Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have detected the faint molecular fingerprint of methyl chloride - a chemical commonly produced by industrial and biological processes here on Earth ...
Astronomy
Oct 2, 2017
0
286
Supernovas—the violent endings of the brief yet brilliant lives of massive stars—are among the most cataclysmic events in the cosmos. Though supernovas mark the death of stars, they also trigger the birth of new elements ...
Astronomy
Jul 10, 2017
80
288
Pointing the Very Large Array (VLA) at a famous galaxy for the first time in two decades, a team of astronomers got a big surprise, finding that a bright new object had appeared near the galaxy's core. The object, the scientists ...
Astronomy
May 23, 2017
7
976
A massive protostar, deeply nestled in its dust-filled stellar nursery, recently roared to life, shining nearly 100 times brighter than before. This outburst, apparently triggered by an avalanche of star-forming gas crashing ...
Astronomy
Mar 15, 2017
59
348
For the first time, astronomers have seen a dusty disk of material around a young star fragmenting into a multiple-star system. Scientists had suspected such a process, caused by gravitational instability, was at work, but ...
Astronomy
Oct 26, 2016
26
508
Supermassive black holes, millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun, are found at the centers of galaxies. Many of these galactic behemoths are hidden within a thick doughnut-shape ring of dust and gas known as a ...
Astronomy
Sep 15, 2016
31
1657
A violent outburst by the young star V883 Orionis has given astronomers their first view of a water "snowline" in a protoplanetary disk - the transition point around the star where the temperature and pressure are low enough ...
Astronomy
Jul 13, 2016
0
1342
Like a pair of human hands, certain organic molecules have mirror-image versions of themselves, a chemical property known as chirality. These so-called "handed" molecules are essential for biology and have intriguingly been ...
Astronomy
Jun 14, 2016
23
3975
Subtle distortions hidden in ALMA's stunning image of the gravitational lens SDP.81 are telltale signs that a dwarf dark galaxy is lurking in the halo of a much larger galaxy nearly 4 billion light-years away. This discovery ...
Astronomy
Apr 14, 2016
66
1796
The most luminous galaxy in the Universe - a so-called obscured quasar 12.4 billion light-years away - is so violently turbulent that it may eventually jettison its entire supply of star-forming gas, according to new observations ...
Astronomy
Jan 15, 2016
61
1187
