An astronomer with the National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA), Dr Bonaventure Okere, has won the 2024 International Astronomical Union (IAU) prize for astronomy education in Africa. Guido Schwarz, IAU’s Press Officer, announced the prize winners in a statement issued on the union’s official website page, a copy of which was obtained by the…

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are intense, short-lived blasts of radio waves hailing from beyond the Milky Way that can emit the same amount of energy in just thousandths of a second that the sun takes three days to emit. However, despite their power and the fact that around 10,000 FRBs could erupt in the sky…

Come 2029, skywatchers can glimpse at least one “star” in the sky made by humans. Earlier this week, NASA announced plans to place a small satellite in Earth orbit at a little over 22,000 miles (35,400 kilometers) above our planet’s surface — far enough for the satellite to mimic a real star to telescopes on…

Deep in the outer reaches of the solar system — so far away from the known planets that the sun would barely be distinguishable from a nearby star — a massive, icy world may be lurking in the shadows, waiting to be discovered by humanity.  And the day that we finally find this elusive planet…

Deep in the outer reaches of the solar system — so far away from the known planets that the sun would barely be distinguishable from a nearby star — a massive, icy world may be lurking in the shadows, waiting to be discovered by humanity.  And the day that we finally find this elusive planet…

A first-of-its-kind NASA mission aims to put a new “star” in the sky by the end of the decade to help solve a wide range of the universe’s biggest mysteries, scientists have announced.  The Landolt NASA Space Mission aims to send an artificial star satellite into orbit around Earth by “early 2029,” Peter Plavchan, an…

The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the oldest and most distant supernova ever seen — a stellar explosion that took place when the universe was just 1.8 billion years old. The ancient starburst was uncovered among 80 others in a patch of sky that, from our perspective on Earth, is about the width of…

When astronomers turn our radio telescopes out towards space, we sometimes detect sporadic bursts of radio waves originating from across the vast expanse of the universe. We call them “radio transients”: some erupt only once, never to be seen again, and others flicker on and off in predictable patterns. We think most radio transients come…

Human technology like cell phones and broadcast towers constantly radiate radio waves into space, and astronomers estimate this tell-tale signature of humanity has swept across 75 nearby star systems, signaling to any watchful alien civilization that Earth hosts a technologically advanced species. And, while scientists have listened to the incessant radio chatter from our planet…

Planet hunters: David Charbonneau and Sara Seager share the $1m prize for their work characterizing the atmospheres of exoplanets (courtesy: Nils Lund/Kavliprize) Exoplanet researchers David Charbonneau from Harvard University and Sara Seager from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have won the 2024 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics. The laureates, who will share the $1m prize, have…