Astronomy

Douglas Adams told us the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. If only cosmology were so straightforward. Astronomers have been arguing for years about a number every bit as fundamental, and they […]

Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and elsewhere report the discovery of a binary system consisting of two brown dwarfs undergoing stable mass transfer. The detection of the system, designated ZTF J1239+8347, was […]

Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered an extrasolar planet orbiting TOI-4616—a nearby M-dwarf star. The newfound alien world, which received designation TOI-4616 b, is slightly larger than […]

One of the things astronomers find when they look around at galaxies is a correlation between a galaxy’s mass and the mass of its supermassive black hole. Contrary to popular belief, these SMBH don’t anchor […]

General relativity stands as one of the bedrock theories in modern physics. Its strange view of relative time and space has been confirmed by countless experimental and observational tests, from rotational frame dragging to the […]

Researchers at Northumbria University have used the most powerful space telescope ever built to answer one of the longest-standing puzzles in planetary science—why does Saturn appear to spin at a different speed depending on how […]

A luminous swirl set against the deep black of space, the barred spiral galaxy IC 486 glows with a soft, ethereal light in this new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Month image. IC […]

As the number of exoplanet detections has breached 6,000 and continues to grow, scientists are finding a wide variety of different solar system architectures. Critical to understanding how these architectures take shape is finding young […]

A team of cosmologists in China has introduced a mathematical framework that investigates two of the deepest mysteries in cosmology at the same time. Publishing their research in The Astrophysical Journal, Yun Chen and colleagues […]

Our Milky Way’s halo of hot gas is warmer to the “south” than the “north” because of an internal combustion engine-like effect that is compressing the gas like a piston, a new study has found. […]