Tag Archives: Warped

Astronomers have discovered a surprisingly small “dark object” lurking within a distant ring of warped light. The record-breaking find could help shed light on the mysterious identity of dark matter, which would have major implications for the field of cosmology. The hidden object, likely a clump of invisible dark matter, was spotted within B1938+666 — an “Einstein ring” located around …

Fomalhaut has long been the poster child for bright, nearby stars with spectacular debris disks. But even by cosmic standards, its dusty ring has always looked odd.  Now, the sharpest radio images yet from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) show that the disk’s lopsided shape doesn’t just look off-center – it actually changes shape with distance from the star. …

QUICK FACTS What it is: A planet-forming disk around a star Where it is: 525 light-years away, in the constellation Taurus When it was shared: Aug. 29, 2025 This spectacular new image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows a star cocooned within a massive disk of gas and dust. It’s a protoplanetary disk — a ring of dense …

The origin of the differing tilts in the orbits of the planets in our solar system may have been revealed through the discovery of subtle warps spotted in many planet-forming disks around young stars. A major observing program with ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array), called exoALMA, has surveyed 15 planet-forming, or protoplanetary, disks in detail. In particular, astronomers led by …

Thanks to a theory put forward by Albert Einstein over 100 years ago and a happy coincidence, astronomers have discovered radiation being pumped out from the core of a quasar — within which a supermassive black hole lurks. The team, led by Matus Rybak of Leiden University, made the discovery while hunting for cold gas in the galaxy RXJ1131-1231, an …