SWEAP Investigation Will Directly Measure Ionized Gas in the Solar Atmosphere
When NASA’s Parker Solar Probe launches into space from the Kennedy Space Center, it will begin its journey to the Sun, our nearest star. The…
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics News
Astronomers Confirm Galaxies in the Early Universe
Astronomers in the past decade have detected thousands of galaxies dating from epochs only a few billion years after the big bang. Many of them,…
Astronomers Study Enduring ‘Radio Rebound’ from Gamma-Ray Burst 161219B
In the blink of an eye, a massive star more than 2 billion light-years away lost a million-year-long fight against gravity and collapsed, triggering a…
Astronomers Reveal Unified Model for Galactic Discs: Star Formation, Turbulence Driving, and Mass Transport
Disc galaxies like our own Milky Way, characterized by a flattened disc of stars and gas (often with a central bulge of material as well)…
Astronomers Record The First Microlensing Event Only Detected By Spitzer
The path of light from a star as it passes by a massive body, like an exoplanet, will be bent and an observer looking toward…
VERITAS Confirms Neutrino Emission from Vicinity of Blazar TXS 0506+056
The VERITAS array has confirmed the detection of gamma rays from the vicinity of a supermassive black hole. While these detections are relatively common for…
Astronomers Determine What Powers the Most Luminous Galaxies
Galaxy-galaxy interactions have long been known to influence galaxy evolution. They are commonplace events, and a large majority of galaxies show signs of interactions, including…
Astronomers Discover More Clues That Earth-Like Exoplanets Are Indeed Earth-Like
A new study provides new clues indicating that an exoplanet – that is, a planet outside the Solar System – that is 500 light-years away…
Chandra Reveals Cluster of X-Ray Binary Stars Near the Galaxy’s Center
A binary star system is one that contains a pair of stars orbiting each other. A black hole X-ray binary is a binary system in…
Herschel Space Observatory Discovers Planetary Nebula Lasers
Astronomical masers (the radio wavelength analogs of lasers) were first identified in space over fifty years ago and have since been seen in many locations;…
ESA’s XMM-Newton Reveals Missing Intergalactic Material
After a nearly twenty-year-long game of cosmic hide-and-seek, astronomers using ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory have finally found evidence of hot, diffuse gas permeating the cosmos,…
Greenland Telescope Opens New Era of Astronomy
To study the most extreme objects in the Universe, astronomers sometimes have to go to some extreme places themselves. Over the past several months, a…
New Model Proposes That Dark Matter Carries an Electric Charge
Astronomers have proposed a new model for the invisible material that makes up most of the matter in the Universe. They have studied whether a…
Chandra Reveals X-Ray Binary Stars at the Galactic Center
The center of our Milky Way galaxy is about twenty-five thousand light-years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. At the core of…
K2 Mission Discovers a New Kind of Supernova
The K2 Mission, an extension of the immensely successful NASA Kepler mission to search for exoplanets, has discovered nearly one hundred new exoplanets so far….
Helium Discovered in the Eroding Atmosphere of an Exoplanet
Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, after hydrogen, and is a major constituent of the gas-giant planets in our Solar System….
Astronomers Detect Massive Clusters of Galaxies in the Early Universe
Astronomers have detected massive clusters of galaxies dating from as early as only about three billion years after the big bang. The stars in these…
Key Parker Solar Probe Sensor Bests Sun Simulator, Set for Summer Launch
You don’t get to swim in the sun’s atmosphere unless you can prove you belong there. And the Parker Solar Probe’s Faraday cup, a key…
