For centuries, humanity gazed upward, believing it understood the grand mechanics of the cosmos. But in the past few years, discoveries from distant galaxies, dying stars, and even the edges of our solar system have turned those beliefs upside down. From black holes that shouldn’t exist to planets where life might thrive in unimaginable conditions, ...
The last few years have been a blur of jaw-dropping space science, the kind that forces you to rewrite old notes and scrap comfortable assumptions. Telescopes peered deeper, probes flew braver, and data sets quietly whispered new truths about the cosmos. As a science journalist, I’ve watched seasoned researchers blink in surprise as theories bent ...
They start as quiet monsters, swallowing light and time, and end as the most honest questions in physics. For decades, black holes were places where our equations went to hide; now they’re where we go looking for answers. New observations of early, oversized black holes and crisp gravitational-wave signals have forced scientists to rethink what ...
Binary stars can be chaotic places for planets, and for years that chaos pushed many searches toward calmer, single suns. Now a team has flipped the script. By singling out 591 “edge-on” twin-star systems identified with Gaia data, researchers argue that these complicated neighborhoods may actually be the easiest places to find new worlds. Their ...
Imagine listening to the universe’s faintest whispers not with laser interferometers stretching kilometers, but with magnets humming softly in a cryogenic hall. That’s the audacious promise of new research showing that powerful superconducting magnets – some already being built for dark matter hunts – could double as detectors for high‑frequency gravitational waves. It’s a twist ...
Every time we point a powerful telescope at the night sky, we stage a quiet confrontation with time itself. Light doesn’t arrive instantly; it travels, carrying a record of where it came from. That simple limitation turns observatories into time machines, letting us witness galaxies as they were long before humans existed. The big story ...
The cosmos just threw us a curveball: a thunderclap of gravity from a collision so heavy, it shouldn’t exist under the usual rules of star death. In a hypothetical scenario involving detection during an observing run, the event forged a new black hole roughly about two hundred twenty-five times the Sun’s mass, pushing deep into ...
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 ...
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 ...
