A nuclear reaction experiment provides a glimpse at what is going on when neutron stars consume nearby companion stars. Neutron stars are among the densest objects in the universe, reaching several times the mass of our Sun, but little more than 20 kilometres in diameter. One teaspoon of a neutron star’s material would weigh as much as a mountain. Their immense gravitational pull will suck in material from other cosmic objects that venture too close. Read more: Plasma accretion disk around black holes recreated in the lab This process can strip hydrogen and helium from a nearby star, which th ..read more

Data from the CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope, in Western Australia, has raised questions on one of the few things astronomers thought we knew about the mysterious cosmic objects known as “fast radio bursts” (FRBs). Researchers led by Dr Marcin Glowacki from WA’s Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) detected a new FRB in a nearby galaxy that has a very important difference in its characteristics compared to other FRBs. Read more: First fast radio burst with a reversible magnetic field discovered Fast radio bursts are characterised by intense, t ..read more

Unlocking the secrets of black holes is one step closer with researchers generating a rotating ring of plasma in the lab, which will enable more realistic studies of plasma accretion disks. Accretion discs are the hot, thin rotating discs formed by matter slowly spiralling towards a black hole. A team at Imperial College London used their Mega Ampere Generator for Plasma Implosion Experiments (MAGPIE) machine to spin plasma in a more accurate representation of accretion disks. Details of the experiment are published in the journal Physical Review Letters and are also being widely published by ..read more

A phenomenon never before seen has just been observed around a fast radio burst by an international team of researchers. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are among the most mysterious objects in our universe. They are known only from the brief, intense flashes of radio frequency radiation that they shoot across the cosmos. Observations of a repeating FRB, called 20190520B, have revealed that the dense plasma surrounding the radio source is highly magnetised and  very turbulent. Over the course of 17 months of observations, the direction of the magnetic field in the plasma changed twice – somethi ..read more

New images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) show Fomalhaut, a star approximately 25 light-years from Earth, has an asteroid belt that may be gravitationally shepherded by unseen planets. Read more: May the fourth be with you: 4 exoplanets like Star Wars worlds Fomalhaut is roughly 440 million years old making it a relatively young star (our Sun is about five billion years old). This means the system could still be in its planet-forming phase. This 2017 image from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) shows Fomalhaut (centre) encircled by its outer ring of dusty deb ..read more

Twenty thousand kilometres above our heads, 31 satellites are whizzing past each other so that we can understand exactly where we are on the planet. This group of satellites is called GPS, or Global Positioning System. But have you ever wondered how these satellites actually work? Or if they could suddenly stop working and you’d have to pull out the old street directory? Let’s dive into everything you ever wanted to know about the science of GPS. How does GPS work? Say your watch wants to know where it is when you’re out for a run – it’ll listen out for radio signals from the GPS, and once it ..read more

Where do quasars – the brightest, most powerful objects in the universe – come from? British researchers have discovered that they are ignited by the collision of galaxies. Quasars, or “quasi-stellar astronomical objects”, were first discovered in 1962. Since then, astrophysicists have wondered what could power these objects that somehow manage to pack the brightness of a trillion suns into a volume the size of our solar system. Read more: James Webb finds planet-forming ingredients in most common star type Researchers from the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire used deep imaging obs ..read more

New research using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has analysed hundreds of low-mass stars and found planet-forming dust surrounding them. “Low-mass stars are the most numerous stellar objects in the Universe,” the international team of researchers write in their new paper. “Before the JWST, we had limited knowledge of how planetary systems around low-mass stars could form at subsolar metallicities.” For scientists, metallicity is not just metals, but the abundance of any element bigger than hydrogen or helium – these are the elements which help form space dust. This dust even ..read more

Gravitationally lensed “Einstein rings” show the tell-tale signs of wave-like dark matter according to research from the University of Hong Kong (UHK). Dark matter is the invisible substance that physicists tell us we can’t see but makes up five-sixths of the stuff in our universe. It is one of the Holy Grails of modern physics to directly measure dark matter, which we only know about indirectly through its gravitational effects throughout the universe. Actually, our observations of the universe wouldn’t make sense without dark matter. But what this enigmatic stuff really is has puzzled physi ..read more

Two brilliant galaxies in the process of merging have been captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), showing a dazzling spectre of infrared light. The two galaxies – known collectively as Arp 220 – are 250 million light years away from Earth and are in the constellation of Serpens. Towards the centre of the image you can see a bright light, this is two galactic cores which are each inside a rotating ring. These star-forming rings are what cause the brightness, as star birth is an energetic process. We know that Arp 220 is brightest in infrared radiation, which is one of James Webb Sp ..read more