Astronomy

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.

Astronomy

Cosmic Couple: One galaxy, two gravitational beasts

Astronomers welcomed the discovery of two black holes in one galaxy, which confirms some ideas about how galaxies and black holes merge and evolve.

Astronomy

More evidence of a flat universe

Another balloon-borne experiment recording relic radiation from the Big Bang has found evidence that the universe is flat.

Astronomy

A supernova’s shocking development

Astronomers have for the first time recorded the full force of the shock wave hurled from supernova 1987A, the brightest stellar explosion witnessed from Earth since the invention of the modern telescope.

Astronomy

New sky map: Look, Ma, no Milky Way!

Using a radio telescope to record emissions from hydrogen gas, astronomers have penetrated the murk of the Milky Way to map the entire southern sky.

Astronomy

Newfound Galaxy Goes the Distance

Astronomers have discovered a galaxy so remote that the light reaching Earth left the body some 13.6 billion years ago, making it the most distant object ever detected.

Astronomy

Something New on the Sun

The sharpest visible-light images of the sun ever recorded are revealing puzzling, new features of sunspots, the dark regions where the sun's powerful magnetic field is concentrated.

Astronomy

Milky Way black hole gets real

Tracing the path of a star orbiting near the center of our galaxy, astronomers have found the best evidence to date that a supermassive black hole lies at the Milky Way’s core.

Astronomy

Cosmic rays from the solar system

Dust grains from the Kuiper belt, a storehouse of comets and other frozen bodies in the outer solar system, are the source of some of the lower energy cosmic rays that bombard Earth.