Astronomy

Astronomy

Hole in the Middle: Are midsize black holes the missing link?

Two teams of astronomers reported that they had confirmed the existence of a new class of black hole.

Astronomy

Reflecting on the Kuiper belt

A new study suggests that at least some members of the Kuiper belt, the reservoir of comets and other frozen objects that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune, reflect more sunlight and are considerably smaller than previously calculated.

Astronomy

Magnetars: A missing link

A rare group of ultradense stars may be magnetars, objects with the strongest magnetic fields known in the universe.

Astronomy

Spacecraft sounds out the sun’s hidden half

By detecting sound waves that have traveled through the sun, two physicists have for the first time found a way to view disturbances on the sun's hidden half, providing a glimpse of stormy weather patterns a week to 10 days before they come into view.

Astronomy

Birth of a Tiny Galaxy: In the universe, dwarfs may pop up last

Using the Hubble Space Telescope to observe a tiny galaxy still in the process of being born, astronomers are getting a rare glimpse of how larger galaxies formed early in the history of the universe.

Astronomy

Super fireworks

A blast wave from supernova 1987A, the brightest stellar explosion witnessed from Earth since 1604, has begun lighting up a ring of gas surrounding the explosion.

Astronomy

No signal from Mars Polar Lander

A radio signal that NASA hoped came from the vanished Mars Polar Lander has a terrestrial origin, scientists from the space agency and Stanford University have concluded.

Astronomy

Getting a Clear View

Outfitted with a mirror that flexes several hundred times a second to compensate for the blurring induced by Earth’s atmosphere, one of the world’s sharpest telescopes just got a whole lot sharper.

Astronomy

Tidal tails tell tales of newborn galaxies

Some streams of gas and dust ripped out of large galaxies appear to form their own galaxies and may provide astronomers with a close-up view of galaxy formation.

Astronomy

An image to relish

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a high-resolution image of an object that looks like a giant hamburger.

Astronomy

Lonely Universe

In a universe dominated by a mysterious antigravity force, dubbed dark energy, distant galaxies will eventually recede from each other faster than the speed of light and observers in our Milky Way some 50 billion years from now will see only a handful of other galaxies in the sky.

Astronomy

Votes cast for and against the WIMP factor

Physicists this week duked it out over a bunch of WIMPs, elementary particles that—if they exist—could solve a decades-old mystery in cosmology and help unify the four fundamental forces of nature.