Astronomy

After years of work building an exquisitely sensitive instrument, University of Chicago scientists stood and watched as it flew up and out of sight into the fiercely blue Antarctic sky. Launched on Dec. 20, it […]

Using HARPS and HARPS-N spectrographs, astronomers have observed a nearby K-type star designated HD 176986, known to host two super-Earth exoplanets. The observations resulted in the discovery of another planet in the system at least […]

Gas giants are large planets mostly composed of helium and/or hydrogen. Although these planets have dense cores, they don’t have hard surfaces. Jupiter and Saturn are the gas giants in our solar system, but there […]

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was designed to look back in time and study galaxies that existed shortly after the Big Bang. In so doing, scientists hoped to gain a better understanding of how […]

For decades, astronomers have been watching WOH G64, an enormous heavyweight star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy visible with the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere. This star is more than 1,500 times […]

Astronomers from the University of Tokyo in Japan and elsewhere have employed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe a distant ultraviolet-luminous galaxy known as CEERS2-588. Results of the observational campaign, published January 29 […]

A group of US astronomers may have uncovered the first evidence for a dark matter sub-halo lurking just beyond our stellar neighborhood. Reporting their findings in Physical Review Letters, a team led by Sukanya Chakrabarti […]

A study led by the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), CSIC-INTA, using modeling techniques developed at the University of Oxford, has uncovered an unprecedented richness of small organic molecules in the deeply obscured nucleus of a […]

An international collaboration of astrophysicists that includes researchers from Yale has created and tested a detection system that uses gravitational waves to map out the locations of merging black holes—known as supermassive black hole binaries—around […]

A newly discovered comet has astronomers excited, with the potential to be a spectacular sight in early April. C/2026 A1 (MAPS) was spotted by a team of four amateur astronomers with a remotely operated telescope […]