When some stars get old, they eject gas and dust, forming a cloud of electrically charged material in space called a planetary nebula. These nebulae all tend to have the same layered structure, but a team of scientists recently spotted a kind of planetary nebula that looks to be inside out.
August 2018 rolled in with a bang, literally, as explosions rocked Caracas, Venezuela on Saturday during a speech by President Nicolas Maduro—and government officials later said bomb-carrying drones were to blame. If the accounts of an attempted assassination using unmanned aerial vehicles is confirmed, the New York…
Professional astronomers are busy people. Some are mapping distant galaxies, others are listening for aliens, and more still are searching for habitable planets—which, it seems, we might one day need. But on occasion, they’re also called upon to do something that shouldn’t require a PhD: find the stars that people…
At this point, we’ve spotted several thousand exoplanets—there’s nothing super exciting anymore about finding a distant star with several worlds orbiting it. But today, scientists are announcing that they have seen an exoplanet in the middle of forming.
For years, astronomers have struggled to understand the source of anomalous microwave emissions coming from various locations across the Milky Way galaxy. A recently concluded survey of the planet-forming disks around young stars suggests these strange transmissions are being produced by something rather…
On the way to its final orbit around Earth, NASA’s planet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has sailed by the moon and snapped its first picture of space. We’ve said several times that TESS would be able to look at 200,000 stars in the 300 light-years around the Earth—but maybe this new shot will…
Scientists have spotted 13-billion-year-old oxygen in a distant galaxy—a signal of stars forming during the universe’s earliest days.
Space is a chaotic, ever-changing place. But that’s not limited to exploding stars and colliding black holes. Even our own Milky Way galaxy could have recently received a massive jolt from which it is still recovering.
The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft team has dropped its long-awaited trove of data about 1.7 billion stars. You can see a new visualization of all those stars in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies above, but you really need to zoom in to appreciate just how much stuff there is in the map. Yes, the specks are…
I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen the Little Dipper—the 2003 blackout, a family trip to the Grand Canyon, a camping trip, and a stargazing drive through Wisconsin cut short by the cold. I don’t remember ever seeing the faint band of the Milky Way. Growing up in New York’s suburbs, there just aren’t…
Around the same time our ancestors left Africa, a dim red dwarf star came to within 0.8 light-years of our Sun, marking the closest known flyby of a star to our Solar System. New research suggests Scholz’s Star, as it’s known, left traces of this interstellar encounter by perturbing some comets in the outer Oort Cloud.
It would be silly to think that scientists and astronomers have spotted all of the different kinds of weird things that exist in space. After all, we’re pretty sure the universe is mostly composed of dark matter and dark energy that we haven’t directly detected. But new research seems to imply that there are entirely…
Officially on the bucket list: Rafting down the Grand Canyon and camping out on its rocky banks under a night sky illuminated by the Milky Way.
The fine folks at NASA are sending a spacecraft to the Sun, and they want to send a little piece of you along with it. Here’s how to get your name on the ultimate “fry” list.
Neutron stars aren’t the twinkle-twinkle kind you typically see in the night sky. They’re stellar corpses, and incredibly dense sources of gravity, with perhaps 1.5 times the mass of the sun packed into an area less than a dozen miles across. Around 9,000 light years away from Earth, one neutron star seems to have…
When you sweep across the FM radio band, you don’t always hear music—mostly, you hear static. Lots of this ambient noise is actually garbled signals from throughout the Milky Way. If you had perhaps the most sensitive FM receiver on Earth, you might pick up the tiniest dip in volume: a signal that comes not from our…
Amateur astronomer Victor Buso was testing his camera-telescope setup in Argentina back in September 2016, pointing his Newtonian telescope at a spiral galaxy called NGC613. He collected light from the galaxy for the next hour and a half, taking short exposures to keep out the Santa Fe city lights. When he looked at…
Supernovae are already some of the brightest explosions in the universe—but there’s more mysterious type, called superluminous supernovae, that can shine a hundred times brighter than the usual ones. And on August 22, 2016, astronomers spotted one whose light traveled over 10 billion years to reach us.
Meet J0815+4729. If it were a Pokémon, it would be kind of like the Milky Way’s level-three Rattata.
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