Astronomy

Astronomers have generated the first three-dimensional map of a planet orbiting another star, revealing an atmosphere with distinct temperature zones—one so scorching that it breaks down water vapor, a team co-led by a Cornell expert […]

The universe is a strange place. The X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) orbiting observatory recently highlighted this fact, when it was turned on a pulsar to document its powerful cosmic winds.This post was originally […]

A new study analyzing historical photographs taken by the Palomar Observatory between 1949 and 1957 has detected several mysterious bright spots in the sky. These transient objects, captured on film before the first satellites were […]

Small and unassuming, Segue 1 is a nearby dwarf galaxy containing only a handful of stars—too few to provide the gravity needed to keep itself from scattering into space. Like other dwarf galaxies, it was […]

An international team of researchers led by the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) has shed light on a decades-long debate about why galaxies spin faster than expected—and whether this behavior is caused by invisible […]

In November 1572, a brilliant new star appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia, shining so brightly that it was visible during the day. Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe carefully documented this celestial phenomenon, and the supernova remnant […]

How can artificial intelligence (AI) help astronomers identify celestial objects in the night sky? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the […]

Using the MeerKAT telescope, an international team of astronomers have detected 30 new radio transient pulsars as part of the Meer(more) TRAnsients and Pulsars (MeerTRAP) project. The discovery was reported in a paper published Oct. […]

The sun is frequently ejecting huge masses of plasma, called coronal mass ejections (CMEs), into space. They often occur together with sudden brightenings called flares, and sometimes extend far enough to disturb Earth’s magnetosphere, generating […]

Dark matter has two central properties: it has mass like regular matter, and unlike regular matter, it reacts weakly or not at all with light. Neutrinos satisfy these two criteria, but neutrinos move through space […]