Astronomy

Astronomy

Distant and Strange: Orb isn’t just another extrasolar planet

A novel search technique that could ultimately find Earthlike worlds has uncovered an extrasolar planet that is 30 times farther away than any other planet detected and lies closer to its parent star than does any other orb discovered to date.

Astronomy

Sugarcoated news arrives from space

Scientists spotted a simple sugar in interstellar space for the first time.

Astronomy

Model Tracks Storms from the Sun

Teams of astronomers have developed a reliable method for predicting the time it takes for solar storms to arrive at Earth and have gathered observations confirming a model of how the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, manages to store up enough magnetic energy to induce these upheavals.

Astronomy

Runaway black hole

Observing a black hole and its visible companion star caroming through our galaxy, astronomers have found the best evidence to date that stellar-mass black holes are born during supernova explosions.

Astronomy

News of the Early Universe: Findings from the cosmic microwave background

The most detailed snapshots so far of the infant universe confirm that the cosmos consists mostly of mystery material, called dark energy, that accelerates the universe's expansion.

Astronomy

News of the Early Universe: Findings from the cosmic microwave background

The most detailed snapshots so far of the infant universe confirm that the cosmos consists mostly of mystery material, called dark energy, that accelerates the universe's expansion.

Astronomy

Black holes and galaxies may grow up together

Astronomers have new and, for the first time, quantitative evidence that bigger black holes reside at the centers of bigger galaxies.

Astronomy

Sizing up small stars

Astronomers have for the first time measured with high precision the size of a small star, Proxima Centauri, the known star nearest to the solar system.

Astronomy

Milky Way’s Last Major Merger

Astronomers have found new evidence supporting the view that the Milky Way and many other spiral galaxies suffered their last major collision billions of years ago.

Astronomy

Survey confirms composition of the cosmos

A team of astronomers announced this week that after measuring the redshifts of 100,000 galaxies, they have new evidence for what makes up most of the mass of the universe.

Astronomy

Hubble Weighs In: Pinning down an extrasolar planet’s mass

Using a decades-old technique, astronomers have precisely measured the mass of a planet outside our solar system.

Astronomy

Galactic cannibalism strikes again

Astronomers have discovered the remains of a tiny galaxy that was swallowed by the galaxy Centaurus A only a few hundred million years ago.