Universe

  What’s Lighting Up the Night Sky This August? Here Are the Top 7 Astronomical Events August is here, and with it comes the bittersweet feeling of summer winding down. But before we trade warm nights for cooler ones, the sky has a few spectacular reminders of why this season is worth staying up late for. This month, the sky is unusually busy, showcasing rare planetary alignments, a beloved meteor shower at its peak, and several planetary “close encounters” that promise more than just wishful thinking. Here are the top seven celestial spectacles you won’t want to miss as summer makes its graceful exit. 9 August: Full Moon Summer nights are slowly getting shorter, but August still holds its ground as one of the best months for skywatching. On 9 August, the Full Moon, traditionally known as the Sturgeon Moon, will light up the sky. It rises and bathes the UK’s night in silvery drama from sunset until dawn with peak illumination at  07:55 GMT (08:55 AM in the UK). The name...

 Astronomers baffled by bizarre 'zombie star' that shouldn't exist A newly discovered neutron star is behaving so strangely that it may alter our understanding of the dense remains left behind when stellar objects die A collapsed star around 13,000 light years away is so unusual that the researchers who have discovered it say it shouldn’t exist. It was first detected in January 2024 by the ASKAP radio telescope in Western Australia and is likely to be a kind of pulsar that has never been seen before. When supermassive stars reach the end of their lives and explode in a supernova, the remnants form a super-dense object called a neutron star. Pulsars are neutron stars that spin rapidly, emitting radio waves from their magnetic poles as they rotate. Most pulsars spin at speeds of more than one revolution per second and we receive a pulse at the same frequency, each time a radio beam points towards us. But in recent years, astronomers have begun to find compact objects that e...

  Astronomers discover new evidence of intermediate-mass black holes Left: posterior distribution of the chirp mass of the binary in the source frame as a function of the inferred effective inspi In the world of black holes, there are generally three size categories: stellar-mass black holes (about five to 50 times the mass of the sun), supermassive black holes (millions to billions of times the mass of the sun), and intermediate-mass black holes with masses somewhere in between. While we know that intermediate-mass  black holes  should exist, little is known about their origins or characteristics—they are considered the rare "missing links" in black hole evolution. However, four new studies have shed new light on the mystery. The research was led by a team in the lab of Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Karan Jani, who also serves as the founding director of the Vanderbilt Lunar Labs Initiative. The primary paper, " Properties of 'Lite' Intermediate-...