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…
Astrophysics
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,…
Hubble Finds Phantom Imprint in Space Revealing Black Hole Roaming Our Milky Way Galaxy
Hubble Determines Mass of Black Hole Isolated Black Hole Supermassive black holes, such as Sagittarius A* — the black hole at the center of the…
Astrophysicists Predict Gravitational Wave Strength From Merging Supermassive Black Holes
Gravitational waves are ripples in the curvature of spacetime caused by accelerated masses that propagate as waves at the speed of light outward from their…
Astronomers Discover a Mysterious “Black Widow” Binary – With the Shortest Orbit Yet
When a massive star runs out of fuel and collapses, it may leave behind a neutron star. (Unless the leftover mass is too great, in…
Stellar “Ghost” Discovered: Astronomers May Have Detected a “Dark” Free-Floating Black Hole
Gravitational microlensing turns up black hole candidate, one of 200 million in the galaxy. When massive stars come to the end of their lives and…
The Chemistry of the Sun: Resolving a Decade-Long Controversy About the Composition of Our Star
New calculations of Solar spectrum resolve decade-long controversy about the composition of our star. Although our sun is far closer than any other star in…
Jupiter Discovered To Be Inhomogeneous – Metallicity Reveals New Clues About Planet’s Origin
New research finds that Jupiter’s gaseous envelope doesn’t have a homogeneous distribution and its metallicity reveals clues about its origin. An international team of astronomers…
Astrophysicists Create “Time Machine” Simulations To Observe the Lifecycle of Ancestor Galaxy Cities
Many processes in astrophysics take a very long time, making their evolution tricky to study. For example, a star like our sun has a lifespan…
Counting Galaxies To Solve a Cosmological Puzzle: Putting the Theory of Special Relativity Into Practice
The theory of relativity was developed by Albert Einstein in the early 1900s due to the inability of classical physics to explain certain observations. It…
Unlocking One of the Most Profound Cosmological Mysteries: How the Universe Got Its Magnetic Field
By studying the dynamics of plasma turbulence, MIT researchers are helping to solve one of the mysteries of the origins of cosmological magnetic fields. One…
The Sun Is Spinning Round Again: Solving Part of the “Solar Problem”
An international team of astronomers has succeeded in developing a model to solve part of the “solar problem.” All was wrong with the Sun! A…
Unlocking the Mysterious Missing Links of Black Hole Astronomy
A deeper understanding of black holes could revolutionize our understanding of physics, but their enigmatic nature makes them difficult to observe. Because the theory of…
New Laser Breakthrough for Gravitational Waves Will Test the Fundamental Limits of General Relativity
New laser breakthrough to help increase understanding of gravitational waves. Scientists have created a proof-of-concept setup of a new laser eigenmode sensor that offers over…
Strange Radio-Emitting Neutron Star Discovered in Stellar Graveyard
An international team of astronomers has discovered a strange radio-emitting neutron star, which rotates extremely slowly, completing one rotation every 76 seconds. The team of…
Webb Space Telescope’s Quest for Primeval Black Holes
The Webb Space Telescope team continues to work on commissioning the science instruments, the final step before starting science operations in the summer. We recently…
Astronomy & Astrophysics 101: Measuring the Age and Size of the Universe
How do we measure the age and size of the universe? The search for Cepheids The top-ranked scientific justification for building the Hubble Space Telescope…
A Strange Surging Glow in a Distant Galaxy Could Change the Way We Look at Black Holes
Something weird is going on in the galaxy known as 1ES 1927+654: In late 2017, and for reasons that scientists couldn’t explain, the supermassive black…
