and galaxy clusters. The gas and dust between stars are just transient blobs of material - sometimes bright and sometimes dark - that are either released during stellar death or waiting to...
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:...
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...