News by Subject Space & Planetary

NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of Tropical Storm Karen on Sept. 26 and found the strongest thunderstorms west of center.

For the first time, astronomers have witnessed the immediate aftermath of a star being violently ripped apart by a supermassive black hole. The observations were published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal. Benjamin Shappee at the University of Hawai?i Institute for Astronomy (IfA) is part of the team of astronomers led by Carnegie Observatories' Thomas Holoien. Both are founding members of the Ohio State University-based All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN).

Astronomers detected a giant planet orbiting a small star. The planet has much more mass than theoretical models predict. While this surprising discovery was made by a Spanish-German team at an observatory in southern Spain, researchers at the University of Bern studied how the mysterious exoplanet might have formed.

NASA's TESS has for the first time seen the aftermath of a star that was violently ripped apart by a supermassive black hole. Catching such a rare event in action will help astronomers understand these mysterious phenomena. The observation is reported by a team of astronomers led by Carnegie's Thomas Holoien, who is a founding member of the international network of telescopes that made the discovery -- the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae.

For the first time, NASA's planet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) watched a black hole tear apart a star in a cataclysmic phenomenon called a tidal disruption event. Follow-up observations from other instruments have produced the most detailed look yet at the early moments of one of these star-destroying occurrences.

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided a full visible image of a strengthening Hurricane Lorenzo in the eastern North Atlantic Ocean. On Sept. 26, Lorenzo attained status as a major hurricane.

Astronomers studying the outskirts of a distant galaxy have discovered the galaxy sits in a serene ocean of gas. The massive galaxy, which is about four billion light years from Earth, is surrounded by a halo of gas that is much less dense and less magnetised than expected.

Using one cosmic mystery to probe another, astronomers have analyzed the signal from a fast radio burst, an enigmatic blast of cosmic radio waves lasting less than a millisecond, to characterize the diffuse gas in the halo of a massive galaxy.