Astronomy

A star’s mass determines its entire life story, from how it shines to how it dies. For young stars shrouded in dust, getting an accurate mass has long been difficult, but new radio measurements are […]

Ultra-faint dwarf galaxies—tiny satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way—have long been seen as cosmic fossils. Now, a new study published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society uses an unprecedented set of simulations […]

New observations of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS include the first measurement of the abundance of deuterated water relative to ordinary water in an interstellar object. Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) discovered that […]

New observations and simulations by a team of researchers led by MPE reveal that a massive binary star near our galaxy’s center is responsible for creating a series of enigmatic gas clouds—compact gas clumps that […]

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team now is targeting as soon as early September 2026 for launch, ahead of the agency’s commitment to flight no later than May 2027.This post was originally published on […]

Fifteen years after Western astronomers first discovered “buckyballs” in space (soccer ball-shaped molecules that resemble a hollow sphere), they’re back with stunning images and rich data generated using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)—the most […]

NASA unveiled a new telescope on Tuesday to scan vast swaths of the universe for planets outside our solar system and probe the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.This post was originally published on […]

Astronomers from South Africa and India have analyzed archival data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) regarding a nearby small galaxy group known as IC 1262. Results of the new […]

At more than one million degrees, the sun’s atmosphere—the corona—is incredibly hot; but not everywhere. Time and again, huge structures of significantly cooler solar plasma—about 10,000 degrees—appear within the corona. These structures are known as […]

The universe has a hidden structure, and a University of Virginia professor is mapping it in 3D, using 46 million galaxies and quasars and 19 million stars. Satya Gontcho A Gontcho, an assistant professor in […]