Free Republic

Betelgeuse is our next door supergiant. It is almost 1000 times bigger than our sun and possibly it has already exploded in a giant supernova. How would we notice, how fast would the process be and what could we expect to see from Earth? Something happened in 2019 Betelgeuse is currently in the final stages of its short life. So when the red supergiant abruptly darkened in late 2019, the behavior led many to speculate that it might be about to explode. The loss of brightness was far greater than anything previously recorded. Analyzing data from Hubble Space Telescope and...

Although we usually have a pretty good handle on all the different kinds of blips and blobs detected by our telescopes, it would be unwise to assume we've seen everything there is to see out there in the big, wide Universe. Case in point: a new kind of signal spotted by radio telescopes, which has astronomers scratching their heads. Four of these strange objects have been detected. All of them are circular in shape, and three are particularly bright around the edges - like a ring, or a bubble that is more opaque around the edges. An international team of...

There's something unusual lurking out in the depths of space: Astronomers have discovered four faint objects that at radio wavelengths are highly circular and brighter along their edges. And they're unlike any class of astronomical object ever seen before. The objects, which look like distant ring-shaped islands, have been dubbed odd radio circles, or ORCs, for their shape and overall peculiarity. Astronomers don't yet know exactly how far away these ORCs are, but they could be linked to distant galaxies. All objects were found away from the Milky Way's galactic plane and are around 1 arcminute across (for comparison, the...

Scientists in the Netherlands unveiled the largest radiotelescope in the world on Saturday, saying it was capable of detecting faint signals from almost as far back as the Big Bang. The LOFAR (LOw Frequency ARray) consists of 25,000 small antennas measuring between 50 centimetres and two metres across, instead of a traditional large dish, said Femke Boekhorst of the Netherlands Radioastronomy Institute. It is based near the northeastern Dutch town of Assen, but the antennas are spread out across the rest of the Netherlands and also in Germany, Sweden, France and Britain. "Today we have launched the biggest radiotelescope in...

BOSTON --A new telescope at an observatory outside Boston will become a key tool in the search for extraterrestrials as scientists try to detect light signals from distant civilizations. An optical telescope dedicated Tuesday at the Oak Ridge Observatory, about 35 miles west of Boston, is the first to be used exclusively for a project called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

ASSOCIATED PRESS CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Astronomers using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia have discovered a superbubble, the fastest-spinning pulsar ever observed and a magnetic field that resembles a Slinky. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory announced the discoveries last week during an American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. The observatory is located in Pocahontas County. The superbubble of hydrogen gas rises 10,000 light years above the Milky Way's plane. Astronomer Jay Lockman said it is not unusual for hydrogen gas to be driven outward from the Milky Way's plane. But he said whatever drove the...

Astronomers are reporting today that they have moved a notch closer to seeing the unseeable. Using a worldwide array of radio telescopes to obtain the most detailed look yet at the center of the Milky Way, they said they had determined that the diameter of a mysterious fountain of energy there was less than half that of Earth's orbit about the Sun. The result strengthens the case that the energy is generated by a black hole that is gobbling stars and gas, they said. It also leaves astronomers on the verge of seeing the black hole itself as a small...

Of the many "maybe’s" that SETI has turned up in its four-decade history, none is better known than the one that was discovered in August, 1977, in Columbus, Ohio. The famous Wow signal was found as part of a long-running sky survey conducted with Ohio State University’s "Big Ear" radio telescope. The Wow signal’s unusual nomenclature connotes both the surprise of the discovery and its sox-knocking strength (60 Janskys in a 10 KHz channel, which is more than 50 thousand times more incoming energy than the minimum signal that would register as a hit for today’s Project Phoenix.) But is...