The universe can’t hide behind the zone of avoidance any longer
Our view of the cosmos is always limited by the fact we are located within a galaxy filled with interstellar gas and dust.
This is...
Can a dead star keep exploding?
In September 2022, an automated sky survey detected what seemed to be a supernova explosion about one billion light-years away.
The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)...
Life might be easiest to find on planets that match an earlier earth
We’re inching closer and closer to reliably detecting biosignatures on distant planets.
Much of the focus is on determining which chemicals indicate life’s presence.
But life...
Why some distant exoplanets are mysteriously shrinking
Have you ever wondered about planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets? They come in all sizes, from small, rocky ones like Earth...
Scientists suspect there’s ice hiding on the Moon, and a host of missions are...
Building a space station on the Moon might seem like something out of a science fiction movie, but each new lunar mission is bringing...
How black holes consume entropy
Entropy is one of those fearsomely deep concepts that form the core of entire fields of physics (in this case, thermodynamics) that is unfortunately...
When stars consume their partners, we could detect a blast of neutrinos
You might be familiar with the bizarre ritual of the female praying mantis which,
I’m told, bites off the head and eats other body parts...
Scientists find aurora-like radio emission above a sunspot
A team of astronomers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology's Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research (NJIT-CSTR) has made an exciting discovery involving a sunspot,...
Growing black hole seen only 470 million years after the big bang
One of the big questions in cosmology asks when black holes first showed up in the early Universe.
Recently astronomers discovered the most distant (and...
How we get ultra-compact dwarf galaxies
I have been fascinated by galaxies for most of my adult life.
I find it amazing that, just as we can ascertain the lifecycle of...