An international team of astronomers has published a map of the sky showing over 25,000 supermassive black holes. The map, to be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, is the most detailed celestial map in the field of so-called low radio frequencies. The astronomers, including Leiden astronomers, used 52 stations with LOFAR antennas spread across nine European countries. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-02-astronomers-publish-supermassive-black-holes.html…
Tag: Astronomy & Astrophysics
Evidence for substance at liquid-gas boundary on exoplanet WASP-31b
One of the properties that make a planet suitable for life is the presence of a weather system. Exoplanets are too far away to directly observe this, but astronomers can search for substances in the atmosphere that make a weather system possible. Researchers from SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research and the University of Groningen have now found evidence on exoplanet…
Astronomers see whirlwind around possible exoplanet in the making
An international team of astronomers led by researchers from the Netherlands has discovered a whirlwind of dust and debris in orbit around a young star. It is possible that a planet is forming within the debris. The scientists made the discovery during the time that designers and developers of an astronomical instrument get as a reward for their work. They will…
Astronomers finally measure polarized light from exoplanet
An international team led by Dutch astronomers has, after years of searching and defying the boundaries of a telescope, for the first time directly captured polarized light from an exoplanet. They can deduct from the light that a disk of dust and gas is orbiting around the exoplanet in which moons are possibly forming. The researchers will soon publish their findings…
Unveiling the double origin of cosmic dust in the distant Universe
Two billion years after the Big Bang, the Universe was still very young. However, thousands of huge galaxies, rich in stars and dust, were already formed. An international study, led by SISSA—Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, now explains how this was possible. Scientists combined observational and theoretical methods to identify the physical processes behind their evolution and, for the first…
Study of nebula IRAS 00500+6713 suggests its central star is unlike any seen before
A team of researchers from Potsdam University and Kazan Federal University has found evidence of a previously unknown kind of star in nebula IRAS 00500+6713. In their paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the group describes their study of the nebula and its central star and what they believe it represents. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-nebula-iras-central-star.html…
Scientists claim controversial results of comet observations are consistent
Astrophysicists from Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) joined the international research team for explaining the difference in the results of observation of the comet 41P/ Tuttle—Giacobini—Kresak. Researchers believe that data obtained by three independent teams are complementary and its complex analysis helps to unravel the mystery of dust chemical composition of comet 41P and other conundrums of the Universe. A related…
Machine learning yields a breakthrough in the study of stellar nurseries
Artificial intelligence can make it possible to see astrophysical phenomena that were previously beyond reach. This has now been demonstrated by scientists from the CNRS, IRAM, Observatoire de Paris-PSL, Ecole Centrale Marseille and Ecole Centrale Lille, working together in the ORION-B program. In a series of three papers published in Astronomy & Astrophysics on 19 November 2020, they present the most…
Ten times more hyper-luminous galaxies observed than stars can produce
A team of astronomers led by SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research has observed 10 times more hyper-luminous galaxies in the infrared than stars can produce according to the models. If the theory is correct, it means that stars alone cannot account for the brightness of the most luminous infrared galaxies. The paper was published in a special issue of Astronomy…
Has the hidden matter of the universe been discovered?
Astrophysicists consider that around 40% of the ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets and galaxies remains undetected, concealed in the form of a hot gas in the complex cosmic web. Today, scientists at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay) may have detected, for the first time, this hidden matter through an innovative statistical analysis of 20-year-old data. Their findings are…