Transient Astronomical Event

SGR 0501+4516 is the likeliest candidate in our Milky Way Galaxy for a magnetar that was not born in a supernova explosion as initially predicted; the object is so strange it might even offer clues to the mechanism behind fast radio bursts.

How much of an influence can one single object in the Universe have? Until recently, we didn't think it was all that much. Sure, individual objects can emit lots of things: photons of all…

Your favorite TV show isn't the only place where guest stars might appear. Keep an eye on the sky for the second half of 2024 and you might be able to...

Scientists looked at how polarization changed direction to learn more about origins.

Neutron stars typically rotate at fast speeds, taking just seconds or even a fraction of a second to fully spin on their axis.

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Telescope will hunt for the universe's first stars — or rather, what's left of them after they've been ripped apart by black holes.

The detection of two celestial interlopers careening through our solar system has scientists eagerly anticipating more.

Webb and Hubble unveil a dazzling and vivid view of a galaxy cluster.

It does not mean that Saturn's rings will physically detach from the planet.

Multiple ground-based telescopes and satellites were employed to detect and observe GRB 230307A, an exceptionally bright and rare gamma-ray burst, which NASA believes originated from a kilonova....

The recent Chandra-JWST discovery of a quasar in the z ~ 10.3 galaxy UHZ1 reveals that accreting supermassive black holes (SMBHs) were already in place ~ 450 million years after the Big Bang (Bogdan et al. 2023). The Chandra X-ray source detected in UHZ1 is a Compton-thick quasar with a bolometric luminosity of $L_{\rm bol} \sim 5\times10^{45}\ \rm{erg\ s^{-1}},$ corresponding to a BH mass of $\sim 4\times 10^7…

Researchers have discovered the most distant active supermassive black hole to date with the James Webb Space Telescope. The galaxy, CEERS 1019, existed just over 570 million years after the big bang, and its black hole is less massive than any other yet identified in the early universe.

A team of astronomers led by researchers at the University of Southampton has uncovered the largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed. The explosion is more than ten t...

A team of astronomers led by the University of Southampton have uncovered the largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed.

A new study sheds light on the bright outbursts of radiation that are created when a star is destroyed by a supermassive black hole. The outbursts do not necessarily form in the close vicinity of the black hole, but are created by tidal shocks that occur when gas from the destroyed star hits itself while circling the black hole.

Now in its fifth year in space, NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) remains a rousing success. TESS's cameras have mapped more than 93% of the entire sky, discovered 329 new worlds and thousands more candidates, and provided new insights into a wide array of cosmic phenomena, from stellar pulsations and exploding stars to supermassive black holes.

Radio burst may come from a neutron star that's too big to live.

A green-hued comet has made its closest approach to Earth, wowing night sky watchers in the Northern Hemisphere who caught a glimpse of the icy celestial object as it passed through our cosmic neighborhood.

In the eROSITA all-sky survey, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) have found an interesting repeating event. In an otherwise quiescent galaxy, an X-ray flare repeats every 220 days, indicating that a star orbiting the central black hole "feeds" the gravity monster on subsequent orbits. Such events could be effective tools to explore the accretion process and the gravity field…

Ready for some easy astronomy? How about the top 12 brightest objects in our solar system? You only need your eyes for 7 of them. Check 'em out here. The post Top 12 brightest objects in our solar system first appeared on EarthSky.