Astronomers Detect Hidden Black Hole Lurking at Galactic Center
Astronomers have detected a stealthy black hole from its effects on an interstellar gas cloud. This intermediate mass black hole is one of over 100…
Astrophysics
Stellar Flyby Helped Shape Our Solar System 3 Million Years Ago
Some of the peculiar aspects of our solar system — an enveloping cloud of comets, dwarf planets in weird orbits and, if it truly exists,…
New Idea Helps Explain Why Galaxies Have The Shapes They Do
Dark matter may scatter against each other only when they hit the right energy, say researchers in Japan, Germany, and Austria in a new study….
ESA’s Gaia Satellite Discovers Billion-Year-Old River of Stars
Astronomy & Astrophysics published the work of researchers from the University of Vienna, who have found a river of stars, a stellar stream in astronomical…
Merging Neutron Stars Provide Insight Into Fundamental Properties of Matter
The option to measure the gravitational waves of two merging neutron stars has offered the chance to answer some of the fundamental questions about the…
ALMA Discovers Ordinary Table Salt in Disk Surrounding Massive Star
New ALMA observations show there is ordinary table salt in a not-so-ordinary location: 1,500 light-years from Earth in the disk surrounding a massive young star….
Scientists Show Sun’s Magnetic Waves Behave Differently Than Believed
New research undertaken at Northumbria University shows that the Sun’s magnetic waves behave differently than currently believed. Their findings have been reported in the latest…
Astronomers Reveal a Warped and Twisted Milky Way
Our Milky Way galaxy’s disk of stars is anything but stable and flat. Instead, it becomes increasingly ‘warped’ and twisted far away from the Milky…
Scientists Chart Environment Surrounding a Stellar-Mass Black Hole
Scientists have charted the environment surrounding a stellar-mass black hole that is 10 times the mass of the Sun using NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition…
New Results Show Dark Energy May Vary Over Time
A new study using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton suggests that dark energy may have varied over cosmic time. This artist’s…
New Research Solves Key Mystery in the Birth of Massive Black Holes
When the universe was still a baby – less than 1 billion years old – some of its stars turned into monster black holes. A…
New Simulations Provide Clues on How to Escape a Black Hole
Black holes are known for their voracious appetites, binging on matter with such ferocity that not even light can escape once it’s swallowed up. Less…
Breakthrough Allows Astronomers To See What Makes Sagittarius A* Glow
A black hole four million times as massive as our Sun lurks at the center of the Milky Way. This black hole, called Sagittarius A*…
Astronomers Explain Mystery Orbits in Outermost Reaches of Solar System
The strange orbits of some objects in the farthest reaches of our solar system, hypothesised by some astronomers to be shaped by an unknown ninth…
Hypernova Observations Reveal the Death of the Massive Stars
The end of a star’s life can occur in a tranquil manner in the case of low mass stars, such as the Sun. This is…
Scientists Reveal Orderly Chaos of Black Holes
An international consortium of scientists studying gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) as part of the POLAR (GRB polarimeter) experiment has revealed that high-energy photon emissions from black…
Astronomers Reveal New Way Supermassive Black Holes Are “Fed”
Supermassive black holes weigh millions to billions times more than our sun and lie at the center of most galaxies. A supermassive black hole several…
Astronomers Discover Double Star System That Flipped Planet-Forming Disk
New research that included astronomers Luca Matra and David J. Wilner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center For Astrophysics has found the first confirmed example of a…