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Van Vleck Observatory Opens Its Doors for Community Outreach
c/o Rewa Bush For decades, the University’s Astronomy Department has hosted public outreach programs at its home, the Van Vleck Observatory — that is, until the COVID-19 pandemic forced the observatory to close its doors. This fall, new efforts by students, faculty, and community members have led to the resurrection of public programming in full…
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Watch SpaceX’s Starship launch for 2nd time ever on Nov. 18
Update for Nov. 18: SpaceX says all systems and weather are GO for its second Starship launch test today at 8 a.m. EST (1300 GMT). You can watch it live here beginning at 7:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT). SpaceX plans to launch its Starship vehicle for the second time ever on Saturday (Nov. 18), and…
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‘Peculiar’ aurora-like radio signal from sunspot discovered for the 1st time
Solar scientists have observed a stunning display of radio waves over a sunspot, and these emissions strikingly resemble auroral displays on Earth known as the Northern Lights. Happening around 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) over a dark, relatively cool patch of the sun, these “auroral” radio emissions could not only shine a light on the dynamics…
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Einstein must be wrong: How general relativity fails to explain the universe
Einstein’s theory of gravity — general relativity — has been very successful for more than a century. However, it has theoretical shortcomings. This is not surprising: the theory predicts its own failure at spacetime singularities inside black holes — and the Big Bang itself. Unlike physical theories describing the other three fundamental forces in physics — the electromagnetic…
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Massive gamma-ray burst reached Earth’s upper atmosphere
An artistic impression of a gamma-ray burst from a galaxy almost two billion light-years away. Credit: ESA/ATG Europe; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO It came from somewhere 2 billion miles away. And when it arrived in October of 2022, the gamma-ray burst lit up the entire ionosphere. Now astronomers are working in a whole realm of…
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“Fluffy” exoplanet filled with water, sulphur and sand rain
Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to identify clouds of water vapour, sulphur dioxide and silicates on a nearby exoplanet. European researchers found the compounds on WASP-107b, an exoplanet some 200 light-years from Earth. With the mass of Neptune and the size of Jupiter, WASP-107b is not a dense planet – in…
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This dead star is bursting back to life
It would appear that a distant star has sprung back to life after its explosive death, blasting out repeated energetic flares over a period of several months that are like nothing astronomers have seen before. Though each flash lasts just a few minutes even 100 days after the first eruption, they all remain as bright…
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‘A galactic war of aliens’? The colossal ‘Tassie devil’ exploding in space
Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text size A colossal cosmic cataclysm exploding with the intensity of an entire galaxy of stars has gobsmacked astronomers, who say the detonations of hot, blue-white light upend our understanding of how the laws of physics are supposed to operate. And the puzzling phenomenon has been named after Australia’s…
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Webb Telescope Peers into Puffy Planet with Clouds of Sand
Artist’s impression of WASP-107bMichiel Min / European MIRI EXO GTO team / ESA / NASA / Klaas Verpoest (LUCA School of Arts, Belgium) It’s a strange world not even the most imaginative science fiction authors ever came up with: a planet only twice as dense as Styrofoam, enveloped in high-altitude clouds of tiny sand particles.…
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Scientists suspect there’s ice hiding on the Moon
Some dark craters on the Moon, indicated here in blue, never get light. Scientists think some of these permanently shadowed regions could contain ice. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Building a space station on the Moon might seem like something out of a science fiction movie, but each new lunar mission is bringing that idea…
