Nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole. The few that don't have had theirs ejected during a galactic collision. That's because galaxies and their black holes have formed hand in hand. There is still some debate as to whether galaxies formed around the seeds of supermassive black holes or the other way around, but there is plenty of evidence to support the idea that the two evolve together.
Astronomers have found the first direct evidence that a wandering black hole can feed itself by dragging gas along in its wake as it moves through its galaxy. It's the first direct evidence of an accretion channel long predicted in theory but never before observed. The paper describing this discovery was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 11.
Senegalese engineers in hairnets and white gloves are carefully assembling a nanosatellite at a French lab—another step toward fostering their own space industry back home.
A few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the first stars ignited—literally the "let there be light" moment for the universe. Now known to astronomers as Population III, or Pop III, stars, these giants were very different from the stars we know today. They formed from pristine hydrogen and helium, with almost no "metal" (i.e., other elements) holding them back. They were also huge, growing to tens to hundreds of times larger than the sun. And they died young, in many cases collapsing into the universe's earliest black holes.
Until just over a decade ago, ring systems were thought to be exclusive to the giant planets of the solar system, such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. However, in 2013, a small body barely 250 kilometers (155 miles) in diameter, located at nearly 17 times the Earth–sun distance, joined this small group. The object is Chariklo, a small body orbiting between Saturn and Uranus, around which astronomers discovered two dense rings.
New observations of the composition of distant galaxies offer insights into the earliest phases of the universe and confirm decades of scientific understanding of the elements and particles produced by the Big Bang, according to a new study.
Toward the end of their lives, low-mass stars undergo an abrupt dip in brightness, also known as the luminosity bump. While the endpoint of this bump is well understood, its onset has remained elusive. Now, in a paper published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Saskia Hekker, leader of the Theory and Observations of Stars group at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), finds that entropy is the key driver of the bump.
The two NASA astronauts who led the Artemis II moonshot earlier this year are stepping away from spaceflight.
Key figures from Europe's space industry and other international players have converged on Paris to discuss how to advance the continent's ambitions in a global market dominated by the United States.
Love it or hate it, artificial intelligence is likely here to stay. Its ravenous need for computational power has overwhelmed chip manufacturers and power companies alike. While our current AI obsession is likely a bubble ready to burst, we won't simply stop using computers. Since their first invention, computers have continued to grow more powerful, and our civilization has grown ever more dependent on them. Computation defines our civilization. Perhaps computational power is what defines any advanced civilization. If that's the case, then the most advanced civilizations in the universe would push computing to its most powerful and efficient state.
Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists have discovered a new class of objects behaving unlike any they have seen before. Astronomers suggest these newly spotted objects in other galaxies may help solve not one, but two long-standing questions in astrophysics.
An international team led by researchers from the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil has developed an innovative method to identify stars that have consumed the planets around them. The technique detects variations in the abundance of beryllium, a relatively rare chemical element, and could open a new window into studying the evolution of planetary systems.
We've been searching for life on Mars for a long time, but so far we've come up empty. The fundamental problem is a Catch-22 involving two of the key ingredients for life. Life as we know it needs liquid water and reasonable temperatures, both of which are available on Mars, but hardly ever at the same time. But a new paper from lead author Anna Bognar and her team at ELTE Eötvös Loránd University and the Konkoly Observatory describes a way for life to access both requirements at the same time—by hiding away in salt crystals.
Astronomers have taken one of the deepest looks yet at Cloud-9, a candidate "dark galaxy," and found no trace of stars. The paper outlining this discovery was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 21.
Mercury's surface is riddled with wrinkles, evidence of a once-larger planet that has shrunk over time. A new study finds that Mercury may have contracted 10% to 30% more than previously thought—a loss of nearly 12 miles (19 kilometers) of total diameter since the planet formed—due to debris from impact craters obscuring signs of the planet's shrinking.
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