Tag Archives: nearby

An unexpected deep-sea deposit may be the smoking gun from a nearby star that exploded as a supernova in the relatively recent past. Earlier this year, a team of scientists in Germany discovered a strange spike in beryllium-10 in the seafloor of the Pacific Ocean. This radioactive isotope forms when cosmic rays strike Earth’s atmosphere. From there it falls, sinks …

The latest weather forecast doesn’t come from Dublin, London or New York — it comes from deep space, where a lonely world drifts without a sun and glows with auroras more dazzling than Earth’s northern lights. The world, called SIMP-0136, is about 200 million years old and lies about 20 light-years away in the constellation Pisces. It isn’t quite a …

What can auroras on a rogue planet teach astronomers about planetary formation and evolution? This is what a recent study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the atmospheric composition of a nearby rogue planet, including its atmospheric temperature and auroras. This study has the potential to help astronomers better understand rogue …

A small, cool star 40 light-years away has a planet that just might hold on to an atmosphere. Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to watch that world, TRAPPIST-1e, pass in front of its star four times and extract the planet’s faint atmospheric fingerprint. A new paper reports those observations and what they can – and cannot – …

The friend who witnessed Michael Brown’s death was shot and killed Sunday morning less than a mile from where a police officer killed Brown. The Ferguson Police Department confirmed Dorian Johnson died of injuries sustained during the shooting that occurred around 8:30 a.m. Sunday on the 9600 block of Abaco Court. The location of the shooting is just 15 minutes …

Astronomers have investigated the atmosphere and potential habitability of a famous “Goldilocks zone” planet using NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The planet in question is TRAPPIST-1e, an Earth-sized rocky exoplanet that’s located around 40 light-years away from our planet. TRAPPIST-1e is the fourth planet in orbit around a red dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1. It sits well within the …

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is boosting its maritime force in the waters off Venezuela to combat threats from Latin American drug cartels with the expected arrival of more vessels next week, an action that will undoubtedly fuel more speculation among Venezuelans, their government and its political opposition. The U.S. government has not signaled any planned land incursion from …

A dazzling bolt of radio light from across intergalactic space is the most powerful of its kind seen to date – and its location has been tracked with unprecedented precision. On 16 March 2025, the CHIME radio telescope in Canada recorded a one-off fast radio burst ( FRB) so powerful, astronomers initially weren’t sure about what they were looking at …

“Punctum” may sound like type of punctuation, but to some scientists, it constitutes what may be a brand new type of cosmic object. In a new interview with Gizmodo, Elena Shablovinskaya, a radio astronomer at Chile’s Universidad Diego Portales (UDP) and Germany’s Max Planck Institute who led the team behind the find, waxed prolific about the bright dot she and her …

“Punctum” may sound like type of punctuation, but to some scientists, it constitutes what may be a brand new type of cosmic object. In a new interview with Gizmodo, Elena Shablovinskaya, a radio astronomer at Chile’s Universidad Diego Portales (UDP) and Germany’s Max Planck Institute who led the team behind the find, waxed prolific about the bright dot she and her …