Image: Hubble sweeps a messy star factory

This sprinkle of cosmic glitter is a blue compact dwarf galaxy known as Markarian 209. Galaxies of this type are blue-hued, compact in size, gas-rich, and low in heavy elements. They are often used by astronomers to study ...

Why is space black?

Imagine you're in space. Just the floating part, not the peeing into a vacuum hose or eating that funky "ice cream" from foil bags part. If you looked at the Sun, it would be bright and your retinas would crisp up. The rest ...

Caltech rocket experiment finds surprising cosmic light

Using an experiment carried into space on a NASA suborbital rocket, astronomers at Caltech and their colleagues have detected a diffuse cosmic glow that appears to represent more light than that produced by known galaxies ...

Universe older than it looks

When astronomers (Bond 2013) first dated the star HD 140283, which lies a mere 190 lightyears from Earth in the constellation of Libra, they were puzzled. This rare, star appeared to be rather ancient and was quickly nicknamed ...

ALMA reveals ghostly shape of 'coldest place in the universe'

At a cosmologically crisp one degree Kelvin (minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit), the Boomerang Nebula is the coldest known object in the Universe – colder, in fact, than the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, which is the natural ...

Feeding galaxy caught in distant searchlight

An international group of astronomers that includes UC Santa Barbara astrophysicist Crystal Martin and former UCSB postdoctoral researcher Nicolas Bouché has spotted a distant galaxy hungrily snacking on nearby gas. The ...

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