Astronomers Reveal Suppressed Star Formation in the Early Universe
Massive clusters of galaxies, some with more mass than a hundred Milky Way galaxies, have been detected from cosmic epochs as early as about three…
Cosmology News
Spitzer Reveals Clues to How Ancient Galaxies Lit up the Universe
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed that some of the universe’s earliest galaxies were brighter than expected. The excess light is a byproduct of the…
Blue Supergiant Stars Shimmer Because of Waves on Their Surface
Blue supergiants are rock ‘n’ roll: they live fast and die young. This makes them rare and difficult to study. Before space telescopes were invented,…
New Hubble Telescope View of the Evolving Universe
Astronomers have put together the largest and most comprehensive “history book” of galaxies into one single image, using 16 years’ worth of observations from NASA’s…
Stardust Shines New Light on the Formation of the Solar System
The study of a tiny grain of stardust — older than our solar system — is shining new light on how planetary systems are formed….
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…
Important Threshold Crossed in Mystery of the Universe’s Expansion Rate
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope say they have crossed an important threshold in revealing a discrepancy between the two key techniques for measuring the…
VERITAS Collaboration Measures Smallest Star Size to Date
Scientists in the VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) Collaboration have published a paper in Nature Astronomy journal detailing the results of their…
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…
Planet Orbiting Barnard’s Star Might Have An Atmosphere
The closest exoplanet to us, if we include only single stars like the Sun, is the planet around Barnard’s Star, Barnard’s Star-b (“BSb”). (The planet…
Chandra Black Hole Close-Up Image Makes History
A black hole and its shadow have been captured in an image for the first time, a historic feat by an international network of radio…
Astronomers Search for Iron Volcanism on Metallic Asteroids
Metallic asteroids are thought to have started out as blobs of molten iron floating in space. As if that’s not strange enough, scientists now think…
Astronomers Discover a Heavy Metal Fragment of a Planet
A fragment of a planet that has survived the death of its star has been discovered by University of Warwick astronomers in a disc of…
Solar Coronal Rain on Our Sun Links Two Mysteries
For five months in mid 2017, Emily Mason did the same thing every day. Arriving to her office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in…
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…
Astronomers Observe Doughnut-Shaped Torus Surrounding Black Hole
Astronomers used the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to make the first direct image of a dusty, doughnut-shaped feature surrounding…
Astronomers View Star Formation in the Central Molecular Zone
Stars form from the gas and dust in molecular clouds via a series of complex processes that are currently only partly understood, and the evolution…