The long-lost twin of the moon may have been spotted trailing behind Mars by astronomers. A 1km-wide asteroid called (101429) 1998 VF31 was first spotted 22 years ago and new analysis reveals it is ‘strikingly similar’ to the moon. Scientists from the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium (AOP) in Northern Ireland used the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) … Read more
Astronomers from the Max Planck institutes has confirmed the existence of an exoplanet in another star system some 63 light years away from Earth – and have shared a picture to prove it. Called b Pictoris c, the planet was captured using the radial velocity method that detects exoplanets, along with the Very Large Telescopes … Read more
Earth is the only planet we know that has sentient life – but astronomers have found two dozen exoplanets that may have better conditions for life than our home world. A team led by Washington State University identified 24 ‘superhabitable’ planets out of more than 4,500 known exoplanets that could be a good candidate for … Read more
Australian astronomers say they’ve found no technological signs of alien life in a study of more than 10 million star systems. Perth-based researchers used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope in the Western Australian outback, in a project dubbed ‘looking for ET’. The MWA searches for powerful radio emissions at low frequencies, similar to FM … Read more
Luke Skywalker calls Tatooine home, a planet with two suns, and astronomers now understand more about how these complex multi-star systems form in reality. A strange young star system 1,200 light years from Earth was studied using powerful telescopes, but unlike Tatooine’s, this budding system has three stars. Researchers at the University of Exeter tracked their … Read more
A distant galaxy that looks ‘surprisingly like our Milky Way’, has been discovered by astronomers, who say it appears like a near-perfect ring of light in space. Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute used the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile to find the galaxy 12 billion light years from Earth. … Read more
A distant galaxy that looks ‘surprisingly like our Milky Way’, has been discovered by astronomers, who say it appears like a near-perfect ring of light in space. Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute used the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile to find the galaxy 12 billion light years from Earth. … Read more
The first ever photo of two planets orbiting a Sun-like star 309-light years from the Earth has been captured by astronomers using a ground-based telescope. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile was used to capture the image of the two giant exoplanets orbiting the very young star. Astronomers say this image is … Read more
Astronomers observe ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ behavior in a double star system 19,000 light-years away that switches between X-ray and radio waves A dense cluster called Terzan 5 sits 19,000 light-years away from Earth Experts re-analyzed an image of the system snapped back in February They found that the double star system flips between X-rays and … Read more
Astronomers capture image of super-rare galaxy 11 billion light-years away from Earth that looks like a ‘cosmic ring of fire’ Star formation has been named R5519 and provides snapshot of early universe Galaxy has a hole in its centre that is two billion times the sun-Earth distance Discovery was announced in the journal Nature Astronomy … Read more