Astronomers have discovered a new class of stellar object that seems to be defying death in inexplicable ways. The object, located about 15,000 light-years from Earth, appears to be a magnetar — the collapsed heart of a once-giant star, now cramming a sun’s worth of mass into a ball no wider than a city, while … Read more
Astronomers have peered back to the dawn of the cosmos to observe time ticking five times more slowly in the early universe than it does now — finally proving a prediction that Albert Einstein made more than a century ago. Researchers spotted the extreme slow-motion effect in data taken from bright cosmic beacons known as … Read more
A malevolent, screaming skull face. A witch cackling in profile. An all-seeing eye, gazing red and furious from the void of space. Like cosmic Halloween decorations, nebulas are some of the most gorgeous objects in the universe, and some of the spookiest. These vast regions of gas and dust, illuminated by starlight and sculpted by … Read more
In 1906, astronomer and businessman Percival Lowell launched a search for “Planet X,” a hypothetical giant planet orbiting the sun beyond Neptune. Lowell was convinced that Planet X existed based on some supposed irregularities he had observed in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. His belief eventually led to the discovery of Pluto in 1930, … Read more
Since the first direct detection of the space-time ripples known as gravitational waves was announced in 2016, astronomers regularly listen for the ringing of black holes across the universe. Projects like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (better known as LIGO) have detected almost 100 collisions between black holes (and sometimes neutron stars), which shake up … Read more
The sun is an ordinary star, but it’s not the only kind of star out there. Most stars in our galaxy are M dwarfs (sometimes called red dwarfs), which are significantly smaller and redder than the sun — and many of them may have the potential to host life, new research shows. A new reanalysis … Read more
Scientists recently discovered an asteroid that tags along with Earth during its yearly journey around the sun. Dubbed 2023 FW13, the space rock is considered a “quasi-moon” or “quasi-satellite,” meaning it orbits the sun in a similar time frame as Earth does, but is only slightly influenced by our planet’s gravitational pull. It is estimated … Read more
On June 30, 1908, an asteroid flattened an estimated 80 million trees in Siberia over 830 square miles (2,150 square kilometers). Dubbed the Tunguska event, it is considered the biggest asteroid impact in recorded history. Yet no one has ever found the asteroid fragments or an impact site. The asteroid lit up the skies in … Read more
Scientists caught Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus spraying a “huge plume” of watery vapor far into space — and that plume likely contains many of the chemical ingredients for life. Scientists detailed the eruption — glimpsed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in November 2022 — at a conference at the Space Telescope Science Institute … Read more
Rest easy: Earth probably won’t be creamed by a killer asteroid in the next 1,000 years. New research accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal and available on the preprint server arXiv.org finds that none of the kilometer-wide (0.6 mile) asteroids that travel near Earth are likely to hit the planet in the next millennium. … Read more
