Astrophysics Stories
Look closely at this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and you’ll see galaxies of various shapes and sizes clustered together toward the center-left of the image. A few foreground stars shine brightly and are easily distinguished by the spikes…
An international team studying data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope concludes the mission detected a rare, unusually luminous supernova. The researchers say it likely received its power-up from a supermagnetized neutron star born in the stellar collapse that triggered…
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals an enigmatic galaxy with a bright center and a face that hints at spiral structure, yet it holds no obvious spiral arms. Reddish-brown clumps and filaments of dust partially obscure the galaxy’s full…
NASA’s TESS has released its most complete view of the starry sky to date
A recently developed ultra-black coating not only efficiently absorbs light, but is also extremely thin and durable, enabling its potential use on starshades that could someday support the imaging of exoplanets and potentially facilitate the detection of life beyond our…
The Milky Way’s galactic bulge, the bulbous region that surrounds the galactic center, contains a dense collection of stars, planets, and other free-floating objects. This region has been studied for decades with numerous ground-based and space-based telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble…
A new paper from NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project announces that volunteers have essentially doubled the number of known brown dwarfs, with over 3,000 new discoveries made over the past 10 years since the project began. Brown dwarfs are…
A study of NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) data on stellar pairs undergoing mutual eclipses has uncovered more than two dozen candidate exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system. This method allows the mission to locate planets it couldn’t…
In this new picture from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, a spiral galaxy glittering with star clusters is the center of attention. NGC 3137 is located 53 million light-years away in the constellation Antlia (the Air Pump).
A newly discovered object may be a key to unlocking the true nature of a mysterious class of sources that astronomers have found in the early universe in recent years. A “X-ray dot” found by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory could…