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Science News
16-year-old Cosmic Mystery Solved, Revealing Stellar Missing Link
The Blue Ring Nebula, which perplexed scientists for over a decade, appears to be the youngest known example of two stars merged into one Maunakea, Hawaii – In 2004, scientists with NASA’s space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) spotted an object unlike any they’d seen before in our Milky Way galaxy: a large, faint blob of […]
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Unexplained Brightness from Colossal Explosion
Maunakea, Hawaii – Astronomers have discovered the brightest infrared light from a short gamma-ray burst ever seen, with a bizarre glow that is more luminous than previously thought was possible. Its half-second flash of light, detected in May of this year, came from a violent explosion of gamma rays billons of light-years away that unleashed […]
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Galaxies In The Infant Universe Were Surprisingly Mature
Maunakea, Hawaii – In the first and largest multi-wavelength survey of distant galaxies in the early universe ever conducted, an international team of astronomers has discovered that massive galaxies were already much more mature in the early universe than previously expected. The survey, called ALPINE (the ALMA Large Program to Investigate C+ at Early Times), […]
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Active volcanoes feed Io’s sulfurous atmosphere
Maunakea, Hawaii – Astronomers have made a breakthrough in understanding how volcanic activity directly affects the atmosphere of Jupiter’s moon Io. In a remarkable first, new radio images from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile show plumes of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and sulfur monoxide (SO) gas spewing from Io’s volcanoes and into its […]
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Anemic Star Cluster Breaks Metal-poor Record
Maunakea, Hawaii – In a surprising discovery, astronomers using two Maunakea Observatories – W. M. Keck Observatory and Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) – have found a globular star cluster in the Andromeda Galaxy that contains a record-breaking low amount of metals. The stars in the cluster, called RBC EXT8, have on average 800 times less iron […]
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Unraveling a Spiral Stream of Dusty Embers from a Massive Binary Stellar Forge
Maunakea, Hawaii – Astronomers using three Maunakea Observatories have discovered one of the most prolific dust-making Wolf-Rayet star systems known, remarkably producing an entire Earth mass of dust every year. With nearly two decades of images from the world’s largest observatories – including W. M. Keck Observatory, Subaru Telescope, and Gemini Observatory in Hawaii – […]
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Rare Encounters Between Cosmic Heavyweights
Maunakea Observatories Discover Three Pairs of Merging Supermassive Black Holes Maunakea, Hawaii – A cosmic dance between two merging galaxies, each one containing a supermassive black hole that’s rapidly feeding on so much material it creates a phenomenon known as a quasar, is a rare find. Astronomers have discovered several pairs of such merging galaxies, […]
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100 Cool Worlds Found Near The Sun
Citizen Scientists Help Locate Some Of The Coolest Brown Dwarfs Ever Discovered Maunakea, Hawaii – How complete is our census of the Sun’s closest neighbors? Astronomers and a team of data-sleuthing volunteers participating in Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, a citizen science project, have discovered roughly 100 cool worlds near the Sun — objects more massive […]
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Calcium-Rich Supernova Examined With X-Rays For First Time
Unprecedented Observations Shine Light On A Compact Star’s Final Moments Maunakea, Hawaii – Most of the calcium in the universe, including the very calcium in our teeth and bones, was created in the last gasp of dying stars. Called “calcium-rich supernovae,” these stellar explosions are so rare that astrophysicists have struggled to find and subsequently […]
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Surprisingly Young Galaxy Breaks Low-Oxygen Record
Rare, Extremely Metal-Poor Nearby Galaxy Discovered With Machine Learning Maunakea, Hawaii – Astronomers using two Maunakea Observatories – Subaru Telescope and W. M. Keck Observatory – combined with the power of machine learning, have discovered a nearby galaxy that has broken the record for having the lowest level of oxygen ever seen. The researchers measured […]
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