Astronomy

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the Milky Way’s closest galactic neighbors—a small, gas-rich galaxy visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere, and bound to our galaxy by gravity, alongside its […]

Discovered in the Pictor II dwarf galaxy, star PicII-503 has an extreme deficiency in iron—less than 1/40,000th of the sun. This signature makes it the clearest example of a star within a primordial system that […]

Science in the modern era is increasingly reliant on enormous datasets and automated analysis. In astronomy, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)—a ten-year survey covering the entire southern sky […]

Gamma-ray bursts are the most violent explosions in the universe. In a fraction of a second, they can release more energy than the sun will emit across its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. Most are over before […]

Using data from the Magellan Clay telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), astronomers have investigated a galactic globular cluster known as NGC 5824. Results of the new study, available in a paper published March 5 […]

Patches of the sun’s surface often show strong magnetic fields. These fields can emerge within a matter of hours, and can decay slowly or quickly, sometimes over days, weeks, or even months. Thanks to a […]

A study led by the University of Oxford has identified a new type of planet beyond our solar system—one that stores large amounts of sulfur deep within a permanent ocean of magma. The findings have […]

We’re starting to see just how exceptional our own solar system and its history is, as more exoplanets are discovered. A fourth exoplanet discovery in the LHS 1903 system made by ESA’s CHEOPS mission places […]

Using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers have discovered a new super-Earth exoplanet orbiting a star located about 83 light years away. The newfound alien world is slightly larger than Earth and encircles its […]

Astronomers have employed the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) to investigate a peculiar pulsar wind nebula known as Vela X. Results of the new observations, published March 2 on the arXiv pre-print server, provide more […]