What was here before the solar system?

The solar system is old. Like, dial-up-fax-machine-old. 4.6 billion years to be specific. The solar system has nothing on the universe. It's been around for 13.8 billion years, give or take a few hundred million. That means ...

Giant cosmic tsunami wakes up comatose galaxies

Galaxies are often found in clusters, with many 'red and dead' neighbours that stopped forming stars in the distant past. Now an international team of astronomers, led by Andra Stroe of Leiden Observatory and David Sobral ...

A serendipitous gravitational lens

(PhysOrg.com) -- The path traveled by a light beam will bend in the presence of matter. This remarkable prediction, reached by Einstein in his theory of general relativity, was confirmed by observations of the solar eclipse ...

Help! My stars are leaking!

Star clusters are wonderful test beds for theories of stellar formation and evolution. One of the key roles they play is to help astronomers understand the distribution of stellar masses as stars form (in other words, how ...

Dense star clusters shown to be binary black hole factories

The coalescence of two black holes—a very violent and exotic event—is one of the most sought-after observations of modern astronomy. But, as these mergers emit no light of any kind, finding such elusive events has been ...

A river of stars in the solar neighborhood

Astronomy & Astrophysics publishes the work of researchers from the University of Vienna, who have found a river of stars, a stellar stream in astronomical parlance, covering most of the southern sky. The stream is relatively ...

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