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The James Webb Space Telescope will show us more stars than we’ve ever seen before

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You’ve probably heard of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, but do you know what it’s actually going to do? Webb is the most powerful telescope ever built, and its assorted instruments will give us a clearer view of more stars than we’ve ever seen. The observatory, which is currently undergoing calibration to prepare for the … Read more

2 Supermassive Black Holes Are Locked in The Tightest Orbit We’ve Seen Yet

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A dance of death is taking place at the heart of a galaxy in the distant Universe. Some 10 billion light-years away, two supermassive black holes are locked in an orbit so tight that they will collide with each other and form one much larger black hole in the relatively short time of just 10,000 … Read more

We’ve Found The Part of The Brain That Helps Us Say Words How We Intend To

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While it might feel as though we do it without thinking, getting words from our brain and out of our mouths in an intelligible way is actually an incredibly complex process – and scientists just made a new discovery about a key part of it.   Our brains are always adjusting what we’re saying based … Read more

Supercomputers Simulated a Black Hole And Found Something We’ve Never Seen Before

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While black holes might always be black, they do occasionally emit some intense bursts of light from just outside their event horizon. Previously, what exactly caused these flares had been a mystery to science.    That mystery was solved recently by a team of researchers that used a series of supercomputers to model the details of black holes‘ magnetic … Read more

New Models Let Us Dive Into One of The Brightest Star Explosions We’ve Ever Seen

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A star that exploded into brightness nearly 200 years ago can now be explored in glorious, multi-wavelength detail. In a new video, a team of scientists modeled the Homunculus Nebula around the star Eta Carinae in three dimensions, enabling insight into this incredible event.   The binary system Eta Carinae started erupting in the late … Read more

Astronomers Detect Strange Signals We’ve Never Seen Before in Our Cosmic Vicinity

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Something in Earth’s cosmic neighborhood is emitting weird signals of a kind we’ve never seen before. Just 4,000 light-years away, something is flashing radio waves. For roughly 30 to 60 seconds, every 18.18 minutes, it pulses brightly, one of the most luminous objects in the low-frequency radio sky. It matches the profile of no known … Read more

Human evolution: 160,000-year-old fossil may be the first Denisovan skull we’ve found

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A partial skull from China represents the earliest human with a “modern” brain size. It could represent an unknown group of ancient humans, or perhaps one of the enigmatic Denisovans Humans 26 January 2022 By Michael Marshall Fragments of a large ancient human skull known as Xujiayao 6 Xiu-Jie Wu,Christopher J.Bae, Martin Friess, Song Xing, … Read more

The Doomsday Clock Is About to Tick, And We’ve Never Been So Close to Midnight

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In less than 24 hours the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will update the Doomsday Clock. It’s currently at 100 seconds from midnight – the metaphorical time when the human race could destroy the world with technologies of its own making.   The hands have never before been this close to midnight. There is scant … Read more

For The First Time, We’ve Seen a Red Giant Star Transition Into a Supernova

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We’re seeing many spectacular sights out in space as our telescopes become more powerful, but there’s a new contender for the most exciting one yet: According to researchers, we’ve observed a red supergiant star exploding into a supernova for the first time.   Supernova (SN) 2020tlf, to give it its technical name, was watched for … Read more

Some black holes are anything but black – and we’ve found more than 75,000 of the brightest ones

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Researchers have found over 75,000 of the brightest black holes. (Image credit: ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray), CC BY-SA) This article was originally published at The Conversation. When the most massive stars die, they collapse to form some of the densest objects known in the Universe: black holes. They are the … Read more