Astronomers have for the first time spotted long-sought signals of light from the earliest stars ever to form in the Universe — around 180 million years after the Big Bang. The signal is a fingerprint left on background radiation by hydrogen that absorbed some of this primordial light. The evidence hints that the gas that made up the early...
Well, nuts. Last week, just five days ago, I wrote that astronomers had found evidence of rings of dust around Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our own, and furthermore that there might be a ringed planet there. As I was literally drafting up that article, a different team of astronomers — using the very same data — were putting the final...
Nestled in the Ophiuchus star-forming region, 410 light-years from the Sun, a protoplanetary disk is slowly taking shape. Dust emission from AS 209 reveals a curious pattern of rings and gaps surrounding the young star. Protoplanetary disks are composed of gas and dust particles, forming after the collapse of a molecular cloud. As matter from the...
Space weather emitted by Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our sun, may make that system rather inhospitable to life after all. Using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a team of astronomers discovered that a powerful stellar flare erupted from Proxima Centauri last March. This finding, published in the...