Astronomers Detect Massive Clusters of Galaxies in the Early Universe
Astronomers have detected massive clusters of galaxies dating from as early as only about three billion years after the big bang. The stars in these…
Astronomers have detected massive clusters of galaxies dating from as early as only about three billion years after the big bang. The stars in these…
You don’t get to swim in the sun’s atmosphere unless you can prove you belong there. And the Parker Solar Probe’s Faraday cup, a key…
The nuclei of most galaxies host supermassive black holes with millions or even billions of solar-masses of material. Material in the vicinity of such black…
Astronomers studying the motions of galaxies and the character of the cosmic microwave background radiation came to realize in the last century that most of…
A “core-collapse” supernova occurs when the iron core of a massive star collapses under the force of gravity and then rebounds, generating pressure waves and…
The discovery of an exoplanet has most often resulted from the monitoring of a star’s flicker (the transiting method) or its wobble (the radial velocity…
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is undergoing final preparations in Florida for its April 16 launch to find undiscovered worlds around nearby stars, providing…
On Sunday, March 25, a new program called “Finding Life in Outer Space” will debut on the Smithsonian Channel. The scientific lead for this program…
There is a process at work in most galaxies that affects both the central black hole mass as well as the galaxy’s global velocity structure…
A merger between galaxies can trigger intense radiation from bursts of star formation and from the accretion of gas onto the two supermassive black holes…
Over 3500 extra-solar planets have been confirmed to date. Most of them were discovered using the transit method, and astronomers can combine the transit light…
A team of astrophysicists and planetary scientists has predicted that Neptune-like planets located near the center of the Milky Way galaxy have been transformed into…
Some galaxies in the universe are as much as a thousand times more luminous than our Milky Way galaxy, with most of their light being…
The Sun glows with a surface temperature of about 5,500 degrees Celsius (9,900 degrees Fahrenheit). On the other hand, its hot outer layer, the corona,…
The galaxy Arp 220 is ultraluminous (defined as having more than about 300 times the luminosity of our own galaxy) and, at a distance of…
The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10-meter-diameter telescope in the Antarctic that has been operating at millimeter- and submillimeter-waves for a decade; the CfA…
There are currently over 3500 confirmed exoplanets known thanks to the remarkable sensitivity of the Kepler spacecraft and to technological advances in space and ground-based…
An axion is a hypothetical elementary particle whose existence was postulated in order to explain why certain subatomic reactions appear to violate basic symmetry constraints,…