China will permit foreign astronomers to use its 1,600-foot radio telescope for the first time this summer. The Five-hundred meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is the world’s largest single-disc radio observatory, used for spotting cosmic phenomena and searching for extraterrestrial life. It’s one of the only ‘Sky Eyes’ remaining after the decommissioning and collapse … Read more
Crushed-up remains of large asteroids discovered in a white dwarf star could help astronomers find the universe’s ‘missing’ lithium Researchers found the lithium in asteroids in the atmosphere of a white dwarf This is the first time the element has been found in an exosolar rocky body Future studies will look for further white dwarf … Read more
Astronomers from the UK have created a new map of the Milky Way made up of nearly two billion stars using data gathered by the European Space Agency (ESA) Gaia space observatory. University of Cambridge experts led the creation of the cosmic atlas of two billion stars, that they believe could shed light on how … Read more
A flash of luck, 6 inches of metal pipe and a few cake tins helped astronomers trace the source of a mysterious fast radio burst to a strange star in the Milky Way. California Institute of Technology and MCGill University astronomers identified a magnetar star 32,000 light years from the Earth as the source of … Read more
The weather on one of the most inhospitable exoplanets ever discovered, with raining rocks and 60 mile deep lava seas, has been predicted by astronomers. The world, named K2-141b, was found around 200 light years away from Earth and has winds of more than 3,000 mph and surface temperatures over 5,000F. Researchers from McGill and York … Read more
The long-lost twin of the moon may have been spotted trailing behind Mars by astronomers. A 1km-wide asteroid called (101429) 1998 VF31 was first spotted 22 years ago and new analysis reveals it is ‘strikingly similar’ to the moon. Scientists from the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium (AOP) in Northern Ireland used the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) … Read more
Astronomers from the Max Planck institutes has confirmed the existence of an exoplanet in another star system some 63 light years away from Earth – and have shared a picture to prove it. Called b Pictoris c, the planet was captured using the radial velocity method that detects exoplanets, along with the Very Large Telescopes … Read more
Earth is the only planet we know that has sentient life – but astronomers have found two dozen exoplanets that may have better conditions for life than our home world. A team led by Washington State University identified 24 ‘superhabitable’ planets out of more than 4,500 known exoplanets that could be a good candidate for … Read more
Australian astronomers say they’ve found no technological signs of alien life in a study of more than 10 million star systems. Perth-based researchers used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope in the Western Australian outback, in a project dubbed ‘looking for ET’. The MWA searches for powerful radio emissions at low frequencies, similar to FM … Read more
A distant galaxy that looks ‘surprisingly like our Milky Way’, has been discovered by astronomers, who say it appears like a near-perfect ring of light in space. Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute used the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile to find the galaxy 12 billion light years from Earth. … Read more