Astronomy

Astronomy

The sun’s searing radiation led to the shuffling of the solar system’s planets

As the young sun’s radiation evaporated gas from its surrounding disk, it triggered a jumbling of the giant planets’ orbits, simulations suggest.

Physics

Gravitational waves gave a new black hole a high-speed ‘kick’

Ripples in spacetime revealed that two black holes united into one, which then sped off at around 5 million kilometers per hour.

Astronomy

‘Goldilocks’ stars may pose challenges for any nearby habitable planets

Orange dwarfs emit far-ultraviolet light long after birth, stressing the atmospheres of potentially life-bearing worlds.

Astronomy

Crumbling planets might trigger repeating fast radio bursts

Mysterious blasts of cosmic radio waves might be due to planets sweeping extremely close to their host neutron stars.

Astronomy

A newly discovered planet renews debate about how some giant worlds form

An implosion of gas may have given birth to this young exoplanet, which orbits too far from its star to have been built up bit by bit, researchers say.

Astronomy

A star nicknamed ‘Earendel’ may be the most distant yet seen

Analyzing Hubble Space Telescope images revealed a star whose light originates from about 12.9 billion light-years away, researchers say.

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

When the Magellanic Clouds cozy up to each other, stars are born

The Magellanic Clouds, the two closest star-making galaxies to the Milky Way, owe much of their stellar creativity to each other.

Astronomy

Here’s the best timeline yet for the Milky Way’s big events

A new study puts more precise dates on when the Milky Way formed its thick disk and collided with a neighboring galaxy.

Physics

Levitating plastic beads mimic the physics of spinning asteroids

"Tabletop asteroids," buoyed by sound waves, hint at why some loosely bound space rocks have odd shapes and can’t spin too quickly.

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.