Quiet Black Holes With a Stellar Companion Raise Questions About How They Form

Gaia has discovered three stellar mass black holes, each with a small stellar companion. For two of these systems the companions orbit closer that we would expect. Just how these systems form is a bit of a mysteries, but there are clues.

Astronomers Hear the Faint Whispers of Cosmic Hydrogen from the Distant Past.

Astronomers have directly detected an extremely faint radio signal from hydrogen gas billions of light years away, demonstrating a powerful new way to map the Universe.

A Pair of White Dwarfs Locked in a Six-Minute Orbit Might One Day Be Observed By Gravitational Waves

Future gravitational wave observatories will be able to see the gravitational waves of close-orbiting binary stars. A newly studied white dwarf system could be one of the first systems we observe.

Snapping the Sun's Grand Magnetic Border at 0.3 AU

Out in the solar system, there is a giant rippling curtain of charged particles that is actually the largest structure in our solar system. Known as the Heliospheric Current Sheet (HCS), it marks the spot where the sun flips its magnetic north and south poles, and grows directly out of giant, glowing loops of plasma on its surface called helmet streamers. However, so far, studies of it have only occurred near Earth, using space-based instruments such as SoHo and Wind. But now, a new paper from Keiichi Ogasawara of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and his team used the joint ESA/NASA mission Solar Orbiter to capture the HCS at only about ⅓ the distance to Earth - before interactions with interstellar space and the solar wind change it. In other words, this paper represents the clearest ever picture of what the solar system’s largest coherent structure is actually made out of.

Could life exist on Venus? Peptides survive harsh acid.

The planet Venus is arguably the most mischievous planetary body in the solar system. This is because like Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, Venus is shrouded in a thick atmosphere that can’t be viewed with optical telescopes and require radar images to see the surface. Unlike Titan, whose atmosphere looks quite dull, Venus’s swirling and awe-inspiring clouds give observers the impression that its surface is covered in wonderous features. However, the truth is far from ideal, as Venus’s surface is a living hell with searing temperatures and crushing pressures. But, unlike its surface and Titan, Venus’s atmosphere provides many more ideal conditions, even Earth-like conditions. But while life would be hard to exist on its surface, could we find life in the atmospheric clouds of Venus?

The DESI Legacy Imaging Survey Releases the Largest 2-D Map of the Universe

The newest DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys map covers three-quarters of the sky and catalogs nearly four billion objects. This publicly-available database contains stars, galaxies, supernovae, gravitational lenses, and much more.

The 20th Data Release (DR 20) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is Here!

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has officially launched its twentieth data release (DR20), featuring updated data from multiple observations projects.