After a journey lasting about two billion years, photons from an extremely energetic gamma-ray burst (GRB) struck the sensors on the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope on October 9th, 2022. ...
If you look at massive galaxies teeming with stars, you might be forgiven for thinking they are star factories, churning out brilliant balls of gas. But actually, less evolved dwarf galaxies have bigger regions of star factories, ...
Caves were some of humanity's first shelters. Who knows what our distant ancestors were thinking as they sought refuge there, huddling and cooking meat over a fire, maybe drawing animals on the walls. Caves protected our ...
Deep in the depths of our galactic ocean, astronomers have observed triggered star formation in the Nessie Nebula.
A delicate tracery of dust and bright star clusters threads across this image from the James Webb Space Telescope. The bright tendrils of gas and stars belong to the barred spiral galaxy NGC 5068, whose bright central bar ...
Researchers from Ohio State University have come up with a novel method to detect dark matter, based on existing meteor-detecting technology. By using ground-based radar to search for ionization trails, similar to those produced ...
When a star explodes (a supernova), it sends its intense burst of light out in all directions. On rare occasions, in the months and years that follow, rings of light or "light echoes" spread out from the original supernova ...
Imagine walking through a dense, hazy fog in the middle of the night, seeing patches of light from cars and towns shimmering in the distance. It's nearly impossible to tell if the lights are deep in the fog or beyond it. ...
If everything goes according to plan on December 25, we will enter a new era of astronomy with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It's an event that has been anticipated for a decade—it will be the largest ...
Very distant, active supermassive black holes are the brightest beacons in the universe. Known as quasars, these behemoths are surrounded by equally distant galaxies. In recent decades, researchers have gone on a cosmic treasure ...
