On October 9, 2022, an intense pulse of gamma-ray radiation swept through our solar system, overwhelming gamma-ray detectors on numerous orbiting satellites, and sending astronomers on a chase to study the event using the ...
Astronomy
Mar 28, 2023
1
1594
Air pollution is an existential threat to millions of Americans with asthma and other health issues. In response to that threat, NASA and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory are innovating to improve observations of ...
Environment
Mar 2, 2023
0
3
Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) have unveiled a first-of-its-kind map that could help answer decades-old questions about the origins of stars and the influences of magnetic fields ...
Astronomy
Jan 11, 2023
0
569
For the first time, astronomers have spotted an exoplanet whose orbit is decaying around an evolved, or older, host star. The stricken world appears destined to spiral closer and closer to its maturing star until collision ...
Astronomy
Dec 19, 2022
0
870
Two astrophysicists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have suggested a way to observe what could be the second-closest supermassive black hole to Earth: a behemoth 3 million times the mass of the Sun, hosted ...
Astronomy
Nov 28, 2022
1
294
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just scored another first: a detailed molecular and chemical portrait of a distant world's skies.
Astronomy
Nov 22, 2022
1
3076
A new study has revealed the true shape of the diffuse cloud of stars surrounding the disk of our galaxy. For decades, astronomers have thought that this cloud of stars—called the stellar halo—was largely spherical, like ...
Astronomy
Nov 18, 2022
1
817
A team of astrophysicists say that cosmic inflation—a point in the universe's infancy when space-time expanded exponentially, and what physicists really refer to when they talk about the "Big Bang"—can in principle be ...
Astronomy
Nov 3, 2022
10
130
Astrophysicists have performed a powerful new analysis that places the most precise limits yet on the composition and evolution of the universe. With this analysis, dubbed Pantheon+, cosmologists find themselves at a crossroads.
Astronomy
Oct 19, 2022
64
979
Astronomers agree that planets are born in protoplanetary disks—rings of dust and gas that surround young, newborn stars. While hundreds of these disks have been spotted throughout the universe, observations of actual planetary ...
Astronomy
Sep 14, 2022
0
358
