Study hints at the existence of the closest black holes to Earth in the Hyades star cluster

A paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society hints at the existence of several black holes in the Hyades cluster—the closest open cluster to our solar system—which would make them the closest black holes to Earth ever detected.

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How do you weigh a star? Masses of RR Lyrae stars revealed through their pulsations

RR Lyrae stars are old, pulsating stars that burn helium in their cores for fuel. Their progenitors were similar to our sun, but they are now much larger and brighter than our sun. We know of hundreds of thousands of RR Lyrae stars within the Milky Way, and we can use them to study how our galaxy has evolved since its formation. However, one fundamental measurement has so far eluded astronomers: there has been no reliable way to determine the masses of RR Lyrae stars—until now.

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Have we really found the first samples from beyond the solar system? The evidence is not convincing

Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University in the US, has published a press release claiming that some of the 700 or so spherical metallic fragments (spherules) he recovered from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, just off the coast of Papua New Guinea, are from beyond the solar system.

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New ring galaxy discovered by Indian astronomers

By analyzing the data from the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), astronomers from the Christ University in Bangalore, India, have serendipitously discovered a new ring galaxy, which received designation DES J024008.08-551047.5 and may belong to the rare class of polar ring galaxies. The finding was reported in a paper published August 29 on the pre-print server arXiv.

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Four astronauts return to Earth in SpaceX capsule to wrap up six-month station mission

Four astronauts returned to Earth early Monday after a six-month stay at the International Space Station.

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4.6-billion-year-old meteorite increases our understanding of the early solar system

An analysis of the approximately 4.6-billion-year-old meteorite Erg Chech 002, discovered in 2020 in the Erg Chech region of the Sahara Desert in Algeria, is presented in Nature Communications.

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India's moon rover completes its walk, scientists analyzing data looking for signs of frozen water.

India's moon rover has completed its walk on the lunar surface and been put into sleep mode less than two weeks after its historic landing near the lunar south pole, India's space mission said.

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India launches spacecraft to study the sun after successful landing near the moon's south pole

India launched its first space mission to study the sun on Saturday, less than two weeks after a successful uncrewed landing near the south polar region of the moon.

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Researchers reveal statistical properties of dispersion measure, waiting time on repeating fast radio burst

Repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) are mysterious radio transient sources in the universe that emit a repeating radio pulse lasting for a few milliseconds. Plasma lensing is the cold, non-magnetized, and inhomogeneous plasma cloud in cosmic space, which can refract the radio signal as images with frequency-dependent properties, such as the frequency-dependent dispersion measure (DM).

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Unprecedented gamma-ray burst explained by long-lived jet

Last year, Northwestern University researchers reported new observational evidence that long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) can result from the merger of a neutron star with another compact object (either another neutron star or black hole)—a finding that was previously believed to be impossible.

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