Press releases

The coldest and oldest exoplanet ever imaged agrees with models of planet evolution to solar system ages more

First clear evidence of conditions varying between the morning and evening transition zones separating the day and night sides of a tidally locked hot Jupiter more

Newly identified fast-moving stars in the star cluster Omega Centauri provide solid evidence for a central black hole in the cluster. With at least 8200 solar masses, it is the best candidate for a class of black holes astronomers have long believed to exist: intermediate-mass black holes, formed in the early stages of galaxy evolution. The discovery bolsters the case for Omega Centauri as the core region of a galaxy that was swallowed by the Milky Way billions of years ago. Stripped of its outer stars, that galaxy nucleus has remained “frozen in time” since then. The study has been published in the journal Nature. more

Using the space telescope JWST, astronomers have examined one of the most distant known black holes in the universe. Their observations provide a glimpse of the growth of black holes in the early universe, less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Surprisingly, the early black hole in question seems to be “feeding” in much the same manner as its more recent kin. Astronomers have been struggling for a while now to explain how the earliest black holes gained their considerable masses. The new results all but rule out unusually efficient feeding mechanisms at early times as a possible solution. The results have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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JWST discovers a large variety of carbon-rich gases that serve as ingredients for future planets around a very low-mass star more