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Astronomy/Space
Results 1 - 20 of 87.
Astronomy / Space - Environment - 04.10.2024
Astronomers probe a ’steam world’
Led by a team at UdeM's IREx, scientists explore the exoplanet GJ 9827 d'and find a significant amount of water vapor in its atmosphere. A Canadian-led international study has revealed new insights into the atmosphere of GJ 9827 d - an exoplanet orbiting the star GJ 9827 in the constellation Pisces, about 98 light-years from Earth - using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Astronomy / Space - Physics - 19.09.2024
Taking a star’s temperature
UdeM astronomers find a way to measure temperature changes in a star with greater-than-ever precision, a breakthrough that promises to be particularly useful for detecting and studying exoplanets. Étienne Artigau, the UdeM astrophysicist who led the development of an innovative technique that provides precise information on a star's temperature variations.
Astronomy / Space - Life Sciences - 29.08.2024
Microbes in orbit: Understanding spaceflight’s impact on gut health
Scientists have uncovered how space travel profoundly alters the gut microbiome, yielding insights that could shape future space missions. The groundbreaking study, led by a McGill University researcher in collaboration with University College Dublin (UCD), NASA's GeneLab and an international consortium, offers the most detailed profile to date of how space travel affects gut microbes.
Astronomy / Space - Earth Sciences - 19.08.2024
Western researchers help identify origins of Martian meteorites
An international research team has identified the specific origins of most of the Martian meteorites that are now on Earth. They've traced the meteorites to five craters where they were launched off Mars after impact. The craters are located within two volcanic regions on the red planet called Tharsis (the region containing Olympus Mons, the largest shield volcano in the solar system) and Elysium.
Astronomy / Space - Earth Sciences - 08.07.2024
Found with Webb: a potentially habitable world
A team of astronomers from UdeM has made an exciting discovery about the temperate exoplanet LHS 1140 b: it could be a promising "super-Earth" covered in ice or water. When the exoplanet LHS 1140 b was first discovered, astronomers speculated that it might be a mini-Neptune: an essentially gaseous planet, but very small in size compared to Neptune.
Astronomy / Space - Physics - 25.06.2024
UdeM astronomers are helping to build the world’s largest telescope
A Canadian team led by René Doyon will help design and build the ANDES spectrograph, which will search for signs of life outside the solar system. In 2014, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) began construction of the world's largest telescope, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), in Chile's Atacama Desert, 3,000 metres above sea level.
Astronomy / Space - Physics - 21.06.2024
No black holes from light
For the last seven decades, astrophysicists have theorized the existence of "kugelblitze," black holes caused by extremely high concentrations of light. These special black holes, they speculated, might be linked to astronomical phenomena such as dark matter, and have even been suggested as the power source of hypothetical spaceship engines in the far future.
Astronomy / Space - Physics - 19.06.2024
Building the world’s largest telescope
In 2014, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) began construction of the world's largest telescope, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), at an altitude of over 3,000 m in Chile's Atacama Desert. Scheduled to enter service in 2028, this giant telescope promises to mark a new era in ground-based astronomy.
Earth Sciences - Astronomy / Space - 13.06.2024
Meteorite impact leaves rare rocks and evidence of extreme heat at remote lake in Quebec
For more than a decade, Western University planetary geologist Gordon "Oz" Osinski has led expeditions to Kamestastin Lake in Labrador. The environment is a perfect training ground because the properties and rock formations - created by the violent impact (and extreme heat) of an asteroid 36 million years ago - uniquely mimic the surface on the Moon.
Astronomy / Space - 10.06.2024
Landolt space mission: more precise measurements of star brightness
Astronomy professor Jonathan Gagné will be part of the Landolt space mission, solving problems caused by errors in astronomical calibrations. A major scientific breakthrough will be taking place soon thanks to NASA's Landolt space mission. The mission, at a cost of $19.5 million, will make it possible to measure stellar luminosities more accurately.
Astronomy / Space - Chemistry - 14.05.2024
Tour de force: Western Space researchers chart Orion Nebula like never before
Els Peeters, Jan Cami and collaborators among first scientists to use James Webb telescope for research and they targeted star formation Star and planet formation is a messy affair. It starts with the gravitational collapse of a gigantic cloud of gas and dust, which simultaneously produces massive stars, whose intense radiation field creates a harsh environment, as well as more modest stars, like our Sun, surrounded by a planet-forming disk that is rich in organic materials.
Astronomy / Space - Physics - 01.05.2024
A ’cosmic glitch’ in gravity
A group of researchers at the University of Waterloo and the University of British Columbia have discovered a potential "cosmic glitch" in the universe's gravity, explaining its strange behaviour on a cosmic scale. For the last 100 years, physicists have relied upon Albert Einstein's theory of "general relativity" to explain how gravity works throughout the universe.
Astronomy / Space - Physics - 05.04.2024
New gravitational wave signal helps fill the ’mass gap’ between neutron stars and black holes
A collaboration of researchers including UBC scientists have observed gravitational waves from the collision of what is most likely a neutron star and an object likely to be a light black hole, 650 million light-years from Earth. The mass of the black hole is 2.5 to 4.5 times the mass of Earth's sun, meaning it falls in the so-called 'mass gap': heavier than heaviest known and theorized neutron stars but lighter than the lightest black holes in our galaxy.
Astronomy / Space - Physics - 04.04.2024
11 billion years into the past
The first cosmological measurements from a global collaboration bring us one step closer to solving the mystery of Dark Energy Canadian scientists working with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) participated in the DESI collaboration's first-year analysis of an exciting new three-dimensional map of the universe, providing details about our cosmological past that have never been seen before.
Astronomy / Space - Physics - 27.03.2024
Milky Way black hole’s magnetic field mapped for first time
Characteristics of the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy captured in unprecedented detail by international team that includes Waterloo scientists Long-held theories on how black holes like the one at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, evolve were proven right this week thanks to research made possible by Canadian scientists.
Astronomy / Space - Physics - 21.03.2024
’brown dwarfs’ grow old alone
The interstellar objects are usually paired as binary systems, but in a new study Clémence Fontanive shows that, as they get older, few actually keep their companion. Clémence Fontanive , a researcher at Université de Montréal's Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets, used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study some of the coldest and lowest-mass "brown dwarfs" of our solar system.
Astronomy / Space - Physics - 06.03.2024
Discovery tests theory on cooling of white dwarf stars
Open any astronomy textbook to the section on white dwarf stars and you'll likely learn that they are "dead stars" that continuously cool down over time. New research published in Nature is challenging this theory, with the University of Victoria (UVic) and its partners using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite to reveal why a population of white dwarf stars stopped cooling for more than eight billion years.
Astronomy / Space - Physics - 26.02.2024
Metal ’scar’ discovered on cannibal star: Study
Western researcher part of team that found a unique signature of a star ingesting surrounding planets and asteroids When a star like our Sun reaches the end of its life, it can expand to ingest the surrounding planets and asteroids that were born with it. Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) in Chile, researchers, including Western physics and astronomy professor emeritus John Landstreet , have found a unique signature of this process for the first time, a scar imprinted on the surface of a white dwarf star.
Astronomy / Space - Physics - 23.02.2024
Destruction of an Earth oceans’ worth of water per month in Orion Nebula
An international team, including Western astrophysicists Els Peeters and Jan Cami , has shed light on the destruction and re-formation of a large quantity of water in a planet-forming disk located at the heart of the Orion Nebula. This discovery was made possible by an original multidisciplinary approach combining observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and quantum physics calculations.
Astronomy / Space - Earth Sciences - 14.02.2024
Saturn’s largest moon most likely non-habitable
A study led by astrobiologist Catherine Neish for Western University shows the subsurface ocean of Titan - the largest moon of Saturn - is most likely a non-habitable environment, meaning any hope of finding life in the icy world is dead in the water. This discovery means it is far less likely that space scientists and astronauts will ever find life in the outer solar system, home to the four 'giant' planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.