Abstract Radio detections of stellar systems provide a window onto stellar magnetic activity and the space weather conditions of extrasolar planets — information that is difficult to obtain at other wavelengths. The maturation of low-frequency radio instruments and the plethora of wide-field radio surveys have driven recent advances in observing auroral emissions from radio-bright low-mass…

How can we determine if intelligent life exists in our Universe, or maybe other universes? This is what a recent study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society as an international team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Switzerland investigated how the universe’s expansion, which is hypothesized to be caused by…

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has done an extraordinary job teaching us about our Sun while achieving record distances from the latter’s surface, coming within 4.51 million miles (7.26 million kilometers) on September 27, 2023. Now, the Parker Solar Probe is a month away from breaking this record, as it is slated to come within 3.8…

How did the first galaxies after the Big Bang form and evolve? Were they small and attributed to dark matter or were they large and some other force attributed to their growth? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers challenged longstanding hypotheses that…

New research from Case Western Reserve University questions standard model The standard model for how galaxies formed in the early universe predicted that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would see dim signals from small, primitive galaxies. But data are not confirming the popular hypothesis that invisible dark matter helped the earliest stars and galaxies…

A team of astronomers using data from the eROSITA All-Sky Survey has modeled the hot gas in our local stellar neighborhood, finding a curious “interstellar tunnel” towards the constellation of Centaurus. The “tunnel” potentially connects our own local bubble to a neighboring superbubble. Our Solar System resides in a 1,000-light-year-wide “Local Bubble”, sometimes called the…

2 / 4 Special to The Westfield News WHS Astronomy Club invite girl scouts to gaze at the stars Westfield High School Space and Astronomy Club invited the Girl Scout “Westies” Service Unit, which consists of eight troops in Westfield and West Springfield, to learn about the night school at an observing on Nov. 8…

Astronomy has taken giant leaps since Galileo first looked at the sky through his handmade telescope. Today, scientists study the sky from enormous observatories or incredibly complex spacecraft worth billions of dollars. But this doesn’t mean that astronomy is a closed club, accessible only for the few chosen ones. On the contrary, the data collected…