An international team of astronomers has detected the most distant radio galaxy ever observed. By measuring the redshift of its light, the researchers determined that the object is about 12 billion light-years away, which dates it back to when the universe itself was just a kid.
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The MeerKAT radio telescope array is finally up and running in South Africa. To show off what the facility can do, astronomers have pointed all 64 antennas towards the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and snapped one of the clearest shots ever taken of the mysterious region.
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About 3.7 billion years ago, a neutrino was thrown out of a blazar and launched towards Earth. The ghostly particle was detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica and traced back to its point of origin, helping to confirm the most distant neutrino source ever identified.
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The theory of relativity predicts that any two objects in a vacuum will fall at the same rate. Whether or not this applied to massive objects like planets and stars has long been debated, but now astronomers have shown that the phenomenon does hold true, meaning Einstein was right yet again.
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Here on Earth, 80 years of advertising has told us that diamonds are special, but our shiny stones have nothing on the weird and wonderful forms seen out in space. Now, astronomers have found that mysterious microwave signals around stars could be caused by swirling clouds of diamond dust.
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In August 2017, astronomers observed a collision between two neutron stars so powerful it produced gravitational waves, flares in visible light, radio waves, x-rays and a gamma ray burst. Now that things have quietened, astronomers have studied the strange object created in the cosmic collision.
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A new eye has joined the hunt for planets around nearby stars. The instrument, dubbed SPIRou, has been installed at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, where it has achieved first light by snapping the spectrum of the star AD Leonis.
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Elements like oxygen, carbon and nitrogen weren’t very common until the first stars had fired up, burnt out and exploded. Now, astronomers using ALMA have detected the most distant – and hence, earliest – signature of oxygen, in a galaxy 13.28 billion light-years away.
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Astronomers at Australian National University have spotted a black hole so bright that were it in our home galaxy, it would outshine all the stars in the sky. This supermassive monster also happens to be the fastest-growing black hole ever seen, devouring the equivalent of the Sun every two days.
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Described as the world’s largest and most advanced superconducting camera, a new instrument dubbed DARKNESS is designed to filter out the blinding light of stars to see orbiting exoplanets in more detail than ever before.
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