Astronomers Discover A Dusty Primordial Star Forming Galaxy
Galaxies with extremely high rates of star formation (from hundreds to thousands of solar-masses worth of stars per year) are rare. Our Milky Way, for…
Space News
ESO’s Very Large Telescope Captures a Fleeting Moment in Time
The faint, ephemeral glow emanating from the planetary nebula ESO 577-24 persists for only a short time — around 10,000 years, a blink of an…
Breakthrough Allows Astronomers To See What Makes Sagittarius A* Glow
A black hole four million times as massive as our Sun lurks at the center of the Milky Way. This black hole, called Sagittarius A*…
Astronomers Explain Mystery Orbits in Outermost Reaches of Solar System
The strange orbits of some objects in the farthest reaches of our solar system, hypothesised by some astronomers to be shaped by an unknown ninth…
Hubble Image of the Week – Peering Into The Past
This picture showcases a gravitational lensing system called SDSS J0928+2031. Quite a few images of this type of lensing have been featured as Pictures of…
MUSE Hubble Ultra Deep Field Survey Confirms Puzzling Result
The universe is about 13.8 billion years old, and its stars are arguably its most momentous handiwork. Astronomers studying the intricacies of star formation across…
NASA’s Juno Reveals Two Massive Storms in Latest Flyby of Jupiter
This image of Jupiter’s turbulent southern hemisphere was captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft as it performed its most recent close flyby of the gas giant…
Scientists Solve Long Standing Mystery: The Length of a Day on Saturn
Using new data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, researchers believe they have solved a longstanding mystery of solar system science: the length of a day on…
Saturn’s Rings Relatively New, Formed Much Later Than The Planet
The rings of Saturn may be iconic, but there was a time when the majestic gas giant existed without its distinctive halo. In fact, the…
Moon Data Reveal Large Increase In Asteroid Impact History
By looking at the Moon, the most complete and accessible chronicle of the asteroid collisions that carved our young solar system, a group of scientists…
Hypernova Observations Reveal the Death of the Massive Stars
The end of a star’s life can occur in a tranquil manner in the case of low mass stars, such as the Sun. This is…
New Movie Shows the Propeller-Like Rotation of Ultima Thule
This movie shows the propeller-like rotation of Ultima Thule in the seven hours between 20:00 UT (3 p.m. ET) on Dec. 31, 2018, and 05:01…
Scientists Reveal Orderly Chaos of Black Holes
An international consortium of scientists studying gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) as part of the POLAR (GRB polarimeter) experiment has revealed that high-energy photon emissions from black…
Astronomers Reveal New Way Supermassive Black Holes Are “Fed”
Supermassive black holes weigh millions to billions times more than our sun and lie at the center of most galaxies. A supermassive black hole several…
Astronomers Discover Double Star System That Flipped Planet-Forming Disk
New research that included astronomers Luca Matra and David J. Wilner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center For Astrophysics has found the first confirmed example of a…
Chandra Views Never Before Seen Behavior From Giant Black Hole
Astronomers have discovered behavior by a jet from a giant black hole that has never been seen before. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory they have…
Hubble Image of the Week – Messier Monday
This huge ball of stars — around 100 billion in total — is an elliptical galaxy located some 55 million light-years away from us. Known…
GAIA Reveals For the First Time Crystallization in White Dwarfs
Data captured by ESA’s galaxy-mapping spacecraft Gaia has revealed for the first time how white dwarfs, the dead remnants of stars like our Sun, turn…