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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

With a diameter approximately twice that of Earth, GJ 9827d could be an example of a planet with a water-rich atmosphere, according to astronomers at UdeM. A Canadian-led team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reports observing the smallest exoplanet to have water vapour detected in its atmosphere.

New research from Western University shows the early lunar crust, which makes up the surface of the Moon, was considerably enriched in water more than 4 billion years ago, counter to previously held understanding. The discovery is outlined in a study published today in the journal Nature Astronomy .

Fleeting blasts of energy from space, known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), are a cosmic enigma. A Canadian-led international team of researchers has published new findings suggesting that supernovae are the predominant contributors to forming sources that eventually produce FRBs. "Fast radio bursts are one of astronomy's greatest mysteries," said lead author Mohit Bhardwaj, a member of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst (CHIME/FRB) collaboration and a McWilliams Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University.

A team of iREx astronomers has unravelled the enigmatic atmosphere of the exoplanet HAT-P-18 b, shedding light on its intriguing blend of gases, clouds, and even the effects of its star's activity.

A team of astronomers including McGill Professor Nicolas Cowan has unravelled the enigmatic atmosphere of the exoplanet HAT-P-18 b, shedding light on its intriguing blend of gases, clouds, and even the effects of its star's activity Exoplanets, planets located beyond our Solar System, captivate both scientists and the public, holding the promise of unveiling diverse planetary systems and potentially habitable worlds.

  Searching for signs of alien life in our own solar system    Scientists have long been captivated by the possibility of discovering evidence for extraterrestrial life in the universe. While many of the world's largest telescopes are pointed toward distant galaxies and star systems, some think there's a strong possibility that life could be detected much closer to home.

We put ChatGPT 4 to the test, asking it to read two scholarly studies produced at the university and summarize them in a pair of newsy articles for UdeM Nouvelles. The results were.. mixed. Credit: Miriam Beauchamp (Marc Antoine Charlebois) and Laurence Perreault-Levasseur (Mila Quebec) How good is ChatGPT at reading and synthesizing science, specifically the highly detailed science published as peer-reviewed studies in scholarly journals? To find out, we put the chatbot to the test, twice.

The OSIRIS-REx mission is NASA's first mission to collect samples from an asteroid - in this case 101955 Bennu - and return to Earth. OSIRIS-REx is an acronym for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security - Regolith Explorer. The sealed capsule landed on Sept. 24 near Salt Lake City, Utah, a feat that was broadcast live by NASA.

ESA's Euclid space mission unveils stunning full-colour images of the cosmos, setting a new standard for astronomical imaging precision By Jordan Flemming University Relations Today, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid space mission reveals five of its first full-color images of the cosmos. For the first time, Euclid has harnessed the power to capture razor-sharp astronomical images across a vast expanse of the sky, delving deep into the distant universe.