In 2020, astronomers added a new member to an exclusive family of exotic objects with the discovery of a magnetar. New observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory help support the idea that it is also a pulsar, meaning it...
Type Ia supernovae, as cosmological distance indicators, have led to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe. Nevertheless, the nature of their progenitors and explosion mechanisms remain unsolved mysteries.
An international team led by Dr. Wang Lingzhi from...
A University of Arizona-led research team has found bands and stripes on the brown dwarf closest to Earth, hinting at the processes churning the brown dwarf's atmosphere from within.
Brown dwarfs are mysterious celestial objects that are not quite stars...
It is during rare merging events that galaxies undergo dramatic changes in their appearance and in their stellar content. These systems are excellent laboratories to trace the formation of star clusters under extreme physical conditions.
The Milky Way typically forms...
Last month, Japan's Hayabusa2 mission brought home a cache of rocks collected from a near-Earth asteroid called Ryugu. While analysis of those returned samples is just getting underway, researchers are using data from the spacecraft's other instruments to reveal...
From an observatory high above Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers have taken a new look at the oldest light in the universe.
Their observations, plus a bit of cosmic geometry, suggest that the universe is 13.77 billion years old—give or take 40 million...
Although violent and unpredictable, stellar flares emitted by a planet's host star do not necessarily prevent life from forming, according to a new Northwestern University study.
Emitted by stars, stellar flares are sudden flashes of magnetic imagery. On Earth, the...
A research team, led by astronomers from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), has discovered 591 high velocity stars based on data from the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) and Gaia, and 43...
The Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) is home to many interdisciplinary projects which benefit from the synergy of a wide range of expertise available at the institute. One such project is the...
The ultra-powerful James Webb Space Telescope will launch soon. Once it's deployed and in position at the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 2, it'll begin work. One of its jobs is to examine the atmospheres of exoplanets and look for biosignatures....
Although violent and unpredictable, stellar flares emitted by a planet's host star do not necessarily prevent life from forming, according to a new Northwestern University study.
Emitted by stars, stellar flares are sudden flashes of magnetic imagery. On Earth, the...
