All Stories by Liz Kruesi
- Space
Binary stars keep masquerading as black holes
The drive to find black holes in ever-larger astronomy datasets is leading some researchers astray.
- Astronomy
NASA’s exoplanet count surges past 5,000
With a new batch of 60 confirmed exoplanets, the number of known worlds in our galaxy reaches another milestone.
- Astronomy
The universe’s background starlight is twice as bright as expected
Images from the New Horizons spacecraft suggest that light from all known galaxies accounts for only half of the cosmos’ visible background glow.
- Particle Physics
How light from black holes is narrowing the search for axions
The orientation of light waves from the region around galaxy M87’s central black hole rules out the existence of axions of a certain mass.
- Astronomy
Earth’s purported ‘nearest black hole’ isn’t a black hole
A disputed multiple-star system doesn’t have a black hole, as once reported, but is actually a missing piece in binary star evolution.
- Space
How Russia’s war in Ukraine hinders space research and exploration
A Mars rover, an X-ray telescope and several low-Earth satellites are at risk in response to international sanctions on Russia.
- Planetary Science
Earth has a second known ‘Trojan asteroid’ that shares its orbit
A recently found space rock is about one kilometer wide, orbits ahead of Earth around the sun and will stick around for at least 4,000 years.
- Astronomy
An X-ray glow suggests black holes or neutron stars fuel weird cosmic ‘cows’
With the brightest X-ray glow of a new class of exploding stars, cosmic oddity AT2020mrf boosts evidence of these mysterious blasts’ power source.
