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Categories: Mathematics: Statistics, Space: Structures and Features

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Stars are the machines that sculpt the universe, yet scientists don't fully know how they form. To understand the frenzied 'baby boom' of star birth that occurred early in the universe's history, researchers turned to the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. This nearby galaxy has a simpler chemical composition than the Milky Way, making it similar to the galaxies found in the younger universe, when heavier elements were more scarce. This allows it to serve as a proxy for the early universe. Two separate studies -- the first with the Hubble Space Telescope, and the second with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope -- recently came to the same conclusion. Using different methods, the independent teams found young stars spiraling into the center of a massive star cluster called NGC 346 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. This river-like motion of gas and stars is an efficient way to fuel star birth, researchers say. The teams' results show that the process of star formation in the Small Magellanic Cloud is similar to that in our own Milky Way.

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A new study suggests that many more planets may have large amounts of water than previously thought--as much as half water and half rock. The catch? All that water is probably embedded in the rock, rather than flowing as oceans or rivers on the surface.

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Astronomers have just announced the discovery of two 'super-Earth' planets orbiting LP 890-9, a small, cool star located about 100 light-years from Earth.

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Jupiter-sized planets can be stolen or captured by massive stars in the densely populated stellar nurseries where most stars are born, a new study has found.

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Physicists and astronomers have studied gamma rays caused by the Sagittarius Dwarf, a small neighboring galaxy of our Milky Way. They showed that all the observed gamma radiation can be explained by millisecond pulsars, and can therefore not be interpreted as a smoking gun signature for the presence of dark matter.

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Astronomers have used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to take a direct image of a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet is a gas giant, meaning it has no rocky surface and could not be habitable. The image shows how Webb's powerful infrared gaze can easily capture worlds beyond our solar system, pointing the way to future observations that will reveal more information than ever before about exoplanets.

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Astronomers using the VLBA have produced a full, 3-D view of a binary star system with a planet orbiting one of the stars. Their achievement promises important new insights into the process of planet formation.

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While observing a newly-dormant galaxy, scientists discovered that it had stopped forming stars not because it had used up all of its gas but because most of its star-forming fuel had been thrown out of the system as it merged with another galaxy. What's more, if proven common, the results could change the way scientists think about galaxy mergers and deaths.

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Researchers have observed 'baby stars' in the Small Magellanic Cloud, having an environment similar to the early universe. Toward one of the baby stars, they found molecular outflow, which has similar properties to those seen in the Milky Way galaxy, giving a new perspective on the birth of stars.

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Astronomers have discovered a rare celestial jewel -- a so-called Planetary Nebula (PN) inside a 500 million-year-old Galactic Open Cluster (OC) called M37 (also known as NGC2099). This is a very rare finding of high astrophysical value.

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Using new simulations, astrophysicists implemented simple conditions to model the feeding of a supermassive black hole and the organic formation of its jets and accretion disk. When the researchers ran the simulation, the simple conditions organically and unexpectedly led to the formation of an X-shaped radio galaxy. Surprisingly, the researchers found that the galaxy's characteristic X-shape resulted from the interaction between the jets and the gas falling into the black hole.

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Physicists have built a quantum scale heat pump made from particles of light. This device brings scientists closer to the quantum limit of measuring radio frequency signals, useful in for example the hunt for dark matter.

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NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured the first clear evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system. This observation of a gas giant planet orbiting a Sun-like star 700 light-years away provides important insights into the composition and formation of the planet. The finding offers evidence that in the future Webb may be able to detect and measure carbon dioxide in the thinner atmospheres of smaller rocky planets.

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An international team of astronomers has discovered an exoplanet that could be completely covered in water.

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ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) has imaged the result of a spectacular cosmic collision -- the galaxy NGC 7727. This giant was born from the merger of two galaxies, an event that started around a billion years ago. At its center lies the closest pair of supermassive black holes ever found, two objects that are destined to coalesce into an even more massive black hole.

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Astrophysicists have laid out a method for how to use pairs of colliding black holes to measure how fast our universe is expanding -- and thus help illuminate how the universe evolved, what it is made out of, and where it's going.

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Using new computational algorithms, scientists have measured a sharp ring of light predicted to originate from photons whipping around the back of a supermassive black hole.

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NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope confirms one supernova remnant as a launch site for some of our galaxy's highest-energy protons.

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Just milliseconds after the universe's Big Bang, chaos reigned. Atomic nuclei fused and broke apart in hot, frenzied motion. Incredibly strong pressure waves built up and squeezed matter so tightly together that black holes formed, which astrophysicists call primordial black holes. Did primordial black holes help or hinder formation of the universe's first stars, eventually born about 100 million years later?

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Using new simulations, astrophysicists discovered that star formation is a self-regulatory process. In other words, stars themselves set their own masses. This helps explain why stars formed in disparate environments still have similar masses.