What was recently discovered by astronomers

The observations reveal a wide range of peculiar shapes, from spherical to dog-bone, and are Now an international team of scientists has Two recent articles use data from meteorites derived from Vesta to resolve the Monday, October 25, Load more stories. Print Email Share. Living Well. View all the latest top news in the environmental sciences, or browse the topics below:. A neutron star is the collapsed core of what had once been a massive star.

The transit lasted about three hours, during which the X-ray emission decreased to zero. Based on this and other information, the astronomers estimate that the candidate planet would be around the size of Saturn, and orbit the neutron star or black hole at about twice the distance Saturn lies from the Sun. Dr Di Stefano said the techniques that have been so successful for finding exoplanets in the Milky Way break down when observing other galaxies.

This is partly because the great distances involved reduce the amount of light which reaches the telescope and also mean that many objects are crowded into a small space as viewed from Earth , making it difficult to resolve individual stars. With X-rays, she said, "there may be only several dozen sources spread out over the entire galaxy, so we can resolve them. In addition, a subset of these are so bright in X-rays that we can measure their light curves.

The researchers freely admit that more data is needed to verify their interpretation. One challenge is that the planet candidate's large orbit means it would not cross in front of its binary partner again for about 70 years, quashing any attempts to make a follow-up observation in the near-term.

One other possible explanation that the astronomers considered is that the dimming has been caused by a cloud of gas and dust passing in front of the X-ray source. However, they think this is unlikely, because the characteristics of the event do not match up with the properties of a gas cloud. Dr Di Stefano said that the new generation of optical and infrared telescopes would not be able to compensate for the problems of crowding and dimness, so observations at X-ray wavelengths would likely remain the primary method for detecting planets in other galaxies.

It was made using data from the European Space Agency Gaia satellite. The Blue Ring Nebula is thought to be a never-before-seen phase that occurs after the merger of two stars.

Debris flowing out from the merger was sliced by a disk around one of the stars, creating two cones of material glowing in ultraviolet light.

The red supergiant star Betelgeuse, in the constellation of Orion, experienced unprecedented dimming late in This is an infrared image of Apep, a Wolf-Rayet star binary system located 8, light-years from Earth. An artist's illustration, left, helps visualize the details of an unusual star system, GW Orionis, in the Orion constellation.

The system's circumstellar disk is broken, resulting in misaligned rings around its three stars. This is a simulation of two spiral black holes that merge and emit gravitational waves. This artist's illustration shows the unexpected dimming of the star Betelgeuse. This extremely distant galaxy, which looks similar to our own Milky Way, appears like a ring of light.

This artist's interpretation shows the calcium-rich supernova ehk. The orange represents the calcium-rich material created in the explosion. Purple reveals gas shed by the star right before the explosion. The blue dot at the center of this image marks the approximate location of a supernova event which occurred million light-years from Earth, where a white dwarf exploded and created an ultraviolet flash. It was located close to tail of the Draco constellation.

This radar image captured by NASA's Magellan mission to Venus in shows a corona, a large circular structure miles in diameter, named Aine Corona. When a star's mass is ejected during a supernova, it expands quickly. Eventually, it will slow and form a hot bubble of glowing gas. A white dwarf will emerge from this gas bubble and move across the galaxy. The afterglow of short gamma ray burst that was detected 10 billion light-years away is shown here in a circle. This image was taken by the Gemini-North telescope.

Due to the expansion of the universe, the galaxy appears to be moving away from the Milky Way at an accelerate rate. This artist's concept illustration shows what the luminous blue variable star in the Kinman Dwarf galaxy may have looked like before it mysteriously disappeared.

This is an artist's illustration of a supermassive black hole and its surrounding disk of gas. Inside this disk are two smaller black holes orbiting one another. Researchers identified a flare of light suspected to have come from one such binary pair soon after they merged into a larger black hole. This image, taken from a video, shows what happens as two objects of different masses merge together and create gravitational waves.

This is an artist's impression showing the detection of a repeating fast radio burst seen in blue, which is in orbit with an astrophysical object seen in pink.

Fast radio bursts, which make a splash by leaving their host galaxy in a bright burst of radio waves, helped detect "missing matter" in the universe. A new type of explosion was found in a tiny galaxy million light-years away from Earth. This type of explosion is referred to as a fast blue optical transient. Astronomers have discovered a rare type of galaxy described as a "cosmic ring of fire.

This is an artist's impression of the Wolfe Disk, a massive rotating disk galaxy in the early universe. A bright yellow "twist" near the center of this image shows where a planet may be forming around the AB Aurigae star. This artist's illustration shows the orbits of two stars and an invisible black hole 1, light-years from Earth. This system includes one star small orbit seen in blue orbiting a newly discovered black hole orbit in red , as well as a third star in a wider orbit also in blue.

This illustration shows a star's core, known as a white dwarf, pulled into orbit around a black hole. During each orbit, the black hole rips off more material from the star and pulls it into a glowing disk of material around the black hole.

Before its encounter with the black hole, the star was a red giant in the last stages of stellar evolution. This artist's illustration shows the collision of two mile-wide icy, dusty bodies orbiting the bright star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away.

The observation of the aftermath of this collision was once thought to be an exoplanet. New observations detected carbon monixide in the cometary tail as the sun heated the comet.