News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Light pollution is a big problem, and it’s getting bigger. Recently published research led by Dr Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel at the University of Exeter, UK suggests that a global rise in artificial lighting has substantially boosted light pollution levels over the past few decades – some regions have suffered as much as a fivefold increase! … Read more
A rare treasure that could shed light on the evolution of black holes has been discovered in the Milky Way’s closest large galactic neighbor. In a cluster of stars in the Andromeda galaxy, aka M31, astronomers studied changes in light to identify a black hole clocking in at almost 100,000 times the mass of the … Read more
A red giant is a dying star in the final stages of stellar evolution. In about five billion years, our own sun will turn into a red giant, expand and engulf the inner planets — possibly even Earth. What does the future hold for the light of our solar system and others like it? Star … Read more
Black holes can not only rip stars apart, but they can also trigger star formation, as scientists have now seen in a nearby dwarf galaxy. At the centers of most, if not all, large galaxies are supermassive black holes with masses that are millions to billions of times that of Earth’s sun. For instance, at … Read more
The nearest stars, their distances in light-years, spectral types and known planets. (Image credit: Karl Tate, SPACE.com contributor) Stars speckle the expanse of our ever-expanding universe. While our closest star is the sun that we orbit in our little corner of the cosmos, we can peer out to see what stellar neighbors live nearby. The … Read more
The Hubble constant describes how fast the universe is expanding, but our measurements won’t line up, which may mean our standard model of the universe is wrong Space 20 January 2022 By Leah Crane Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of galaxies looked at in the study ESA The expansion of the universe is … Read more
We often think of supernova explosions as inevitable for large stars. Big star runs out of fuel, gravity collapses its core, and BOOM! But astronomers have long thought at least one type of large star didn’t end with a supernova. Known as Wolf-Rayet stars, they were thought to end with a quiet collapse of their core … Read more
Because we can’t see black holes, it’s hard to know exactly how many are out there in the big, wide Universe. But that doesn’t mean we have no means of trying to figure it out. Stellar-mass black holes are the collapsed cores of dead massive stars, and new research incorporating how these stars and binaries … Read more
A new image of the Flame Nebula shows the interstellar cloud as we’ve never seen it before. A team of astronomers using the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope has captured the star-forming region in radio wavelengths, revealing details that we had never seen before. The Flame Nebula, which is close to the famous Horsehead … Read more
Scientists observed changes in the signals coming from rapidly-spinning stars called millisecond pulsars that might point to the existence of subtle space-time ripples vibrating throughout the entire universe. Millisecond pulsars are stellar remnants that spin hundreds of times per second, producing precise radio pulses that can act as a cosmic metronome. Scientists think that ripples … Read more