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Controversial Telescope Starts Construction on Sacred Hawaiian Mountain Next Week

The controversial Thirty Meter Telescope is set break ground on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea on the week of July 15, after about a decade of delays due to local opposition. Opponents, who have been mostly Native Hawaiians, argue that Mauna Kea, the mountain where this new state-of-the-art telescope is set to gaze into space, has already … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

Freaky Star Seems to Dim Randomly, and Astronomers Don’t Know Why

What is going on with this strange, winking star? Typically, if the planet-hunting Kepler telescope saw a regularly dimming star, that would signal the presence of an exoplanet periodically passing between the star and Earth. But researchers identified a star called EPIC 249706694 (HD 139139) that seems to dim at random, and the team hasn’t … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

New Campaign Is Asking Every Country on Earth to Name Distant Worlds

A new campaign headed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) called IAU100 NameExoWorlds will allow each country in the world to name a star and its exoplanet, the IAU announced yesterday. Nearly 100 nations are all signed up and ready to go, with the next step involving national campaigns to select names and provide the … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

How Did This Tiny Little Star Make Such a Big Sparkle?

Scientists spotted a superflare larger than some of the hugest solar storms on record—from what seems to be a tiny, almost Jupiter-sized star. The Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), a sky-surveying telescope in Chile, first detected the flare on August 13, 2017. Not only is it the second-largest observed flare to come from a star … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

First Images from New Night-Sky Camera in California Show Gorgeous View of Andromeda Galaxy 

A new sky survey project has released its first round of incredible data, results, and images, including this amazing new view of our neighboring Andromeda galaxy. One theme that goes all the way back to the earliest days of astronomy is the observation of transients—things that change in the night sky. The Zwicky Transient Facility … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

New Star Map Reveals the Milky Way Is Warped

A new analysis of pulsing stars has revealed the Milky Way’s twisted shape. Scientists have known since the 1950s that the spiral-shaped Milky Way’s disk is warped, bending by thousands of light-years at its outskirts. Now, researchers have created a map of stars called Cepheid variables in order to create a 3D map of our … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

Why Scientists Tried to Measure All of the Starlight That Ever Shone

Astronomers this week announced that they’d attempted to measure all of the starlight in the universe. You might wonder why. Ultimately, they’re trying to tell the universe’s story. “We wanted to know how star formation history proceeded,” Kari Helgason, scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, told Gizmodo. The entire universe is … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

Astronomers Have Stumbled Upon One of the Most Ancient Stars in the Universe

A tiny star located about 1,590 light-years from Earth could be as old as 13.53 billion years, making it one of the most ancient stars ever discovered. The diminutive “ultra metal-poor” star is called 2MASS J18082002–5104378 B—hereafter abbreviated to J1808-5104—and it was discovered by a team of astronomers led by Kevin C. Schlaufman from Johns … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

This ‘Born-Again’ Nebula Appears to Be Inside Out

When some stars get old, they eject gas and dust, forming a cloud of electrically charged material in space called a planetary nebula. These nebulae all tend to have the same layered structure, but a team of scientists recently spotted a kind of planetary nebula that looks to be inside out. The nebula, called HuBi 1, … Continued

Tech News

AC Lung, Space Stairs, 3D Guns and the Quietest Place on Earth: Best Gizmodo Stories of the Week

August 2018 rolled in with a bang, literally, as explosions rocked Caracas, Venezuela on Saturday during a speech by President Nicolas Maduro—and government officials later said bomb-carrying drones were to blame. If the accounts of an attempted assassination using unmanned aerial vehicles is confirmed, the New York Times wrote, it would be the “first such … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

NASA’s Sun Probe Set to Launch Next Week on Its Journey to Hell

Next week, NASA is scheduled to send human technology closer to a star than ever before. What they learn could change our understanding of, well, the whole galaxy. The Parker Solar Probe is a mission set to orbit the Sun at just 3.8 million miles. Compare that to Earth’s average distance of 93 million miles, … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

People Can’t Find the Stars They Paid to Name—and They’re Calling Astronomers for Tech Support

Professional astronomers are busy people. Some are mapping distant galaxies, others are listening for aliens, and more still are searching for habitable planets—which, it seems, we might one day need. But on occasion, they’re also called upon to do something that shouldn’t require a PhD: find the stars that people have “purchased” online. That’s right, … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

Astronomers Have Captured First Direct Evidence of an Exoplanet Being Born

At this point, we’ve spotted several thousand exoplanets—there’s nothing super exciting anymore about finding a distant star with several worlds orbiting it. But today, scientists are announcing that they have seen an exoplanet in the middle of forming. The dust disk of the star PDS 70 was detected by the Very Large Telescope’s SPHERE and … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

Detection of Diamond Dust Around Distant Stars Solves Decades-Long Mystery

For years, astronomers have struggled to understand the source of anomalous microwave emissions coming from various locations across the Milky Way galaxy. A recently concluded survey of the planet-forming disks around young stars suggests these strange transmissions are being produced by something rather extraordinary: dense clouds of microscopic diamonds. The appropriately named “anomalous microwave emissions” … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

NASA’s New Exoplanet Hunter Releases Incredible First Image

On the way to its final orbit around Earth, NASA’s planet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has sailed by the moon and snapped its first picture of space. We’ve said several times that TESS would be able to look at 200,000 stars in the 300 light-years around the Earth—but maybe this new shot will show … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

Hints of the First Stars Seen in 13-Billion-Year-Old Oxygen

Scientists have spotted 13-billion-year-old oxygen in a distant galaxy—a signal of stars forming during the universe’s earliest days. Locating the oldest galaxies and understanding how they contributed to the evolution of our universe is perhaps one off astronomy’s key goals, say the scientists behind the new results in their just-published paper. The international team looked … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

Our Galaxy Was Walloped by a Neighbor in Its Not-So-Distant Past, New Analysis Suggests

Space is a chaotic, ever-changing place. But that’s not limited to exploding stars and colliding black holes. Even our own Milky Way galaxy could have recently received a massive jolt from which it is still recovering. Since the Gaia mission’s massive data drop last week, scientists around the world have been hard at work crunching … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

Incredible New View of the Milky Way Is the Largest Star Map Ever

The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft team has dropped its long-awaited trove of data about 1.7 billion stars. You can see a new visualization of all those stars in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies above, but you really need to zoom in to appreciate just how much stuff there is in the map. Yes, … Continued

Tech News

This Is How Stars Would Look Over NYC If It Weren’t So Freaking Light Polluted

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen the Little Dipper—the 2003 blackout, a family trip to the Grand Canyon, a camping trip, and a stargazing drive through Wisconsin cut short by the cold. I don’t remember ever seeing the faint band of the Milky Way. Growing up in New York’s … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago

Around the same time our ancestors left Africa, a dim red dwarf star came to within 0.8 light-years of our Sun, marking the closest known flyby of a star to our Solar System. New research suggests Scholz’s Star, as it’s known, left traces of this interstellar encounter by perturbing some comets in the outer Oort … Continued