Astronomers Simulate Conditions Inside ‘Super-Earths’
By aiming intense X-ray beams at iron samples, scientists have studied the cores of “super-Earth” planets triple the size of Earth. The team, led by…
Astronomy
New Study Reveals Mercury’s Crust Is Thinner Than Anyone Thought
Mercury is small, fast and close to the sun, making the rocky world challenging to visit. Only one probe has ever orbited the planet and…
ALMA Discovers 14-Galaxy Collision in the Distant Universe
Tim Miller, a doctoral candidate in astronomy, is first author of a new study in the journal Nature about the initial stirrings of a 14-galaxy…
Hubble Captures First Image of a Surviving Companion to a Supernova
Seventeen years ago, astronomers witnessed a supernova go off 40 million light-years away in the galaxy called NGC 7424, located in the southern constellation Grus,…
Astronomers Peer Deeper and Farther Into the Cosmos in Search of AGN
The nuclei of most galaxies host supermassive black holes with millions or even billions of solar-masses of material. Material in the vicinity of such black…
HOSTS Survey Paves Way for Exoplanet Missions
By studying dust in the habitable zones of nearby stars, the HOSTS Survey — led by UA astronomers and performed with Arizona telescopes — is…
ALMA and APEX Discover Ancient Galaxy Megamerger
The ALMA and APEX telescopes have peered deep into space — back to the time when the Universe was one tenth of its current age…
Astronomers Continue to Unravel the Mystery of the Universe’s Missing Matter
Astronomers using ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory have probed the gas-filled haloes around galaxies in a quest to find ‘missing’ matter thought to reside there, but…
Webb Space Telescope Will Capture Light From First Generation Stars
The first stars in the universe blazed to life about 200 to 400 million years after the big bang. Observing those very first individual stars…
New Fundamental Law Stipulates the Evolution of Galaxy Clusters
Analysis of gravitational lensing data by an international research team reveals that the evolution of galaxy clusters is dictated by a surprisingly simple law, which…
Scientists Reveal New Mechanism of Radio Emission in Neutron Stars
Young scientists from ITMO University have explained how neutron stars generate intense directed radio emission. They developed a model based on the transitions of particles…
Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole May Have ‘Wandering’ Siblings
Astronomers are beginning to understand what happens when black holes get the urge to roam the Milky Way. Typically, a supermassive black hole (SMBH) exists…
Cassini Reveals the Subtle Colors of Saturn’s Rings
Saturn’s rings display their subtle colors in this view captured on August 22, 2009, by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The particles that make up the rings…
Scientists Detect Hydrogen Sulfide in the Cloud Tops of Uranus
Hydrogen sulfide, the gas that gives rotten eggs their distinctive odor, permeates the upper atmosphere of the planet Uranus – as has been long debated,…
‘Deep Learning’ Algorithm Brings New Tools to Astronomy
A ‘deep learning’ algorithm trained on images from cosmological simulations has been surprisingly successful at classifying real galaxies in Hubble images. A machine learning method…
Juno Captures New Image of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot During 12th Flyby
This image of Jupiter’s iconic Great Red Spot and surrounding turbulent zones was captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. The color-enhanced image is a combination of…
NEOWISE Asteroid-Hunting Spacecraft Releases Fourth Year of Data
NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its fourth year of survey data. Since the mission was restarted in December 2013,…
Hubble Image of the Week – Lenticular Galaxy NGC 2655
This pretty, cloud-like object may not look much like a galaxy — it lacks the well-defined arms of a spiral galaxy, or the reddish bulge…