When clouds collide, destruction and creation go hand-in-hand

All stars are born from the collapse of clouds of dust and gas. But triggering star formation is a tricky process, because these gas clouds can just hang out doing nothing for billions of years. A pair of researchers have ...

Astronomers go hunting for mysterious q-balls

Our universe may feature large, macroscopic clumps of dark matter known as q-balls. These q-balls would be absolutely invisible, but they may reveal their presence through tiny magnifications of starlight.

How did Dimorphos form?

The otherwise unremarkable double asteroid of Didymos and Dimorphos made headlines as the target of NASA's successful Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission. With new details about the system emerging, astronomers have ...

Observatory achieves 'first light' with new planet finder

A new planet-hunting instrument at W. M. Keck Observatory has achieved "first light," capturing its first data from the sky and marking an exciting chapter in the search for Earth-sized planets around other stars, which are ...

Colliding galaxies dazzle in Gemini North image

An evocative new image captured by the Gemini North telescope in Hawai'i reveals a pair of interacting spiral galaxies—NGC 4568 and NGC 4567—as they begin to clash and merge. These galaxies are entangled by their mutual ...

Webb's journey to L2 Is nearly complete

On Monday, Jan. 24, engineers plan to instruct NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to complete a final correction burn that will place it into its desired orbit, nearly 1 million miles away from the Earth at what is called ...

Roman Space Telescope will also find rogue black holes

In the past, we've reported about how the Roman Space Telescope is potentially going to be able to detect hundreds of thousands of exoplanets using a technique known as microlensing. Exoplanets won't be the only things it ...

Factoring in gravitomagnetism could do away with dark matter

Observations of galactic rotation curves give one of the strongest lines of evidence pointing towards the existence of dark matter, a non-baryonic form of matter that makes up an estimated 85% of the matter in the observable ...

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