While examining a nearby supernova with NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, an effort to discover how these stellar explosions ignite charged particles called cosmic rays, scientists have uncovered a bigger mystery. The team found that the supernova, named SN 2023ixf, completely lacks the gamma-ray emissions that should be present when cosmic ray particles are accelerated … Read more
When distant stars explode, they emit bursts of energy called gamma-ray bursts that are so bright that telescopes on Earth can detect them. Studying these pulses, which can also come from mergers of some exotic astronomical objects such as black holes and neutron stars, can help astronomers like me understand the history of the universe. … Read more
Scientists have taken an instrument originally designed to study enormous celestial bodies in the cosmos and repurposed it to explore the world on an infinitely smaller scale. With this instrument they managed to explore the heart of the atom. The team wanted to understand the quantum-scale changes that occur in unstable atoms, and realized there … Read more
If solar scientists aren’t already eager to observe the sun as it reaches solar maximum in 2024, a newly discovered gamma-ray puzzle will add to that desire. While examining 14 years of data from NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope, a team of researchers found that during the last solar maximum in 2013 and 2014, the Sun’s … Read more