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Leonids Meteor Shower: When and How to Watch Its Peak
The event produces some of the year’s fastest meteors, although the nearly full moon may make them challenging to spot. Our universe might be chock-full of cosmic wonder, but you can observe only a fraction of astronomical phenomena with your naked eye. Meteor showers, natural fireworks that streak brightly across the night sky, are one…
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James Webb Spots Massive ‘Red Monsters’—A Discovery That’s Shaking Astronomy to Its Core
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed a groundbreaking discovery: massive, dust-rich galaxies dubbed “red monsters” that challenge fundamental assumptions about the formation of galaxies in the early universe. Observed within the first billion years after the Big Bang, these galaxies appear as massive as the Milky Way but formed at a rate far…
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TRACERS satellites set to enhance understanding of space weather
Iowa’s News Now–In just over five months, the University of Iowa will be launching its TRACERS mission which currently stands as the largest grant ever awarded to the university. In 2019, Dr. Kletzing with University of Iowa’s Physics and Astronomy Department pitched the research study to NASA to examine the near-Earth interaction between our magnetosphere…
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Radio signatures of star–planet interactions, exoplanets and space weather
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…
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Life in the Multiverse: The Role of Dark Energy in Star Formation and Intelligence
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…
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Historic Venus Flyby Sets Parker Solar Probe on Course for Sun’s Closest Approach
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…
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Space
New Uranus research suggests what’s known about the planet could be wrong A solar wind event squashed the protective bubble around Uranus just before Voyager 2 flew by the planet in 1986, shifting how astronomers understood the mysterious world.
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Large, Bright Early Galaxies: A Win for Modified Gravity Over Dark Matter
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…
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Astronomers’ theory of galaxy formation may be upended
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…
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“Interstellar Tunnel” Found Towards The Constellation Of Centaurus By eROSITA Space Telescope
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…
