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    A nebula’s X-ray glow may come from a destroyed giant planet

    The decades-long mystery of a never-ending explosion of X-rays around the remains of a dead star may have finally been solved. The radiation probably originates from the scorching-hot wreckage left behind by a giant planet’s annihilation.

    This discovery stems from four decades of X-ray observations of the Helix Nebula, located 650 light-years from Earth. The stream of X-ray radiation remained effectively constant over at least 20 years, researchers report in the January Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The best explanation, the scientists say, is that the ruins of a Jupiter-sized world continuously fall onto the nebula’s white dwarf star, getting frazzled and glowing in X-rays. More

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    The Milky Way’s black hole is constantly bubbling

    The black hole at the Milky Way’s heart neither slumbers nor sleeps. Instead, the ring of plasma surrounding it flickers constantly, punctuated by superbright flares, observations show.

    Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe Sgr A* and its disk for hours at a time over the course of a year, from April 2023 through April 2024. These were the longest continuous observations yet of our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole.

    The telescope revealed a “constant bubbling” in the disk’s light that changed every few seconds or minutes, says astrophysicist Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. A few times a day, and seemingly at random, the disk would emit a blindingly bright flare, Yusef-Zadeh and colleagues report in the Feb. 20 Astrophysical Journal Letters. More

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    Citizen scientists make cosmic discoveries with a global telescope network

    In January in Monterrey, Mexico, Iván Venzor was one of only a dozen people in the world to glimpse a potential Jupiter-sized planet crossing in front of a distant star.

    It happened too fast to see by eye — just a seconds-long flicker of light — but Venzor’s backyard telescope recorded the data, allowing him to verify the event with researchers. “I’m having dinner with my family, and I’m trying to discover a new kind of planet from a few meters outside,” says Venzor, a hobby astronomer. “It’s effortless.” More

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    The universe’s first supernovas probably produced water

    The first generation of stars in the universe could have produced significant amounts of water upon their deaths, just 100 million to 200 million years after the Big Bang.

    Signatures of water have previously been observed some 780 million years after the Big Bang. But now, computer simulations suggest that this essential condition for life existed far earlier than astronomers thought, researchers report March 3 in Nature Astronomy.

    “The surprise was that the ingredients for life were all in place in dense cloud cores [leftover after stellar deaths] so early after the Big Bang,” says astrophysicist Daniel Whalen of the University of Portsmouth in England. More

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    Some of Earth’s meteors are probably coming all the way from a neighboring star system

    Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the sun, is probably shedding comets and asteroids into our solar system — and even producing a few meteors in our sky.

    Located just 4.3 light-years from Earth, Alpha Centauri consists of three stars that revolve around one another. If Alpha Centauri has an Oort cloud of distant comets as the sun does, about a million of these objects larger than a football field are now in our solar system, astronomers Cole Gregg and Paul Wiegert of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, estimate in work submitted February 5 to arXiv.org. More

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    A fast radio burst from a dead galaxy puzzles astronomers

    A staccato blast of electromagnetic energy has been tracked to an old, dead galaxy for the first time. The discovery supports the idea that there are more ways to produce such flares, called fast radio bursts, than originally thought.

    Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are millisecond-long eruptions of intense radio waves. Astronomers have observed thousands of these blasts, but only about 100 have been traced back to their origins, says astronomer Tarraneh Eftekhari of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Almost all of them came from lively neighborhoods full of young stars. More

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    A cosmic ‘Platypus’ might link two astronomical mysteries

    NATIONAL HARBOR, MD. — A bright blip in a distant galaxy may link two mysterious categories of cosmic flares. The event, which astronomers playfully call the Platypus, could also offer a new way to understand the origins of supermassive black holes that reside at the centers of most galaxies.

    The brilliant burst, spotted in a dwarf galaxy about 6.5 billion light-years from Earth, has many of the hallmarks of a tidal disruption event, the final flash of a star being ripped apart by a black hole. But it also resembles another type of flash, dubbed an LFBOT, which astronomers think might be a class of exploding star. More

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    Galactic chaos at cosmic noon may have stunted Milky Way planet formation

    The Milky Way keeps its planets close to its chest. Stars in a thin, flat disk bisecting the galaxy have more planets on average than stars in a thicker, enveloping disk — and astronomers now think they know why.

    Stars that currently live in the galaxy’s thick disk were born during a time of galactic chaos, says MIT astrophysicist Tim Hallatt. The stars’ violent upbringing hindered their ability to grow and retain planets, he and astrophysicist Eve Lee, formerly of McGill University in Montreal, report January 22 in the Astrophysical Journal. More