Astronomers have detected extreme, never-before-seen behavior from a rare kind of pulsar and stumbled on a surprising link to one of astronomy’s biggest current mysteries. Using 174 hours of radio observations, researchers detected PSR J1227-4853, a rapidly spinning neutron star known as a “transitional millisecond pulsar,” which unleashes hundreds of ultrashort, ultrapowerful “giant pulses.” Their […]

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the largest multispectral imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey of the cosmos, has released its 20th data release (DR 20). It is also the third release of the survey’s fifth phase (SDSS-V), representing a massive operational expansion of the legacy established with prior releases. This milestone provides an unprecedented look […]

Germany’s Isar Aerospace launched a rocket into orbit from Norway on Saturday as Europe races to boost its ability to economically send satellites into space independently of the United States.

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In 1974, Stephen Hawking made a prediction that transformed our understanding of black holes. Black holes, he showed, are not truly black: They slowly lose energy through a quantum process now known as Hawking radiation. The lighter the black hole, the faster it evaporates.

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As the BepiColombo mission prepares to enter the final phase of its journey to Mercury, a series of studies conducted by researchers at the University of Liège and KU Leuven sheds new light on the early stages of the evolution of the planet closest to the sun. Using experimental petrology, the researchers are reconstructing in […]

Star formation in galaxies is closely linked to molecular gas. In the distant past, when galaxy interactions were more common, these encounters compressed molecular gas, causing dense clouds to collapse under their own gravity and form new stars.

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A private spacecraft that was supposed to supply a lifeline to NASA’s Swift Observatory managed to get close to the sinking telescope and even snap photos more than a week after the rescue was abandoned.

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There are myriad ways of “being a star,” and scientists spend years trying to uncover and understand them. One unusual type is the so-called hot subdwarf—small stars that burn mysteriously hot for their size. Scientists from the Faculty of Physics and the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Vilnius University (VU) are working to explain […]