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

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

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

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

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.