A team of astronomers led by Jose Dias do Nascimento (Department of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte [DFTE, UFRN], Brazil) has found the farthest known solar twin in the Milky Way Galaxy, CoRoT Sol 1, which has about the same mass and chemical composition as the Sun. Figure [continue reading]
Water is perhaps the most important molecule in our Solar System. Figuring out where it came from and how it was distributed within and among the planets can help scientists understand how planets formed and evolved. New research from a team including Carnegie’s Erik Hauri demonstrates that water from the interiors of the Earth [continue reading]
A team of astronomers has used the new ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) telescope to pinpoint the locations of over 100 of the most fertile star-forming galaxies in the early Universe. ALMA is so powerful that, in just a few hours, it captured as many observations of these galaxies as have been made by [continue reading]
University of Colorado Boulder astronomers targeting one of the brightest quasars glowing in the Universe some 11 billion years ago say “sideline quasars” likely teamed up with it to heat abundant helium gas billions of years ago, preventing small galaxy formation. This is an artist’s impression of a distant quasar. The dust is hiding the view [continue reading]
New theoretical modeling by Carnegie’s Alan Boss provides clues to how the gas giant planets in our Solar System—Jupiter and Saturn—might have formed and evolved. His work was published recently by The Astrophysical Journal. Jupiter, the largest planet — a gas giant — in our Solar System. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/U.S. Geological Survey New stars are [continue reading]
Two X-ray space observatories, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, have teamed up to measure definitively, for the first time, the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our Sun. This artist’s concept illustrates a supermassive black hole with millions to [continue reading]