Astronomy

An international team of astronomers has employed the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to perform high-resolution observations of the Needle galaxy. Results of the new observational campaign, presented April 15 on the arXiv preprint server, […]

The moon has played a huge role in the development of Earth. It stabilizes the planet, tempers dramatic climate swings, and possibly even provides the tidal heating that might have led to the first life […]

From birth to death, stars generally slow by 100 to 1,000 times their initial rotation rates; in other words, they “spin down.” The sun’s total angular momentum has declined as material is gradually blown off […]

Astronomers can use telescopes to find specific molecules in the atmospheres of neighboring planets, in nebulae—clouds of interstellar dust and gas—hundreds or thousands of light-years away, or in galaxies beyond the far reaches of the […]

Finding planets used to be a painstaking business. Astronomers would fix their gaze on a handful of carefully chosen stars, watch and wait, and hope to catch the faint dip in starlight that signals a […]

The Fe Kα line, or iron Kα line, is often used in astronomical research to understand the physical composition of astronomical objects. This line is produced when a K-shell electron of an iron ion in […]

Astronomers, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), have confirmed the existence of a close quasar pair housed in a pair of merging galaxies seen when the universe was less than a billion years old, […]

It takes a moment for the eyes to adjust. A faint spark appears in the darkness; then another, brighter one. Soon, stars, planets and entire constellations emerge. Before long, a whole galaxy stretches across the […]

In the exotic world of particle physics, neutrinos may be the most mysterious members. They rarely interact with other matter, have almost no mass, and have no electrical charge. These characteristics make them extremely difficult […]

A team of astrophysicists from Nanjing University and University of Bonn have demonstrated that, rather than being random, the mass of new stars born inside a star cluster is actually governed by a defined process […]