A team of astronomers, including Nader Haghighipour from the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, have discovered a third planet in the circumbinary planetary system Kepler-47. This discovery cements the system’s title as the most interesting of the binary-star worlds, and marks the first complete and dynamically full planetary system around a binary star.
A team of astronomers has discovered the most distant body ever observed in our solar system. It is the first known solar system object that has been detected at a distance that is more than 100 times farther than Earth is from the Sun.
The new object was announced on Monday, December 17, 2018, by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center and has been given the provisional designation 2018 VG18. The discovery was made by Carnegie Observaties’ Scott S. Sheppard, the University of Hawaiiʻs David Tholen, and Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo.
A team of astronomers, including IfA’s David Sanders and former IfA postdoc Mike Koss, have used the W. M. Keck Observatory on Muanakea and the Hubble Space Telescope to complete the most detailed census of supermassive black holes in colliding galaxies. The team’s findings support the theory that galaxy mergers explain how some supermassive black holes become so monstrously large.
Astronomers have discovered a new object at the edge of our Solar System. The new extremely distant object far beyond Pluto has an orbit that supports the presence of a larger Planet X. The newly found object, called 2015 TG387, was announced by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center on Monday, October 1, 2018.