Astronomy News

Aug 27, 2020 by News Staff

Around five years ago, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected high-energy gamma rays coming from TXS 0128+554, an elliptical galaxy located some 500 million light-years away in the constellation of Cassiopeia. Purdue University’ Professor Matthew Lister and colleagues have since taken a closer look using NSF’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This multi-frequency composite VLBA image shows young...

Aug 26, 2020 by News Staff

A team of astronomers from Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, France and Japan may have solved the so-called ‘Galactic bar paradox,’ whereby...

Aug 26, 2020 by News Staff

A team of astronomers in the United Kingdom has used a machine learning algorithm to analyze a sample of candidate exoplanets identified by NASA’s Kepler...

Aug 25, 2020 by News Staff

Free-floating, or rogue, exoplanets — free-floating planetary-mass objects that do not orbit a star and instead travel through space — could...

Aug 25, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

An international team of scientists has found interstellar iron-60, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 2.6 million years that is predominantly produced...

Aug 24, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Astronomers using the MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have captured a beautiful image...

Aug 24, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

A new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a tiny portion of a nebula called the Cygnus Loop. This Hubble image shows a small portion of...

Aug 21, 2020 by News Staff

A new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the coma of comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) and its dusty output. This image of comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)...

Aug 20, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers have observed cold, dense and high-velocity molecular gas outflowing from the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. The presence of this gas is puzzling,...

Aug 20, 2020 by News Staff

A series of ‘black dwarf’ supernovae will be the last astrophysical events to occur in our Universe prior to the so-called heat death, when the Universe...

Aug 20, 2020 by News Staff

New images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory show small knots of metal-rich debris in the remnant of Kepler’s supernova, also known as SN 1604,...

Aug 19, 2020 by News Staff

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Harvard University astrophysicists Avi Loeb and Amir Siraj show that an equal-mass stellar companion...

Aug 19, 2020 by News Staff

Multiple supernova explosions about 65 light-years away may have contributed to the ozone depletion and several subsequent extinction events at the Devonian-Carboniferous...

Aug 19, 2020 by News Staff

A small near-Earth asteroid designated 2020 QG safely flew past our planet on August 16 at 12:08 a.m. EDT (August 15 at 9:08 p.m. PDT) at a distance of...

Aug 19, 2020 by News Staff

A team of professional astronomers and citizen scientists from the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project has spotted 95 new brown dwarfs near the Sun. An artist’s...

Aug 18, 2020 by News Staff

‘Oumuamua, a recently-discovered cigar-shaped object of extrasolar origin, is not made of molecular hydrogen ice after all, according to a new study...

Aug 17, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced a spectacular image of part of the distorted spiral galaxy NGC 2442/NGC 2443. This Hubble image shows...

Aug 13, 2020 by News Staff

The red supergiant Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the night sky and appears even more luminous because it is so close to Earth, only 650 light-years...

Aug 13, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered an extremely distant galaxy that looks surprisingly like our...

Aug 11, 2020 by News Staff

On July 4, 2020, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) completed its primary mission and is continuing its search for new extrasolar worlds. An...