The first ever photo of two planets orbiting a Sun-like star 309-light years from the Earth has been captured by astronomers using a ground-based telescope. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile was used to capture the image of the two giant exoplanets orbiting the very young star. Astronomers say this image is … Read more
Astronomers observe ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ behavior in a double star system 19,000 light-years away that switches between X-ray and radio waves A dense cluster called Terzan 5 sits 19,000 light-years away from Earth Experts re-analyzed an image of the system snapped back in February They found that the double star system flips between X-rays and … Read more
Astronomers capture image of super-rare galaxy 11 billion light-years away from Earth that looks like a ‘cosmic ring of fire’ Star formation has been named R5519 and provides snapshot of early universe Galaxy has a hole in its centre that is two billion times the sun-Earth distance Discovery was announced in the journal Nature Astronomy … Read more
Letting off steam: Astronomers spot a new kind of asteroid with a comet-like tail orbiting the sun at the same distance as Jupiter The asteroid was first spotted in 2019 and the tail was confirmed in April 2020 2019 LD2 is letting off gas which is trailing behind the space rock like a comet tail … Read more
A huge rotating disc galaxy has been discovered by astronomers and 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang it was already ‘well-ordered, cold’ and intact. The Wolfe Disk galaxy was found by astronomers from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The universe is 13.8 billion years old and most galaxies, … Read more
A planet is born! Astronomers find the first direct evidence of a new world being formed around a distant star A dense disc of dust and gas was spotted surrounding young star AB Aurigae The star is 520 light years away from Earth and has a spiral structure around it Twists in the centre of … Read more
Astronomers detect an ‘incredibly rare’ Earth-like planet orbiting a star one-tenth the size of our sun 25,000 light-years away The star was spotted in the Galactic Bulge at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy The rocky world’s mass is somewhere between the mass of Earth and Neptune It is so far away that scientists … Read more
Captivating images of planet-forming discs around young stars have been captured by astronomers – and they could hold clues to the origins of Earth-like worlds. An international team of astronomers used the Europe Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope in Chile to take 15 images of the inner rims of planetary discs. In the images astronomers … Read more