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In October 2022, an international team of researchers, including Northwestern University astrophysicists, observed the brightest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever recorded, GRB 221009A. In a paper published in April 2024, a team led by CIERA Postdoctoral Fellow Peter Blanchard has confirmed that the phenomenon responsible for the historic burst — dubbed the B.O.A.T. (“brightest of all time”)

Light from 23 distant galaxies, identified with red rectangles in the Hubble Space Telescope image at the top, were combined to capture incredibly faint emission from eight different elements, which are labelled in the JWST spectrum at the bottom. Although scientists regularly find these elements on Earth, astronomers rarely, if ever, observe many of them

Artist conception of early starbursting galaxies. Stars and galaxies are shown in the bright white points of light, while the more diffuse dark matter and gas are shown in purples and reds. When scientists viewed the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) first images of the universe’s earliest galaxies, they were shocked. The young galaxies appeared

A 31.5 solar-mass black hole with an 8.38 solar-mass black hole companion viewed in front of its (computer generated) stellar nursery prior to merging. The distant band of the Milky Way can be seen toward the lower-left of the black hole pair. Light is warped nearby the black holes due to their strong gravity. The

Still image from a Firefly video visualization of data from the the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia satellite. The full demo enables users to explore all 1.46 billion stars in the Gaia DR3 dataset in real time. Firefly is a browser-based interactive particle visualization app created by CIERA researchers Alex Gurvich and Aaron Geller, in

The kilonova and gamma-ray burst is on the right. The blue color represents material squeezed along the poles, while the red colors indicate material ejected by the two inspiralling neutron stars that is now swirling around the merged object. A disk of ejecta emitted after the merger, hidden behind the red and blue ejecta, is shown in

Artist’s interpretation of the calcium-rich supernova 2019ehk. Shown in orange is the calcium-rich material created in the explosion. Purple coloring represents gas shedded by the star right before the explosion, which then produced bright X-ray emission when the material collided with the supernova shockwave. Learn more: Calcium-rich supernova examined with X-rays for first time

A supernova at least twice as bright and energetic, and likely much more massive than any yet recorded has been identified by an international team of astronomers. Continue to the full article at University of Birmingham News. View the Nature Astronomy article, “An extremely energetic supernova from a very massive star in a dense medium”

“Hot Jupiters” are Jupiter-like planets with orbits close to their host star. Their origins are debated, and some young planetary system may even host multiple Hot Jupiters. Here, we investigate a planetary system of two Hot Jupiters orbiting a Sun-like star. The system is born on the edge of instability, and over time, the planets’

In late 2015, LIGO discovered gravitational waves emitted by two black holes (each with a mass of about 30 times that of our Sun) that spiraled together and merged about 1.5 billion years ago. Astrophysicists are now debating which is the most likely mechanism that can bring two black holes like those observed so close

A screenshot from Firefly, an interactive, web-based, and publicly available particle visualization platform created by Aaron Geller and Alex Gurvich. Shown here is a snapshot in time from a simulation of a Milky Way-like galaxy with the stars in blue, the gas in red, and the dark matter in yellow. In the real universe the gas

Most stars are born together in families of hundreds to thousands, known as star clusters. Over time, the pull of gravity from the galaxy can overcome the gravitational bond holding the family of stars together, shredding the star cluster apart. In this image, the lines show the paths of individual stars in a computer model

Gas-rich “proto-planetary” disks surround young, still forming stars, feeding them through accretion of dust and gas. These are the birthplaces of planetary systems. This image shows a simulation of a possible gas disk progenitor for the real exoplanetary system HR8799. Today, HR8799 has four, six-Jupiter-mass planets, 30 million years into their lives, surrounded by a