Picture a city of a trillion stars holding its breath. Deep in the core, two invisible heavyweights drag spacetime itself into a tightening spiral, their dance silent yet ferociously bright in everything but sound. Astronomers have chased this mystery for decades, piecing together clues from flickering quasars, slingshotted stars, and ripples that make galaxies ...
It is the most one-way door in the cosmos, a border drawn by gravity so fierce that even light cannot stage a retreat. For decades, the event horizon has been framed as an absolute silence, and yet new observations whisper clues from just outside its edge. Images of glowing rings, ripples in spacetime from ...
Every moment of every day, tiny fragments from the deepest reaches of the cosmos are silently drifting down through Earth’s atmosphere and settling on surfaces all around you. These microscopic travelers have journeyed billions of miles across the solar system, some carrying materials older than our planet itself. Right now, as you read this, space ...
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found one of the strangest things in the vast cosmic menagerie: a celestial owl staring back at us from 11 billion light-years away. This strange structure is not just any old galactic formation; it is known as the “Cosmic Owl.” It’s the result of two very rare ring ...
The extraordinary features of a rapidly moving celestial object are scintillating astronomers’ interest. Upon initial discovery, A11pl3Z was given a name but recently NASA has confirmed it as 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object out of four comets or asteroids discovered. Unlike the comets or asteroids which are bound to the sun’s asteroid belt and viewable ...
Jupiter-sized exoplanets which emerge as a proxy for accelerating self-sabotage by instigating tremendous outbursts from their parent stars seem as violations to the conventional structure of planetary systems; astronomers have identified such a diabolic planet, HIP 67522 b. Located within its parent star’s magnetic field, HIP 67522 b’s orbital position subjects it to flare beams ...
Astronomers have found a rare Jupiter-sized planet hiding at the edge of the Milky Way using a phenomenon that Albert Einstein predicted more than a hundred years ago. This is part of a cosmic detective story that has been going on for years. Gravitational microlensing, which uses the bending of space-time itself, found the exoplanet ...
Behind clouds of interstellar dust, a cosmic drama is playing out deep in the southern constellation of Chamaeleon. The Chamaeleon I dark cloud is one of the closest places to Earth where stars are born. It is only 550 light-years away. In this “stellar nursery,” newborn stars break through the darkness and light up huge ...
Astronomers have been trying to fit the cosmic puzzle of how the universe changed from a dark, featureless void into a glittering expanse of stars and galaxies for decades. Now, a faint whisper from the dawn of time, a radio signal emitted just 100 million years after the Big Bang has given scientists an unheard-of ...
Water in the great, cold nurseries where stars birth has a cosmic fingerprint. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have found, for the first time, a rare form of water ice surrounding a young star remarkably similar to our infant Sun. Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, this finding implies that some of ...
