More than half of the Sun-like star systems surveyed in the Milky Way harbor a mysterious type of planet unlike any in our own solar system that the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to shine some light on. Larger than Earth, smaller than Neptune, and orbiting closer to their stars than Mercury orbits ...
Enthusiast Giuseppe Donatiello spotted the dwarf galaxy while scrutinizing publicly available data and his finding was investigated by professional astrophysicists, led by Dr. David Martinez-Delgado from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia, who used deeper images taken with the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo. By processing the data and performing photometric calibration, they confirmed the finding is a ...
This jewel-bright image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy NGC 2903. The telescope captured this image using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), installed in 2002 and 2009 respectively. Interestingly, it observed this particular galaxy in 2001, before the ACS and the WFC3 were installed. ...
A team of international scientists, including researchers from The Australian National University (ANU), have unveiled the largest number of gravitational waves ever detected. The discoveries will help solve some of the most complex mysteries of the Universe, including the building blocks of matter and the workings of space and time. The global team’s study, published ...
The universe was created about 13.8 billion years ago in a blaze of light: the big bang. Roughly 380,000 years later, after matter (mostly hydrogen) had cooled enough for neutral atoms to form, light was able to traverse space freely. That light, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, comes to us from every direction in ...
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features two interacting galaxies that are so intertwined that have a collective name — Arp 91. Their delicate galactic dance takes place more than 100 million light-years from Earth. The two galaxies comprising Arp 91 have their own names: The lower galaxy, which looks like a bright spot, is ...
A new study, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge and reported in the journal Physical Review D, suggests that some unexplained results from the XENON1T experiment in Italy may have been caused by dark energy, and not the dark matter the experiment was designed to detect. They constructed a physical model to help explain the ...
Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), a team of astronomers has obtained the sharpest and most detailed images yet of the Kleopatra asteroid. The observations have allowed the team to constrain the 3D shape and mass of this peculiar dog-bone asteroid to a higher accuracy than ever before. Their research provides ...
In 2019, astronomers spotted something incredible in our backyard: a rogue comet from another star system. Named Borisov, the icy snowball traveled 110,000 miles per hour and marked the first and only interstellar comet ever detected by humans. But what if these interstellar visitors — comets, meteors, asteroids, and other debris from beyond our solar ...
Black hole feeding patterns offer insight into their size, researchers report. A new study revealed that the flickering in the brightness observed in actively feeding supermassive black holes is related to their mass. Supermassive black holes are millions to billions of times more massive than the sun and usually reside at the center of massive ...