Astronomy

The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS carries a chemical clue to conditions in the planetary system of its origin, locked away long before it reached our sun. Its methane signature is unusually rich in heavy hydrogen, suggesting […]

Neutrinos are funny little particles that weigh almost nothing, making them one of the universe’s most elusive building blocks. They can come from objects as mundane as bananas and as exotic as supernovas—the exploding death […]

A tiny glass chip developed by researchers at Heriot-Watt University has linked two telescopes together to enable them to act as a single powerful instrument, marking an important step toward a new generation of astronomical […]

In 2016, a binary star system emitting unusually strong gamma rays was discovered in our galactic neighborhood. Now, astronomers have found the smoking gun, or rather, a smoking trail of cool molecular gas that suggests […]

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have found evidence that a distant, exceptionally blue galaxy may allow most of its ionizing radiation to escape into space. Known as EBG-1, the gravitationally lensed galaxy […]

When we think of extraterrestrial intelligence that might be out there among the stars, we tend to think of creatures not too unlike us, though maybe with gray skin, probably bald and with big black […]

Most of us could spend our entire lives looking at the night sky and see very few changes. The moon becomes more or less illuminated, the planets drift placidly through the sky, satellites and the […]

NASA’s Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes have captured a hauntingly dynamic star-forming scene, like a spectral form rising out of a cold mist. It lies within the vast Carina Nebula, a diffuse star-forming region […]

Preview data from the recently completed NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile point to a wave of discoveries that may complete the census of the Milky Way’s neighboring galaxies—including its faintest companions.This post was […]

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a faint glow in the universe dating back to roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang, long before stars or galaxies emerged. Detecting this light and mapping its fluctuations […]