An international team – led by Dutch astronomers (SRON, NOVA and ASTRON) – has made a tantalizing discovery about the way pulsars emit radiation. The emission of X-rays and radio waves by these pulsating neutron stars is able to change dramatically in seconds, simultaneously, in a way that cannot be explained with current theory. [continue reading]
A continuous stream of charged particles is erupting from the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. This, conclude astronomers on 3 January in Nature, is a by-product of the birth of new stars. The outflow would also seem to play a part in the Milky Way’s magnetic field. One of the authors is astronomer Marijke [continue reading]
With a well-deserved reputation as monstrous destructive machines, black holes owe their power to huge quantities of mass that warp space and time until the gravitational force they command sucks in everything – even light. No surprise that astrophysicists have long considered gravity the dominant player in shaping the accretion disks of dust and [continue reading]
A meteorite found in Antarctica holds evidence of a once-active dynamo on Vesta. About 4.6 billion years ago, the Solar System was little more than a tenuous disk of gas and dust. In the span of merely 10 million years, this soup evolved to form today’s massive, complex planets. In the intervening period, however, [continue reading]
A group of astronomers led by Gregg Wade of the Royal Military College of Canada have used the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory and the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea to measure the most magnetic massive star yet. Their work is published in yesterday’s [continue reading]
The universe is comprised of a large amount of invisible matter, dark matter. It fills the space between the galaxies and between the stars in the galaxies. Since the prediction of the existence of dark matter more than 70 years ago, all sorts of researchers – astronomers, cosmologists and particle physicists have been looking [continue reading]