Astronomers Discover Supermassive Black Holes on a Collision Course
Astronomers have spotted a distant pair of titanic black holes headed for a collision. Each black hole’s mass is more than 800 million times that…
Astrophysics
Chandra Views Spinning Black Holes Across Cosmic Sea
A new study has revealed how fast some distant, rapidly growing supermassive black holes are spinning. The material around of one these black holes is…
Compounds Discovered in Meteorites May Hold Clues to the Origin of Life
Cyanide and carbon monoxide are both deadly poisons to humans, but compounds containing iron, cyanide, and carbon monoxide discovered in carbon-rich meteorites by a team…
First Detection of Polarized Radio Waves in Gamma Ray Burst Jets
Good fortune and cutting-edge scientific equipment have allowed scientists to observe a Gamma Ray Burst jet with a radio telescope and detect the polarisation of…
Astronomers Discover Cool Halo Gas Spinning Like Galactic Disks
A group of astronomers led by Crystal Martin and Stephanie Ho of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has discovered a dizzying cosmic choreography among…
New Class of ‘Cold Quasars’ Was Unknown Until Now
Astronomers have discovered a new class of “cold quasars” that could change our perception of how galaxies mature. The discovery was announced June 12 at…
Simulations Reveal How Acids Behave in Ultracold Interstellar Space
Solvated acids tend to release a proton. However, they display more complex behaviour under space conditions. Bochum-based researchers from the Cluster of Excellence Ruhr Explores…
Scientists Solve the Mystery of the Galaxy with No Dark Matter
A group of researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has clarified one of the mysteries of 2018 in the field of extragalactic…
Unique Experiments Will Study Cosmic Clashes and Their Mysterious Aftermath
What happens when two supermassive black holes collide? Combining the observing power of two future ESA missions, Athena and LISA, would allow us to study…
Chandra Discovers New Signal for Neutron Star Collision
A neutron star merger without an observed gamma-ray burst has been discovered using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This result gives astronomers another way to track…
Scientists Reveal Massive Collision in the Milky Way’s Past
Our Milky Way galaxy has probably collided or otherwise interacted with other galaxies during its lifetime; such interactions are common cosmic occurrences. Astronomers can deduce…
Scientists Show Gravitational Waves Leave Detectable Mark
Gravitational waves, first detected in 2016, offer a new window on the universe, with the potential to tell us about everything from the time following…
Evidence of How a Dwarf Galaxy Contributes to Growth of the Milky Way
Small stellar systems like dwarf galaxies are suggested to be the main building blocks of our Galaxy. However, it is unclear how many and what…
Dark Matter Collaboration Observes Rarest Event Ever Recorded
How do you observe a process that takes more than one trillion times longer than the age of the universe? The XENON Collaboration research team…
New Proposal for Probing What Came Before the Big Bang
Most everybody is familiar with the Big Bang — the notion that an impossibly hot, dense universe exploded into the one we know today. But…
Scientists Discover the First Type of Molecule Formed in the Universe
The first type of molecule that ever formed in the universe has been detected in space for the first time, after decades of searching. Scientists…
Astronomers Reveal First Direct Visual Evidence of a Supermassive Black Hole
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of…
Astronomers Pinpoint Origin of Photons in Mysterious Gamma-Ray Bursts
Scientists from the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research and collaborators have used simulations to show that the photons emitted by long gamma-ray bursts–one of the…