New Breed of Supernova Results In Total Annihilation for Supermassive Stars
A renegade star exploding in a distant galaxy has forced astronomers to set aside decades of research and focus on a new breed of supernova…
Astronomy
Young Jupiter Collided With Massive Protoplanet [Video]
Jupiter’s core may still be reeling from collision 4.5 billion years ago. A colossal, head-on collision between Jupiter and a still-forming planet in the early…
Most Accurate Estimate of Earth-Like Planets Around Sun-Like Stars
A new study provides the most accurate estimate of the frequency that planets that are similar to Earth in size and in distance from their…
Intergalactic ‘Pancakes’ Shatter Into a Cosmic Fog [Video]
To understand the most ordinary matter in the universe — and the extraordinary things that happen to it — a Yale-led team of astronomers took…
Hidden Secrets Revealed by Glitch in Neutron Star
In a paper published today scientists have studied the Vela Pulsar, a neutron star in the southern sky, that is 1,000 light years away. Neutron…
Classic Mars Image From NASA’s Mariner 6 and 7
Lost in the glare following the Apollo 11 Moon landing, two intrepid robotic spacecraft flew by Mars in the summer of 1969 and returned photographs…
Hubble Discovers an Exoplanet Shaped Like a Football
How can a planet be “hotter than hot?” The answer is when heavy metals are detected escaping from the planet’s atmosphere, instead of condensing into…
TESS Discovers Habitable Zone Planet in GJ 357 System
A piping hot planet discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has pointed the way to additional worlds orbiting the same star, one of…
NASA’s TESS Mission Discovers Three New Worlds
NASA’s newest planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), has discovered three new worlds — one slightly larger than Earth and two of a…
Hubble Views Spiral Galaxy Orientated Directly Edge-On To Us
Believe it or not, this long, luminous streak, speckled with bright blisters and pockets of material, is a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way. But…
NASA Releases New Images to Celebrate Chandra’s 20th Anniversary
On July 23, 1999, the Space Shuttle Columbia blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center carrying the Chandra X-ray Observatory. In the two decades that…
Noteworthy Discoveries From TESS Mission’s First Year
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered 21 planets outside our solar system and captured data on other interesting events occurring in the southern…
Water in Polar Moon Craters Not as Invincible as Expected
The Moon’s south pole region is home to some of the most extreme environments in the solar system: it’s unimaginably cold, massively cratered, and has…
Scientists Update HITRAN to Help Model Exoplanet Atmospheres
All atoms and molecules emit distinctive spectral lines across the spectrum, the details of which depend on the internal structures of the species (for example,…
Astronomers Pit Einstein Against Newton to Determine the Mass of KOI-3278
A team of astronomers led by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have updated and confirmed self-lensing binary star KOI-3278’s companion to be a white dwarf…
Sequence of Events Which Gave Rise to the Milky Way Revealed
The universe 13,000 million years ago was very different from the universe we know today. It is understood that stars were forming at a very…
Hubble Captures Sharply Angled Perspective of Spiral Galaxy NGC 3169
Every now and then, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope glimpses a common object — say, a spiral galaxy — in an interesting or unusual way….
ALMA Captures Amazing Image of Microquasar SS 433
This is SS 433, a microquasar first discovered forty years ago and located about 18,000 light-years away in the constellation of Aquila (The Eagle). This…