Astronomy

We know black hole mergers occur because we can detect the resulting gravitational waves. But when trying to piece together the history of black hole mergers in the Milky Way, astronomers need another tactic. They […]

When two stars orbit one another in such a way that one blocks the other’s light each time it swings around, that’s an eclipsing binary. A new paper from NASA’s Eclipsing Binary Patrol citizen science […]

Disk galaxies, like our own Milky Way galaxy, commonly consist of both a thick and thin disk of stars—each with different features, including stellar population and movement. Three major theoretical scenarios have been proposed to […]

The earliest light in the universe has been traveling across space since just after the Big Bang. Known as the cosmic microwave background, it is imperceptible to the human eye. But if scientists can capture […]

An international team of astronomers has employed various satellites and ground-based telescopes to perform multiwavelength observations of a supernova remnant known as SNR J0450.4−7050. Results of the observational campaign, published June 18 on the pre-print […]

The Andromeda galaxy, also known as Messier 31 (M31), is the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way at a distance of about 2.5 million light-years. Astronomers use Andromeda to understand the structure and evolution […]

Detecting exoplanets is one thing, but imaging them is another thing entirely. Astronomers can detect them by the way they block their star’s light and by the way they make their stars wobble, and from […]

Using the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, astronomers have performed a chemical study of a globular cluster known as ESO 280-SC06. As a result, they found that ESO 280-SC06 is a tidally […]

In a recently published paper in Physical Review Letters, scientists propose a comprehensive theoretical framework indicating that gravitational wave signals from black hole mergers are more complex than earlier anticipated.This post was originally published on […]

Imagine a star so dense that a teaspoon of its material would weigh as much as Mount Everest, spinning hundreds of times per second while beaming radio waves across the universe. These are pulsars, the […]