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A new analysis of Hubble data has clinched it: There’s too much light in the space around the Solar System.

Not much extra light, to be sure. Just a subtle, ghostly glow, a faint excess that can’t be accounted for in a census of all the light-emitting objects.

All the stars and galaxies surrounding the Solar System – and zodiacal light, aka dust on the Solar System’s plane – none of these can explain what astronomers are now calling “ghost light”.

Dust storms, long distances and freezing temperatures make living on Mars magnificently challenging. How will we do it?

And the galaxy from which the GRB came from is also strange. It is young and still forming stars – the opposite of the only other known nearby galaxy that has played host to such an event.

“This event looks unlike anything else we have seen before from a long gamma-ray burst,” said Jillian Rastinejad, from Northwestern University, who led the study. “Its gamma rays resemble those of bursts produced by the collapse of massive stars.

Given that all other confirmed neutron star mergers we have observed have been accompanied by bursts lasting less than two seconds, we had every reason to expect this 50-second GRB was created by the collapse of a massive star. This event represents an exciting paradigm shift for gamma-ray burst astronomy.

Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, with the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research via Chris Adami, Paul Davies, AIP Advances, EurekaAlert and University of Portsmouth

“Information,” wrote Arizona State University astrophysicist Paul Davies in an email to The Daily Galaxy, “is a concept that is both abstract and mathematical. It lies at the foundation of both biology and physics.”

Continue reading “Is Information the Fifth State of Matter in the Universe?” »

Today’s stories include Why a Puzzling New Image Of Jupiter Could Help Us Find Life Beyond Earth to Scientists Test Einstein’s Relativity On A Cosmological Scale…

Imagine walking into a room at night, turning out all the lights and closing the shades. Yet an eerie glow comes from the walls, ceiling, and floor. The faint light is barely enough to see your hands before your face, but it persists.

Sounds like a scene out of “Ghost Hunters?” No, for astronomers this is the real deal. But looking for something that’s close to nothing is not easy. Astronomers searched through 200,000 archival images from Hubble Space Telescope and made tens of thousands of measurements on these images to look for any residual background glow in the sky.

Like turning out the lights in a room, they subtracted the light from stars, galaxies, planets and the zodiacal light. Surprisingly, a ghostly, feeble glow was left over. It’s equivalent to the steady light of ten fireflies spread across the entire sky.

Planet 55 Cnc e, also known as “Janssen”, orbits so close to its sun that a year is shorter than an Earth day.

Scientists shed new light on planet 55 Cnc e, known by some as the “hell planet”, revealing how it became so fiery.

That wasn’t always the case, though. New, exact measurements of a planet roughly 40 light-years away from Earth allowed scientists to gain further insight into the way planets can turn into fiery hellscapes over many millennia, as per a press statement.

Continue reading “Ultra-precise readings shed new light on a ‘hell planet’ with an 18-hour year” »

And it’s all thanks to the death of an Earth-sized star as well as a few ‘innocent bystanders.’

The stunning Southern Ring Nebula, NGC 3,132, was created when a star expelled most of its gas 2,500 years ago. It was selected as one of the first five image packages from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The research opens the door for future JWST nebula investigations.

Continue reading “Astronomers reconstruct the chaotic birth of a 2500-year-old nebula” »

Until now, it was thought they came from massive star collapses.

Astrophysicists around the world may be shocked to learn that long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) do not solely come from the collapse of massive stars. A new study by astrophysicists at Northwestern University upends the long-standing belief, uncovering new evidence that at least some long GRBs can result from neutron star mergers, which were previously believed to produce only short GRBs, the university’s publication reported.

It all began in December 2021 when the team detected a 50-second-long GRB (any GRB longer than 2 seconds is considered ‘long’).

Continue reading “New information about long gamma-rays shatters astrophysicists’ theory” »