Astronomers witness ultra-fast winds erupt from a supermassive black hole
Astronomers have witnessed a dramatic and never-before-seen event near a supermassive black hole: an intense X-ray flare that, within hours, triggered ultra-fast winds blasting...
Did black holes change over time? Astronomers question a 50-year-old rule about quasars
Astronomers have uncovered surprising evidence that challenges a long-standing rule about quasars, some of the brightest objects in the universe.
The discovery suggests that the...
Supermassive black holes are picky eaters during galaxy mergers, study finds
Black holes are famous for their enormous appetites, pulling in gas, dust, and even light itself.
But new research shows that even the largest black...
How stardust really travels: A new study rewrites the story of life’s building blocks
The atoms that make up life on Earth—carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and more—were forged inside stars long before our planet existed.
For decades, astronomers believed they...
The solar system loses an ocean world
Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, may not have a subsurface ocean after all.
That’s according to a re-examination of data captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which...
Why the same galaxy can grow or decline—It depends on its neighbor
Galaxies may look serene from afar, but their lives are shaped by powerful internal structures and by the neighbors they keep.
A new study led...
Scientists crack 1.4-billion-year-old salt crystals to reveal Earth’s ancient air
More than a billion years before dinosaurs—and long before plants and animals—Earth looked very different.
In what is now northern Ontario, a shallow, salty lake...
Webb spots the ‘smoke’ from crashing exocomets around a nearby star
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was involved in yet another first discovery recently available in pre-print form on arXiv from Cicero Lu at...
Scientists solve a big bang theory puzzle that could point to dark matter
For years, one of the most intriguing mysteries in physics has been dark matter—an invisible substance thought to make up most of the matter...
Astronomers discover the violent origin of mysterious blue cosmic explosions
For years, astronomers have been puzzled by rare and dramatic flashes of blue and ultraviolet light that suddenly appear in distant galaxies and then...