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Astronomy News
The starparty.com news feed on astronomy, cosmology, astrophysics and space exploration
First Images from JWST Released (7/16/2022) - The first full-colour images from the newly commissioned James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were released on 12 July 2022, providing the deepest ever infrared views of distant galaxies, stunning portraits of the Southern Ring Nebula, Stephan’s Quintet of galaxies and the Carina Nebula, as well as spectographic observations of the exoplanet WASP-96 b, revealing the […]
Evidence of New Fundamental Force (4/10/2021) - The ‘Muon g-2’ experiment conducted at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (also known as Fermilab) in the United States has provided strong evidence for the existence of a new fundamental force of nature. We currently know of four fundamental forces, the strong and weak nuclear forces, the electromagnetic force and the force of gravity. This […]
First Image of a Black Hole (4/20/2019) - A global network of radio telescopes known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has produced the first ever image of the silhouette of a black hole. The image shows hot luminous gas surrounding the black hole’s event horizon – the sphere beyond which light cannot escape the black hole’s gravitational influence. The team responsible has […]
Cliffs of Ice Found on Mars (1/12/2018) - Water ice deposits have been found in cliff-like structures known as ‘scarps’ at eight different sites on Mars, using the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It has previously been shown that there is shallow ground ice under roughly a third of the Martian surface, detected with spectrometers and ground-penetrating radar from orbiting spacecraft. […]
Interstellar Object Discovered in Our Own Solar System (1/7/2018) - On 19 October 2017, an astronomer at the Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii, spotted an object passing through our solar system on an unusual hyperbolic trajectory. The strange cigar-like shape of the object lead some to speculate that it could be the product of an extraterrestrial civilization.
Seven Earth-Like Planets Found Orbiting TRAPPIST-1 (2/24/2017) - On 22 February 2017, astronomers announced that the faint Jupiter-sized ultra-cool red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, in the constellation of Aquarius, is host to seven Earth-sized planets, all of which are within the stars’ ‘habitable zone’, where it is possible that liquid water could be present. The exoplanets have not yet been imaged directly but were […]
Moon discovered orbiting dwarf planet Makemake (4/27/2016) - The dwarf planet Makemake (pronounced Mah-kay Mah-kay), in the Kuiper Belt, has been shown by the Hubble Space Telescope to possess a moon.
Neutrino source pinpointed for first time (4/27/2016) - The IceCube neutrino telescope in Antarctica, the Fermi gamma ray telescope in low earth orbit and an array of radio telescopes across the Southern Hemisphere, have been used collaboratively to pinpoint a neutrino source in deep space for the first time.
Gravitational Waves Detected (2/11/2016) - The first ever confirmed detection of gravitational waves has been announced by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) at a press conference held in Washington DC at 10:30 EST on Thurday, 11 February 2016 . LIGO’s detection of ripples in the fabric of spacetime has been heralded as one of the scientific breakthroughs of the century and […]
Hundreds of new galaxies discovered behind the Milky Way (2/10/2016) - A new multibeam receiver on the Parkes radio telescope in Australia has been used to produce a map of 883 nearby galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way, a third of which were previously unknown.
