Scientists have devised a new method for mapping the spottiness of distant stars by using observations from NASA missions of orbiting planets crossing their stars’ faces. The model builds on a technique researchers have used for decades to study star spots. By improving astronomers’ understanding of spotty stars, the new model — called StarryStarryProcess — can help discover more about …
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When the James Webb Space Telescope first came online in 2022, it immediately spotted something astronomers had never seen before: “little red dots” peppering the ancient expanse of deep space, originating from around when the universe was just one billion years old. Ever since, we’ve struggled to explain what these faint signals could be. The prevailing theory is that they’re …
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Astronomers have confirmed the earliest, most distant black hole yet – and it’s surprisingly monstrous for its time. Residing in a galaxy called CAPERS-LRD-z9, it was already approximately 300 million times the mass of the Sun just 500 million years after the Big Bang, when the baby Universe was just 3 percent of its current age. Additionally, this discovery sheds …
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The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed many wonders of the early universe, but few discoveries have puzzled astronomers more than some mysterious “little red dots.” These tiny, brilliant galaxies appear scattered across deep space images like cosmic breadcrumbs, challenging everything scientists thought they knew about how galaxies formed in the early universe. These faint, compact objects were completely undetected …
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By all rights, they shouldn’t exist. When NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) first opened its eyes to the distant past, it spotted hundreds of tiny, brilliant objects glowing red in the infant universe — just 600 million years after the Big Bang. These “little red dots,” as astronomers came to call them, gleamed with such surprising brightness and density …
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When the JWST began science observations in July 2022, it flung open a whole new window on the Universe. The JWST looked further back in time than any other telescope, and it revealed several surprises. One of them was the Little Red Dots (LRD); ancient, faint objects that the powerful space telescope detected as far back as only 600 million …
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