In May, the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration shocked the world when it released an image of what appears to be a splotchy French cruller on fire. In reality, this wasn’t a doughnut. It was a stunning portrait of Sagittarius A*, the mighty black…
At the heart of almost every galaxy lies an enormous black hole. These monsters are so massive that they get a classification of their own: supermassive black holes, with masses millions or even billions of times the mass of our sun. And when two galax…
Astronomers said Tuesday that the world’s largest radio telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, might’ve picked up a signal from the youngest exoplanet discovered to date.It’s a nascent world thought to have a Jupiter-l…
One major caveat to the spread of electric vehicles is the question of what we’re going to do with all of these car batteries once their time is up. There’s also concern about the environmental impact of lithium mining, not to mention that of other ess…
Astronomers presented us with a mysterious video Wednesday: footage decked with lime green smudges steadily evolving on a dark background. But right at the center of this recording, one smudge isn’t like the others. It’s the brightest neon blob of a…
What’s happening
New radio telescope observations have brought a new lens on one of our universe’s most beautiful stellar nurseries.
Why it matters
Having a clearer sense of what star-forming regions look like could help us understand …
Somewhere across the universe, a magnetic field shrieked.Two stars, created in the same stellar nursery but birthed on opposite ends, appear to have found each other. But when these stars aligned, there were no angels crooning or futures falling int…
In 2019, astronomers captured a hidden piece of the universe for us to download onto our computer screens. It was the first-ever image of a black hole — and it revealed the violence of the cosmic beast. This chaotic void, dubbed M87*, spews out a j…
It’s black hole week, and on Wednesday, NASA released what could be considered this year’s black hole week theme music. It is, quite literally, the soundtrack of a black hole.More specifically, it’s the melody of a vast, monstrous chasm that sits mo…
This week’s image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxy M91, a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation of Coma Berenices. It is relatively nearby to us, at 55 million light-years away, and it is part of our local supercluster. The M in its…
The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted what’s been confirmed as the largest comet ever seen.
At around 80 miles across, the comet, named C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein), is larger than Rhode Island, according to NASA, which shared news of Hubble…
When you think of innovative new space launch concepts, you likely think of rockets like SpaceX’s Starship or NASA’s Space Launch System carrying telescopes or robotic explorers out into orbit and beyond. And certainly, rockets are here to stay, remain…