Italian astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to perform polarimetric observations of the star WRAY 15-1880 and its young circumstellar disk. Results of the new observations, presented June 10 on the arXiv preprint server, suggest that this disk may host a primitive planetary system.

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Astronomers have detected one of the most powerful ultra-fast outflows ever seen from a distant supermassive black hole. Using XMM-Newton and NuSTAR, a team studied a hyper-luminous quasar at cosmic noon and found two distinct wind components blasting away from the black hole, details of which are outlined in a paper submitted to the arXiv […]

Venus’ bizarre and extraordinarily slow retrograde rotation on its axis has long puzzled planetary scientists. But in a new paper presented at the recent European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, the authors argue that their models indicate a high-angle, moon-sized, high-velocity impactor likely triggered Venus’ strange 248-day rotation. And it probably happened within the […]

When stars like our sun age, they puff up into red giants. Their bubbling outer mass gradually escapes into space, and their remaining cores contract into white dwarfs. Since most stars end their lives this way, the universe is teeming with white dwarfs. A new study from Caltech’s Jim Fuller, professor of theoretical astrophysics, proposes […]

Debris is still raining down on Earth more than 100 million years after the giant cosmic explosion that created it. A study published this week in Nature Astronomy by an international team reached this conclusion using measurements of rare isotopes within a slow-growing ferromanganese crust recovered from the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

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Picture the Milky Way not as a silent pinwheel of stars but as something that quietly sings. Scattered through it are millions of pairs of dead stars, mostly white dwarfs, whirling around each other and stirring ripples in spacetime as they go. Individually, these ripples are far too faint to notice. Together, they blur into […]

In the early universe, the first galaxies began to take shape roughly a million years after the Big Bang. Within these young systems, stars formed from vast reservoirs of cold gas, gradually building the structures we see in the cosmos today. Understanding this star-forming gas is key to explaining how galaxies grew, but directly tracing […]

Sulfur is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. If you peer into a diffuse interstellar cloud, you find loads of it—about the amount expected based on fusion patterns in the stars it was born in. However, if you look at a dense, cold molecular cloud—the kind where those stars actually form—it seems […]