Ken Croswell

4 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Ken Croswell |Liz Kruesi

For the first time, astronomers have confirmed the existence of a lone black hole — one with no star orbiting it. It’s “the only one so far,” says Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. In 2022, Sahu and his colleagues discovered the dark object coursing through the constellation Sagittarius. A second team disputed the claim, saying the body might instead be a neutron star.

2 months ago | sciencenews.org | Ken Croswell

Uranus emits more energy than it gets from the sun, two new studies report — a discovery that contradicts findings from the venerable Voyager spacecraft. When Voyager 2 sped past Uranus on January 24, 1986, the spacecraft detected no significant excess heat from the planet, making it seemingly unique among the sun’s giant worlds.

2 months ago | sciencenews.org | Ken Croswell

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.

Nov 1, 2024 | sciencenews.org | Ken Croswell

The first-ever sighting of starlight from a galaxy hosting one of the most distant quasars known has revealed an astronomical oddity. Quasars — blazingly bright galactic cores — owe their brilliance to the intense heat that results as gas whirls around a big black hole. The black hole powering a quasar 13 billion light-years from Earth is half as massive as all the stars around it — a record high ratio for a quasar host galaxy, astronomers report in a paper submitted October 14 to arXiv.org.

Oct 11, 2024 | sciencenews.org | Ken Croswell

Astronomers have finally found an asteroid keeping pace with Saturn in its orbit around the sun. Such objects, called Trojan asteroids, are already known for the other three giant planets. “Saturn was sort of the odd man out, if I can call it that, because even though it’s the second most massive planet in the solar system, it didn’t have any Trojans,” says Paul Wiegert, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada.