lightyears | Common News Update

Apr72022 by adminNo Comments

Astronomers spot farthest galaxy ever, 13.5B light-years from Earth

Science

April 7 (UPI) -- A global team of astronomers has found the most distant space object ever, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. It's a distant galaxy called HD1, some 13.5 billion light years away from Earth, with researchers offering two ideas of what, exactly, the galaxy is. The first paper, published this week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters, is that HD1 could be creating stars at an astounding rate and could even be home to what's known as Population III stars. Population III stars are the universe's very first stars, which researchers say have never been seen until now. The second idea proposed by the team, in another paper published this week in the Astronomical Journal, is that HD1 could hold a supermassive black hole roug...

Three exocomets found around star located 63 light-years away

Science

May 22 (UPI) -- Astronomers have discovered a trio of exocomets circling Beta Pictoris, a star located 63 light-years from Earth. The discovery was made possible by NASA's newest planet-hunter, TESS. Though the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite was designed to locate exoplanets, its instrumentation provides spectral data precise enough to pick out the transits of faraway comets. While studying the Beta Pictoris light curve observed by TESS, scientists recognized the signatures of three comets. "The data showed a significant decrease in the intensity of the light of the observed star," Sebastian Zieba and Konstanze Zwintz, researchers at the Institute of Astro and Particle Physics at the University of Innsbruck, explained in a news release. "These variations due to darkening by an obj...

Astronomers spot superluminous supernova 10 billion light-years away

Science

July 21 (UPI) -- Researchers have identified a superluminous supernova located 10 billion light-years from Earth. It is one of the brightest and most distant star deaths ever recorded.Because the intense radiation produced by the supernova has been traveling for 10 billion years, it offers astronomers a glimpse of the universe's past -- a snapshot of the cosmos as it was just 3.5 billion years after the Big Bang, a time period known as "cosmic high noon."During cosmic high noon, the universe's young galaxies began churning out stars at a prodigious rate.Superluminous supernovae, sometimes called hypernovae or SLSNs, are much rarer than other types of supernovae. They're also 10 to 100 times brighter. Astronomers have struggled to determine what exactly makes the massive star death differen...