Fast-Growing White Dwarf Surprises Astronomers
Astronomers have detected a bright X-ray outburst from a star in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy almost 200,000 light years from Earth. A…
Cosmology
Astronomers Find Unknown Treasure Trove of Planets Hiding in Dust
The first unbiased survey of protoplanetary disks surrounding young stars in the Taurus star-forming region turned up a higher-than-expected number of disks with features suggesting…
LIGO Makes Vital Contribution to New Gravitational Wave Discoveries
Researchers from the University of Portsmouth have made vital contributions to the observations of four new gravitational waves, which were announced this weekend. The new…
Astronomers Reveal How Stellar Binaries Form
Most stars with the mass of the sun or larger have one or more companion stars, but when and how these multiple stars form is…
GRAVITY Measures Environs of a Massive Black Hole Outside the Milky Way
Discovery is the first detailed observation of the environs of a massive black hole outside the Milky Way, say researchers from the GRAVITY group. In…
Fermi Traces the History of Starlight Across the Cosmos
Scientists using data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have measured all the starlight produced over 90 percent of the universe’s history. The analysis, which…
ALMA Reveals Black Hole ‘Donuts’ Are Actually ‘Fountains’
Based on computer simulations and new observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), researchers have found that the rings of gas surrounding active supermassive…
Scientists Discover Two Gravitationally Lensed Quasars
The path of light is bent by mass, an effect predicted by Einstein’s theory of gravity, and when a massive galaxy or cluster lies along…
Scientists One Step Closer to Understanding Spiraling Black Holes
A new model is bringing scientists a step closer to understanding the kinds of light signals produced when two supermassive black holes, which are millions…
Spitzer Reveals That Silica is Formed When Massive Stars Explode
We are all, quite literally, made of star dust. Many of the chemicals that compose our planet and our bodies were formed directly by stars….
ALMA Reveals the Most Luminous Known Galaxy in the Universe
The most luminous galaxy in the universe has been caught in the act of stripping away nearly half the mass from at least three of…
NASA Discovers New Information About Interstellar Visitor ‘Oumuamua
In November 2017, scientists pointed NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope toward the object known as ‘Oumuamua — the first known interstellar object to visit our solar…
Astronomers Reveal Cold Molecular Gas Pumped by a Black Hole
Most galaxies lie in clusters containing from a few to thousands of other galaxies. Our Milky Way, for example, belongs to the Local Group cluster…
Astronomers Witness Slow Death of Neighbouring Dwarf Galaxy
The new peer-reviewed study of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), which is a tiny fraction of the size and mass of the Milky Way galaxy,…
SOFIA Unravels the Mysterious Formation of Star Clusters
The sun, like all stars, was born in a giant cold cloud of molecular gas and dust. It may have had dozens or even hundreds…
Asteroids, Comets and Other Small Objects Provide Clues of Mysterious Distant Past
The entire history of human existence is a tiny blip in our solar system’s 4.5-billion-year history. No one was around to see planets forming and…
ALMA Views Galaxy-Scale Fountain in Full Glory
A billion light-years from Earth lies one of the universe’s most massive structures, a giant elliptical galaxy surrounded by a sprawling cluster of other galaxies…
STEREO Spacecraft Provide New Insights on Comet Tails
Engineers and scientists gathered around a screen in an operations room at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., eager to lay their eyes on…