Hubble Image of the Week – Cosmic Fireflies
Galaxies glow like fireflies in this spectacular NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image! This flickering swarm of cosmic fireflies is a rich cluster of galaxies called…
Galaxies glow like fireflies in this spectacular NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image! This flickering swarm of cosmic fireflies is a rich cluster of galaxies called…
Astronomers have used ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory to solve a decades-old mystery about the origin of powerful cool gas winds in the hot environs of…
A team of astronomers from Maryland, Hawaii, Israel, and France has produced the most detailed map ever of the orbits of galaxies in our extended…
Astronomers have concluded from the study of NGC 1600 and similar galaxies that the relative populations of stars of different masses in a cluster of…
Scientists measure the magnetic field of the black hole binary V404 Cygni, revealing a significantly weaker magnetic field than previously thought. Black holes are famous…
New research suggests that the bulk of clay minerals on Mars could have been formed as the planet’s crust cooled and solidified, not by later…
Astronomers expect that the first galaxies, those that formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, would share many similarities with some…
New research by Yale University scientists suggests rocky planets orbiting other stars may hide thick layers of diamond beneath the surface. “A carbon-rich planet likely…
A team of astronomers, including two from MIT, has detected the most distant supermassive black hole ever observed. The black hole sits in the center…
The Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) has successfully made its first observations. Installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in…
Taking a picture of an exoplanet—a planet in a solar system beyond our sun—is no easy task. The light of a planet’s parent star far…
New research using data collected by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has revealed that a little-known exoplanet called K2-18b could well be a scaled-up version…
New research shows that Jupiter’s moon Europa could have subduction zones, which could supply chemical food for life to a subsurface ocean. A Brown University…
The dust that comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko emits into space consists of about one-half of organic molecules. The dust also belongs to the most pristine and carbon-rich…
These images were taken by ESO’s SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch) instrument, installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory, Chile. These…
If you tried to start a car that’s been sitting in a garage for decades, you might not expect the engine to respond. But a…
Don’t be fooled! The subject of this Picture of the Week, ESO 580-49, may seem tranquil and unassuming, but this spiral galaxy actually displays some…
Correction: A follow-up paper by Barth & Stern (2018) has shown that the evidence for periodic light variations presented in Dorn-Wallenstein et al. (2017) and…