News by Subject Space & Planetary

A stellar flare 10 times more powerful than anything seen on our sun has burst from an ultracool star almost the same size as Jupiter.

Two new studies by UA space scientists, one on high-energy particles and the other on tidal forces, may bring into question the habitability of TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets.

An international team of astronomers has discovered a new way to spot when collisions occur in distant galaxies between two neutron stars -- incredibly dense, city-sized celestial bodies that possess the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe. The team's findings validate predictions first made in 2013 by UNLV astrophysicist Bing Zhang, a member of the research team and one of the study's corresponding authors.

The SDSU-led research has been published in the Astronomical Journal.

Only a few years ago, the astronomy and heliophysics communities were skeptical about whether CubeSats could reliably obtain scientific data. But these breadloaf-size satellites have proven their ability to return useful data. During the APS April Meeting 2019, Christopher S. Moore will describe how the twin Miniature X-ray Solar Spectometer CubeSats measure soft X-rays from the Sun. These were the first solar science-oriented CubeSat missions flown for the NASA Science Mission Directorate.

A team of astronomers used a newly commissioned radio telescope in South Korea to make the first high-resolution observations of the molecular clouds within a star-forming region of the Milky Way. The first good look at the galactic region indicated large molecular clouds about 180 light years across with a mass equal to about 100,000 masses of our sun. A paper describing the observations has been accepted by the Astrophysical Journal.

We gaze up at them, we wish upon them, we even sing about swinging on them. But the one thing we haven't been able to do with a star is figure out how big it is...until now.

A nearby system hosts the first Earth-sized planet discovered by NASA's Transiting Exoplanets Survey Satellite, as well as a warm sub-Neptune-sized world. This milestone sets the path for finding smaller planets around even smaller stars, and those planets may potentially be habitable.

Using the unique capabilities of telescopes specialized on cosmic gamma rays, scientists have measured the smallest apparent size of a star on the night sky to date. The measurements reveal the diameters of a giant star 2,674 light-years away and of a sun-like star at a distance of 700 light-years. The study establishes a new method for astronomers to determine the size of stars, as the international team reports in the journal Nature Astronomy.