A newly discovered planetary system, informally known as 2M1510, is among the strangest ever found. An apparent planet traces out an orbit that carries it far over the poles of two brown dwarfs. This pair of mysterious objects – too massive to be planets, not massive enough to be stars – also orbit each other. … Read more
Gas and dust ejected by a dying star at the heart of NGC 1514 came into complete focus thanks to mid-infrared data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Its rings, which are only detected in infrared light, now look like “fuzzy” clumps arranged in tangled patterns, and a network of clearer holes close to the … Read more
Every shell is racing away from the stars at more than 1,600 miles per second (2,600 kilometers per second), almost 1% the speed of light. “We are used to thinking about events in space taking place slowly, over millions or billions of years,” added Jennifer Hoffman, a co-author and a professor at the University of … Read more
Watch how the three stars in the system called TIC 290061484 eclipse each other over about 75 days. The line at the bottom is the plot of the system’s brightness over time, as seen by TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite). The inset shows the system from above.NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Professional and amateur astronomers … Read more
This visualization shows 294 gamma-ray pulsars, first plotted on an image of the entire starry sky as seen from Earth and then transitioning to a view from above our galaxy. The symbols show different types of pulsars. Young pulsars blink in real time except for the Crab, which pulses slower than in real time because … Read more