The sun's violent death could look like this A white dwarf and an unusual exoplanet hint that'stellar death is not the end.' More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . The sun still has a long life ahead of it, say five billion years or so.

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Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Two years ago, a team of astronomers requested help from citizen scientists around the world for the Kilonova Seekers Project. Launched in July 2023, the endeavor tasks volunteers with parsing through all-sky survey images captured daily by telescopes on opposite sides of the planet known as the Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO). Within six months, Kilonova Seekers' over 2,000 volunteers contributed more than 600,000 classifications to researchers, resulting in a total of 20 new discoveries. Now, astronomers have announced the project's first major published find in Astronomy & Astrophysics: a brilliant exploding star observed in near real-time.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Nothing is permanent--not even the universe itself. At least, that's what current models of physics tell us about the nature of existence. Luckily for humanity, most astrophysicists' estimates don't have the universe's grand finale scheduled for around 10¹¹⁰⁰ years (that's a 1 followed by 1,100 zeros). However, based on new calculations that include the peculiar nature of certain black hole particles, the universe's curtains may fall much sooner than expected--cosmically speaking.

Over the past several decades, conventional spectral analysis techniques of polluted white dwarfs have become powerful tools to learn about the geology and chemistry of extrasolar bodies. Despite their proven capabilities and extensive legacy of scientific discoveries, these techniques are however still limited by their manual, time-intensive, and iterative nature. As a result, they are susceptible to human errors and are difficult to scale up to population-wide studies of metal pollution. This paper seeks to address this problem by presenting cecilia, the first Machine Learning (ML)-powered spectral modeling code designed to measure the metal abundances of intermediate-temperature (10,000$\leq T_{\rm eff} \leq$20,000 K), Helium-rich polluted white dwarfs. Trained with more than 22,000 randomly drawn atmosphere models and stellar parameters, our pipeline aims to overcome the limitations of classical methods by replacing the generation of synthetic spectra from computationally expensive codes and uniformly spaced model grids, with a fast, automated, and efficient neural-network-based interpolator. More specifically, cecilia combines state-of-the-art atmosphere models, powerful artificial intelligence tools, and robust statistical techniques to rapidly generate synthetic spectra of polluted white dwarfs in high-dimensional space, and enable accurate ($\lesssim$0.1 dex) and simultaneous measurements of 14 stellar parameters -- including 11 elemental abundances -- from real spectroscopic observations. As massively multiplexed astronomical surveys begin scientific operations, cecilia's performance has the potential to unlock large-scale studies of extrasolar geochemistry and propel the field of white dwarf science into the era of Big Data. In doing so, we aspire to uncover new statistical insights that were previously impractical with traditional white dwarf characterisation techniques.

It's not every day that you find a scientific discovery in your basement. That's what happened to scientists at the Cargenie Observatory after they stumbled on a 1917 astronomical glass plate. They believe the plate offers the oldest evidence for a planet orbiting star. Previously it was thought, the first exoplanet detection was made 75 years later in 1992. The pull-out box shows the strong lines of the element calcium.