Scientists One Step Closer to Understanding Spiraling Black Holes
A new model is bringing scientists a step closer to understanding the kinds of light signals produced when two supermassive black holes, which are millions…
Space News
Spitzer Reveals That Silica is Formed When Massive Stars Explode
We are all, quite literally, made of star dust. Many of the chemicals that compose our planet and our bodies were formed directly by stars….
NASA InSight Mission on Course for Mars Landing
NASA’s Mars Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) spacecraft is on track for a soft touchdown on the surface of the…
ESO Captures Stunning Image of a Newly Discovered Triple Star System
The VISIR instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope has captured this stunning image of a newly discovered massive triple star system. Nicknamed Apep after an…
NASA Selects Jezero Crater Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
NASA has chosen Jezero Crater as the landing site for its upcoming Mars 2020 rover mission after a five year search, during which every available…
Hubble Image of the Week – Different Generations
Star clusters are common structures throughout the Universe, each made up of hundreds of thousands of stars all bound together by gravity. This star-filled image,…
ALMA Reveals the Most Luminous Known Galaxy in the Universe
The most luminous galaxy in the universe has been caught in the act of stripping away nearly half the mass from at least three of…
MMS Spacecraft Provide First-Ever Views of Elusive Energy Explosion
Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have captured a difficult-to-view singular event involving “magnetic reconnection”—the process by which sparse particles and energy around Earth…
Scientists Bid ‘Goodnight’ to Kepler Space Telescope
Kepler’s astounding success in proving there are more planets than stars in our galaxy, and the existence of many worlds that could be favorable to…
Finding an Elusive Star Behind a Supernova
Located 65 million light-years away is a blue supergiant star that once existed inside a cluster of young stars in the spiral galaxy NGC 3938,…
NASA Discovers New Information About Interstellar Visitor ‘Oumuamua
In November 2017, scientists pointed NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope toward the object known as ‘Oumuamua — the first known interstellar object to visit our solar…
Astronomers Discover Super-Earth Orbiting Barnard’s Star
The nearest single star to the Sun hosts an exoplanet at least 3.2 times as massive as Earth — a so-called super-Earth. One of the…
Stunning Exoplanet Beta Pictoris B Time-Lapse Images
ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has captured an unprecedented series of images showing the passage of the exoplanet Beta Pictoris b around its parent star….
Astronomers Reveal Cold Molecular Gas Pumped by a Black Hole
Most galaxies lie in clusters containing from a few to thousands of other galaxies. Our Milky Way, for example, belongs to the Local Group cluster…
NASA’s Fermi Mission Shows How Luck Favors the Prepared
In 2017, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope played a pivotal role in two important breakthroughs occurring just five weeks apart. But what might seem like…
Hubble Image of the Week – Of Bent Time and Jellyfish
At first glance, a bright blue crescent immediately jumps out of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image: is it a bird? A plane? Evidence of…
Astronomers Witness Slow Death of Neighbouring Dwarf Galaxy
The new peer-reviewed study of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), which is a tiny fraction of the size and mass of the Milky Way galaxy,…
SOFIA Unravels the Mysterious Formation of Star Clusters
The sun, like all stars, was born in a giant cold cloud of molecular gas and dust. It may have had dozens or even hundreds…