Hubble Telescope Discovers Mysterious Black Hole Disc
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have observed an unexpected thin disc of material encircling a supermassive black hole at the heart of the…
Space News
ALMA Reveals Moon-Forming Disk Around Distant Planet
Using Earth’s most powerful array of radio telescopes, astronomers have made the first observations of a circumplanetary disk of gas and dust like the one…
Astronomers Discover A Black Hole Disk That Shouldn’t Exist
As if black holes weren’t mysterious enough, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found an unexpected thin disk of material furiously whirling around a…
Astronomers Discover Supermassive Black Holes on a Collision Course
Astronomers have spotted a distant pair of titanic black holes headed for a collision. Each black hole’s mass is more than 800 million times that…
ALMA Provides First Bird’s-Eye View of Massive Star Growth
Astronomers obtained the first detailed face-on view of a gaseous disk feeding the growth of a massive baby star. They found that it shares many…
Hubble Image of the Week – Galactic Cherry Blossom
The galaxy NGC 1156 resembles a delicate cherry blossom tree flowering in springtime in this Hubble Picture of the Week. The many bright “blooms” within…
Hubble and Spitzer Identify the Atmosphere of Mid-Size Planet
Two NASA space telescopes have teamed up to identify, for the first time, the detailed chemical “fingerprint” of a planet between the sizes of Earth…
Successful Orion Test Brings NASA Closer to Mars Mission
NASA successfully demonstrated Tuesday the Orion spacecraft’s launch abort system can outrun a speeding rocket and pull astronauts to safety during an emergency during launch….
Hubble Views Galaxy’s Biggest Ongoing Stellar Fireworks Show
Imagine slow-motion fireworks that started exploding 170 years ago and are still continuing. This type of firework is not launched into Earth’s atmosphere, but rather…
Chandra Views Spinning Black Holes Across Cosmic Sea
A new study has revealed how fast some distant, rapidly growing supermassive black holes are spinning. The material around of one these black holes is…
ALMA Discovers Earliest Example of Merging Galaxies
Researchers using the radio telescope ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) observed signals of oxygen, carbon, and dust from a galaxy in the early Universe 13…
Hubble Views Rose-Like Bloom in Spiral Galaxy NGC 972
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week shows bright, colourful pockets of star formation blooming like roses in a spiral galaxy named NGC…
TESS Mission Discovers Smallest Planet to Date
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a world between the sizes of Mars and Earth orbiting a bright, cool, nearby star. The planet,…
Compounds Discovered in Meteorites May Hold Clues to the Origin of Life
Cyanide and carbon monoxide are both deadly poisons to humans, but compounds containing iron, cyanide, and carbon monoxide discovered in carbon-rich meteorites by a team…
Saturn’s Moon Titan Might Be Encrusted With Alien Crystals
The frigid lakeshores of Saturn’s moon Titan might be encrusted with strange, unearthly minerals, according to new research being presented here. Scientists re-creating Titan-esque conditions…
Hubble Space Telescope Views ‘Trillions of Stars’
This Hubble Picture of the Week shows the spiral galaxy Messier 98, which is located about 45 million light-years away in the constellation of Coma…
First Detection of Polarized Radio Waves in Gamma Ray Burst Jets
Good fortune and cutting-edge scientific equipment have allowed scientists to observe a Gamma Ray Burst jet with a radio telescope and detect the polarisation of…
Astronomers Confirm the Low Density of Kepler Exoplanets
The Kepler mission and its extension, called K2, discovered thousands of exoplanets. It detected them using the transit technique, measuring the dip in light intensity…