Scientists can finally explain why some massive stars appear to dance around in the sky even though they are not actually moving: The stars have unusually bubbly guts that cause their surfaces to wobble, thus changing the amount of light they give off, according to a new study. The dancing stars are known as red … Read more
In 2012, a shriveled white star in a nearby galaxy reached the end of its life and exploded in a violent, thermonuclear supernova. Such explosions — known as type 1a supernovas — are a common end for billions of stars in our universe, typically resulting in the utter obliteration of the old star at the … Read more
A pulsar is a special kind of neutron star, which is the ultra-dense leftover core of a massive star. Pulsars emit beams of radiation that sweep out in circles as the pulsar spins. When those beams flash over Earth, we see them as regular, repeating pulses of radio emission. “Pulsars are spectacular objects themselves — … Read more
Researchers may have pinpointed the source of a famous supposed alien broadcast discovered nearly a half century ago. The prominent and still-mysterious Wow! Signal, which briefly blared in a radio telescope the night of Aug. 15, 1977, may have come from a sun-like star located 1,800 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. “The Wow! Signal … Read more
Astronomers have discovered a perplexing trend in Neptune’s atmosphere: Ever since the planet’s southern hemisphere summer began almost two decades ago, atmospheric temperatures in this region have plummeted, and scientists aren’t sure why. Neptune is the most distant planet in the solar system, around 30 times farther from the sun than Earth is. Just like … Read more
So far no one has found evidence of intelligent aliens elsewhere in the cosmos. But if they do exist, they might be hanging out on Dyson spheres circling the husks of sunlike stars called white dwarfs scattered throughout the Milky Way, a new paper argues. And that’s there we should be focusing our search for … Read more
Dark matter, the elusive substance that accounts for the majority of the mass in the universe, may be made up of massive particles called gravitons that first popped into existence in the first moment after the Big Bang. And these hypothetical particles might be cosmic refugees from extra dimensions, a new theory suggests. The researchers’ … Read more
Scientists have crafted a new message for any intelligent extraterrestrials who might be out there. And they want feedback on whether they should send it. The technology needed to send the message is not yet ready. And if and when the note is transmitted, it would take thousands of years for it to reach its … Read more
A possible galaxy that exists some 13.5 billion light-years from Earth has broken the record for farthest astronomical object ever seen. That age places this collection of stars, now dubbed HD1, between a time of total darkness — about 14 billion years ago the universe was a blank slate devoid of any stars or galaxies … Read more
Two of the strangest, most colossal structures in the Milky Way may have formed in a 100,000-year-long explosion at our galaxy’s center, new research suggests. Those structures — named the Fermi bubbles and eROSITA bubbles after the respective telescopes that discovered them — straddle the Milky Way’s center in an enormous hourglass shape, with one … Read more
