Astronomy News

Astronomers Use Slime Mold to Reveal Cosmic Web’s Dark Threads

In shaping the Universe, gravity builds a vast cobweb-like structure of filaments tying galaxies and clusters of galaxies together along invisible bridges hundreds of millions of light-years long. This is known as the cosmic web. Image credit: Burchett et al.
Mar 11, 2020 by News Staff

Physarum polycephalum, a single-cell organism known as slime mold, builds complex web-like filamentary networks in search of food, always finding near-optimal pathways to connect different locations. In shaping the Universe, gravity builds a vast cobweb-like structure of filaments tying galaxies and clusters of galaxies together along invisible bridges of gas and dark matter hundreds of millions of light-years long. There is an uncanny resemblance...

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TESS Discovers New Class of Pulsating Star

Mar 10, 2020 by News Staff

Using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a team of professional astronomers and citizen scientists has discovered a star...

An artist’s rendering of two brown dwarfs. Image credit: Roberto Molar Candanosa & Sergio Dieterich, Carnegie Institution for Science.

Astronomers Spot Rare Eclipsing Brown-Dwarf Binary System

Mar 10, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using robotic telescopes at ESO’s newest planet-hunting SPECULOOS (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) Observatory in...

An artist’s impression of several moons forming around a young gas-giant planet. Image credit: Nagoya University.

Single-Moon Systems Possible around Gas-Giant Planets

Mar 9, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

A team of astronomers in Japan has demonstrated that systems can form that have only one large moon, such as Titan around Saturn, around a gas giant. An...

This image, taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 on board the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the central part of the spiral galaxy NGC 1589. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble.

Hubble Space Telescope Observes NGC 1589

Mar 9, 2020 by Natali Anderson

NASA has released a stunning image snapped by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of the central region of the edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 1589. This image,...

This image from ALMA shows the M2 spectral-type supergiant star Betelgeuse. Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / E. O’Gorman / P. Kervella.

Betelgeuse Isn’t Dimming Because It’s About To Explode — It’s Just Dusty

Mar 6, 2020 by News Staff

On February 15, 2020, a team of U.S. astronomers observed Betelgeuse, a dimming red supergiant located approximately 650 light-years away from Earth, using...

An artist’s impression of W43A. Image credit: NAOJ.

ALMA Captures Bipolar Planetary Nebula in the Making

Mar 6, 2020 by News Staff

W43A, an aged star located some 7,000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila, ejected high-speed bipolar jets less than 60 years ago, according to...

Wells et al estimate that there should be at least 10 -- currently undiscovered -- exoplanets which are favorably located to detect the Earth and are capable of sustaining life as we know it. Image credit: NASA.

Study: Life Might Be Common in Inflationary Universe

Mar 6, 2020 by News Staff

In a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, University of Tokyo’s Professor Tomonori Totani looked at how the building blocks of life could...

An artist’s conception of a ringed planet transiting in front of its host star. Image credit: Robin Dienel / Carnegie Institution for Science.

Super-Puff Exoplanets May Actually Have Huge Ring Systems

Mar 4, 2020 by News Staff

Super-puffs, an intriguing, growing class of exoplanets, are the objects with exceptionally large radii for their masses and thus correspondingly low densities....

The structure of our Milky Way Galaxy with its warped Galactic disk, where the majority of its hundreds of billions of stars reside. Data from ESA’s Gaia spacecraft recently proved that the disk’s warp is precessing, essentially moving around similarly to a wobbling spinning top. The speed of the warp’s rotation is so high that it must have been caused by a rather powerful event, astronomers believe, perhaps an ongoing collision with another, smaller, galaxy which sends ripples through the disk like a rock thrown into water. Image credit: Stefan Payne-Wardenaar / NASA / JPL-Caltech / ESA.

Milky Way’s Warp Caused by Recent or Ongoing Encounter with Satellite Galaxy

Mar 3, 2020 by News Staff

Data from ESA’s Gaia star-mapping satellite show that the warped disk of our Milky Way Galaxy precesses, or wobbles, similarly to the motion of a spinning...

An artist’s impression of two white dwarfs in the process of merging; depending on the combined mass, the system may explode in a thermonuclear supernova, or coalesce into a single heavy white dwarf, as with WD J0551+4135. Image credit: Mark Garlick / University of Warwick.

Astronomers Spot Ultra-Massive White Dwarf with Unique Atmosphere

Mar 3, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers have discovered an ultra-massive white dwarf with a unique carbon-hydrogen mixed atmosphere. Named WD J055134.612+413531.09 (WD J0551+4135...

Sizes of 17 new planet candidates, compared to Mars, Earth, and Neptune. The planet in green is KIC 7340288b. Image credit: Michelle Kunimoto.

Astronomers Discover Seventeen New Extrasolar Planets

Mar 2, 2020 by News Staff

Using data gathered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, a team of astronomers in Canada has discovered 17 new exoplanets, including an Earth-sized world....

This Hubble image shows the central part of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 3887. The image is made up of observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in the infrared and optical parts of the spectrum. It is based on data obtained through three filters. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / P. Erwin et al.

Hubble Space Telescope Zooms In on NGC 3887

Mar 2, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured an amazing photo of the central region of a barred spiral galaxy called NGC 3887. This Hubble image shows...

Evidence for the biggest black hole eruption seen in the Universe comes from a combination of X-ray data from Chandra and XMM-Newton, and the Murchison Widefield Array and Giant Metrewave Telescope, as shown here. The eruption is generated by a black hole located in the central galaxy of the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, which has blasted out jets and carved a large cavity in the surrounding hot gas. Image credit: NASA / CXC / NRL / S. Giacintucci et al / ESA / XMM-Newton / NCRA / TIFR / GMRT / 2MASS / UMass / IPAC-Caltech / NSF.

Universe’s Most Powerful Black Hole Eruption Spotted

Feb 28, 2020 by News Staff

Using data from ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra X-ray space observatories, along with two ground-based radio telescopes in Australia and India,...

This artist’s impression shows planets K2-18b and c and their host star. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / M. Kornmesser.

Super-Earth Exoplanet K2-18b Could Have Right Conditions for Life

Feb 27, 2020 by News Staff

A team of astronomers from the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, UK, has found K2-18b, a planet of almost nine Earth masses in orbit...

2020 CD3 is estimated to be only between one and six meters across. Image credit: Jonny Lindner.

Earth Has New, Temporary Moon: 2020 CD3

Feb 27, 2020 by The Conversation

The Minor Planet Centre has just announced that our planet has been orbited by a second moon for the past three years or so. Designated 2020 CD3, the object...

This image, taken by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph on the Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pachón in Chile, shows the planetary nebula CVMP 1. Image credit: Gemini Observatory / NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory / AURA.

Astronomers Snap Photo of Beautiful Planetary Nebula

Feb 27, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Gemini South telescope on the summit of Cerro Pachon in Chile have taken a picture of CVMP 1, a planetary nebula located some 6,500...

This composite image shows the Orion Molecular Clouds, the target of the VANDAM survey. Yellow dots are the locations of the observed protostars on a blue background image made by ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory. Side panels show nine young protostars imaged by ALMA (blue) and the VLA (orange). Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / J. Tobin / AUI / NSF / S. Dagnello / Herschel / ESA.

Astronomers Observe Hundreds of Protoplanetary Disks in Orion Molecular Clouds

Feb 26, 2020 by News Staff

Using NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have captured images of 328...

An artist’s impression of an L dwarf star, a star with so little mass that it is only just above the boundary of actually being a star, caught in the act of emitting an enormous superflare of X-rays, as detected by ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory. Image credit: ESA.

XMM-Newton Detects X-ray Superflare from Ultracool Dwarf

Feb 25, 2020 by News Staff

Using data from the European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) onboard ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, astronomers have detected for the first time a...

These images, taken by the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, show the asteroid Pallas. Image credit: ESO / M. Marsset et al / MISTRAL algorithm, ONERA & CNRS.

Astronomers Snap New Images of Huge Asteroid Pallas

Feb 24, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) imager, an instrument installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT)...

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