Astronomy & Astrophysics 101: Dark Matter
What is Dark Matter? Dark matter is a form of matter that cannot currently be observed directly, but is estimated to comprise about 85% of…
Astrophysics
Mysterious Star Survives a Thermonuclear Supernova Explosion
A Tenacious Star Validates a Revised Model of Supernovae A supernova is the cataclysmic explosion of a star. Thermonuclear supernovae, in particular, signal the complete…
Searching for Cosmic X-Ray Signposts of Elusive Continuous Gravitational Waves
In the last few years, astronomers have achieved an incredible milestone: the detection of gravitational waves, vanishingly weak ripples in the fabric of space and…
A Flicker From the Dark: Reading Between the Lines To Model Our Galaxy’s Supermassive Black Hole
Looks can be deceiving. The light from an incandescent bulb seems steady, but it actually flickers 120 times per second. Because the brain only perceives…
Unraveling the Origin of Mysterious Explosive Radio Bursts
Scientists simulate a perplexing explosive process that occurs throughout the universe. Mysterious fast radio bursts are among the most perplexing phenomena in the universe, releasing…
Pulsar Discovered Blazing Through the Milky Way at Over a Million Mile per Hour
A young pulsar has been discovered blazing through the Milky Way at a speed of over a million miles per hour. This stellar speedster, witnessed…
Chaos and Destruction: Dead Star’s Cannibalism of Its Planetary System Is Most Far-Reaching Ever Witnessed
White dwarf provides insight into the systemic chaos that occurs when a star dies. The violent death throes of a nearby star caused such a…
Gravitational Wave Events With Split Personalities
Deep Follow-up of GW151226 — an ordinary binary or a low-mass ratio merger? Now that we’ve been detecting gravitational waves (GWs), we’d like to better…
Watching the Violent Death of a Rare, Extreme Supergiant Star
By tracing molecular emissions in the outflows around the red hypergiant star VY Canis Majoris, astronomers have obtained the first detailed map of the star’s…
Galactic Belly Flop: Mysterious “Blue Blobs” Reveal a New Kind of Star System
The stellar structures are thought to be created when galaxies collide with hot gas in a process that could be likened to doing a belly…
Astronomers Discover Evidence for Most Powerful Pulsar in Distant Galaxy
Astronomers analyzing data from the VLA Sky Survey (VLASS) have discovered one of the youngest known neutron stars — the superdense remnant of a massive…
Hubble Captures Incredible Snapshot of a Massive Galaxy Cluster
The massive galaxy cluster Abell 1351 is captured in this image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for…
Over a Million Miles per Hour: NASA’s Chandra Catches Pulsar in X-Ray Speed Trap
A pulsar is racing through the debris of an exploded star at a speed of over a million miles per hour. To measure this, researchers…
The James Webb Space Telescope: Prepare for a New Way To See the Universe
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is finally ready to do science – and it’s seeing the universe more clearly than even its own engineers hoped…
New Type Neutron Star Discovered in Unusual Galactic Graveyard
Beginning of a new class of neutron star. A new kind of neutron star has been discovered by a University of Sydney astronomer and her…
Cosmic Cannibalism: Dead Star Caught Violently Tearing Up Planetary System
Both Rocky and Icy Bodies Were Identified Among the Debris on the Surface of a White Dwarf Star “Bring out your dead!” rings in the…
In a Flash: Weird Star Produces the Fastest Nova on Record
Most people are familiar with supernovas, the spectacular stellar explosions that occur at the end of a massive star’s life and often result in a…
New Clues to Mysterious Formation of Hot Jupiter Exoplanets
Astronomers discover a new way of determining the relative age of exoplanets and prove there are multiple ways these planets form. In our solar system,…
