News by Subject Space & Planetary

New models of neutron stars show that their tallest mountains may be only fractions of millimetres high, due to the huge gravity on the ultra-dense objects. The research is presented today at the National Astronomy Meeting 2021.

The discovery sheds new light on the thousand-year mystery of the supernova from A.D. 1054 that was seen by ancient astronomers, before eventually becoming the Crab Nebula, that we know today.

A new method for seeing through ice sheets using radio signals from the sun could enable cheap, low-power and widespread monitoring of ice sheet evolution and contribution to sea-level rise.

A team of physicists led by the University of Iowa have described in fuller detail the sun's electric field. The researchers measured the flow of electrons streaming from the sun as the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft made its closest approach to date to our home star. Result appear in The Astrophysical Journal.

Astronomers see many periodic emissions from space, typically caused by rotation of stars and often very regular. UC Berkeley astrophysicists noticed a unique periodicity in the soft gamma ray emissions from a magnetar located in our galaxy. The soft gamma repeater SGR1935+2154 appears to emit bursts only within regularly spaced windows, and is inactive in between. Based on their analysis, they predicted a resumption of bursts last month; so far, a dozen have been detected.

International team led by University of Warwick makes rare sighting of a binary star system heading towards supernova. Star system's fate was identified from its unusual light variations, a sign that one star has been distorted into a teardrop shape by a massive white dwarf companion. Supernovas from such star systems can be used as 'standard candles' to measure expansion of the universe.

Astronomers have made the rare sighting of two stars spiralling to their doom by spotting the tell-tale signs of a teardrop-shaped star.

Astronomers led by David Yong, Gary Da Costa and Chiaki Kobayashi from Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence in All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D) based at the Australian National University (ANU) have potentially discovered the first evidence of the destruction of a collapsed rapidly spinning star - a phenomenon they describe as a "magneto-rotational hypernova".

Historically most scientists thought that once a satellite galaxy has passed close by its higher mass parent galaxy its star formation would stop because the larger galaxy would remove the gas from it, leaving it shorn of the material it would need to make new stars.