Astronomers Discover Closest High-Mass Stellar Objects Ever Measured
Astronomers have discovered a binary star system with the closest high-mass young stellar objects ever measured, providing a valuable “laboratory” to test theories on high…
Cosmology
Hubble & Gaia Reveal Weight of the Milky Way: 1.5 Trillion Solar Masses
In a striking example of multi-mission astronomy, measurements from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the ESA Gaia mission have been combined to improve the…
SOFIA Explores Supergalactic Wind, Provides Clues to Evolution of Galaxies
The Cigar Galaxy (M82) is famous for its extraordinary speed in making new stars, with stars being born 10 times faster than in the Milky…
Why So Many Planets Outside Our Solar System Have An Odd Configuration
For almost a decade, astronomers have tried to explain why so many pairs of planets outside our solar system have an odd configuration — their…
Astronomers Discover Brown Dwarf Binary Star with Microlensing
Brown dwarfs are stars less massive than the sun and unable to burn hydrogen. They comprise (at least in mass) a bridge between planets and…
New Observations Show Clumps of Gas Swirling Around Black Hole
The supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is by far the closest such object to us, only…
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….
Scientists Discover Solar Tadpole-Like Jets Coming Out Of The Sun
Scientists have discovered tadpole-shaped jets coming out of regions with intense magnetic fields on the Sun. Unlike those living on Earth, these “tadpoles” — formally…
SOFIA Reveals Clues to the Evolution of Universe
A compilation of scientific results from The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA, reveal new clues to how stars form and galaxies evolve, and closer…
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…
Chandra Solves the Universe’s “Missing Mass” Problem
New results from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory may have helped solve the Universe’s “missing mass” problem. Astronomers cannot account for about a third of the…
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…
New NASA Mission Will Explore the Origins of Universe
NASA has selected a new space mission that will help astronomers understand both how our universe evolved and how common are the ingredients for life…
Latest Discoveries From Zwicky Transient Facility, Supernovae, Stars, and More
The results are rolling in from Caltech’s newest state-of-the-art sky-surveying camera, which began operations at the Palomar Observatory in March 2018. Called the Zwicky Transient…
SOFIA Observations of Supernova 1987A Surprise Astronomers
Dust particles form as dying red giant stars throw off material and become part of interstellar clouds of various sizes, densities and temperatures. This cosmic…
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….
ESO Captures Dazzling Image of Newly-Forming Stars in the LMC
This dazzling region of newly-forming stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) was captured by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument (MUSE) on ESO’s Very…