Scientists detect an explosion on a white dwarf dead star
When stars like our Sun use up all their fuel, they shrink to form white dwarfs. Sometimes such dead stars flare back to life in...
Scientists find easier way to measure black holes in distant galaxies
Three years ago, the first ever image of a black hole stunned the world. A black pit of nothingness enclosed by a fiery ring of...
Volcanoes may have killed Venus with a runaway greenhouse, and almost the Earth too
What turned Venus into hell? It could have simply been a steadily-warming Sun, but new research suggests that Volcanoes may have played a role in...
How physics can help us make sense of multiverse madness
If you’re a fan of science fiction films, you’ll likely be familiar with the idea of alternate universes – hypothetical planes of existence with...
This black widow star devours its rapidly circling companion
In black widow star systems, a rapidly spinning dead star, called a pulsar, blasts its orbiting companion with radiation, slowly evaporating it. Like their namesake...
Gravity telescope could image exoplanets, shows Stanford study
In the time since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1992, astronomers have detected more than 5,000 planets orbiting other stars. But when astronomers detect...
Spinning stars shed new light on strange galactic signal
Scientists have found an alternative explanation for a mysterious gamma-ray signal coming from the center of the galaxy, which was long claimed as a...
Scientists find the ancestor of a supermassive black hole
Scientists identified a distant object with properties that lie between those of a galaxy and those of a so-called quasar. The object was born relatively...
Pluto’s orbit is surprisingly unstable, shows study
In 1930, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered the fabled "Ninth Planet" (or "Planet X") while working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The existence of...
Scientists find a new kind of stellar explosion called micronova
Astronomers, with the help of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), have observed a new type of stellar explosion — a...