Evolving Energy of a Solar Flare’s Explosive First Minutes Captured With New Radio Telescope
Toward the end of 2017, a massive new region of magnetic field erupted on the Sun’s surface next to an existing sunspot. The powerful collision…
Astrophysics
Unraveling the Mysteries of Dark Matter by Taking Its Temperature
Warm, cold, just right? Physicists at the University of California, Davis, are taking the temperature of dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up about…
Massive Black Hole Collisions Illuminated by X-Rays and Gravitational Waves
A new study by a group of researchers at the University of Birmingham has found that collisions of supermassive black holes may be simultaneously observable…
Bizarre Objects Discovered Near Our Galaxy’s Supermassive Black Hole – “Really Strange Signature”
Astronomers from UCLA’s Galactic Center Orbits Initiative have discovered a new class of bizarre objects at the center of our galaxy, not far from the…
Oldest Material on Earth Discovered: 7-Billion-Year-Old Stardust Found in Meteorite
The ancient stardust reveals a “baby boom” in star formation. Stars have life cycles. They’re born when bits of dust and gas floating through space…
Origins of the Solar System’s ‘Great Divide’ Sheds New Light on How Life Originated on Earth
Scientists, including those from the University of Colorado Boulder, have finally scaled the solar system’s equivalent of the Rocky Mountain range. In a study published…
Astronomers Have Found the Secret Ingredient to the Universe’s Brightest Explosions
Stars need to be in binary systems to create gamma-ray bursts, University of Warwick study finds Gamma-ray bursts are the Universe’s brightest explosions, caused by…
Artificial Intelligence Examines Over 200,000 Galaxies to Confirm Galaxy Mergers Ignite Starbursts
When two galaxies merge, there are brief periods of stellar baby booms. A group of astronomers led by Lingyu Wang from SRON have now used…
First Stars ‘Bubbling Out’ From the Cosmic Dark Ages Detected by Astronomers
Astronomers using the Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a program of NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, have identified several overlapping bubbles…
Astronomical Mystery Deepens After Fast Radio Burst Detected From Unknown Source
Astronomers have pinpointed the origin of a repeating Fast Radio Burst to a nearby spiral galaxy, challenging theories on the unknown source of these pulses….
Gravitational Waves Surge Through the Fabric of Space and Time After Neutron Stars Violently Collide
On April 25, 2019, the LIGO Livingston Observatory picked up what appeared to be gravitational ripples from a collision of two neutron stars. LIGO Livingston…
Shedding Light on a Galactic Mystery That Has Long Puzzled Scientists
Our Milky Way galaxy has an elegant spiral shape with long arms filled with stars, but exactly how it took this form has long puzzled…
Massive Black Hole Mystery Solved With a Stripped Helium Star
When David Poses As Goliath Stellar black holes form when massive stars end their life in a dramatic collapse. Observations have shown that stellar black…
Stellar Heavy Metals Can Map Evolution of the Milky Way and Other Galaxies
Astronomers have cataloged signs of 9 heavy metals in the infrared light from supergiant and giant stars. New observations based on this catalog will help…
Binary Star V Sagittae Will Explode by Century’s End – “Startlingly Bright in the Night Sky”
LSU astronomy researchers estimate the peak of brightness and explosion of luminous star brighter than any other in the Milky Way Galaxy. Currently, the faint…
Meet NASA’s New Tool for ‘Weighing’ Unseen Planets [Video]
The NEID instrument will help scientists determine the density of distant planets, which can reveal whether the planet is rocky, like Earth, or mostly gaseous,…
“Cold Dark Matter” Breakthrough As Hubble Detects Smallest Known Dark Matter Clumps
Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and a new observing technique, astronomers have found that dark matter forms much smaller clumps than previously known. This result…
Massive Wave of Stellar Nurseries Revealed by New Map of Milky Way – “No Astronomer Expected”
Interconnected stellar nurseries form the largest gaseous structure ever observed in the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers at Harvard University have discovered a monolithic, wave-shaped gaseous…