Astrophysicists have taken a major step forward in understanding how supermassive black holes formed. Using data from Hubble and two other space telescopes, Italian researchers have found the best evidence yet for the seeds ...
Astronomy
May 24, 2016
69
1413
Imagine you want to measure the size of a room, but it's completely dark. If you shout, you can tell if the space you're in is relatively big or small, depending on how long it takes to hear the echo after it bounces off ...
Astronomy
Apr 26, 2016
0
90
A nebula known as "the Spider" glows fluorescent green in an infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). The Spider, officially named IC 417, lies near a much smaller object ...
Astronomy
Apr 15, 2016
0
63
An international team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, has obtained the most detailed 'fingerprint' of a rocky planet outside our solar system to date, and found a planet of two halves: one that is almost ...
Astronomy
Mar 30, 2016
2
914
The last decade has seen a bonanza of exoplanet discoveries. Nearly 2,000 exoplanets—planets outside our solar system—have been confirmed so far, and more than 5,000 candidate exoplanets have been identified. Many of ...
Astronomy
Mar 29, 2016
2
506
When a team of astronomers found a galaxy in the direction of Ursa Major two years ago, they weren't sure what to make of it.
Astronomy
Mar 29, 2016
20
220
For centuries, the solar system was viewed as a standard blueprint for planetary systems in the universe, with a star (our sun) at the center of a circular track, and a planet orbiting within each lane. Smaller, rockier planets ...
Astronomy
Mar 28, 2016
1
59
By pushing the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to its limits astronomers have shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the distance to the most remote galaxy ever seen in the Universe. This galaxy existed just 400 ...
Astronomy
Mar 3, 2016
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5198
The early universe was a chaotic mess of gas and matter that only began to coalesce into distinct galaxies hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. It would take several billion more years for such galaxies to assemble ...
Astronomy
Jan 7, 2016
24
988
Astronomers are finding dozens of the fastest stars in our galaxy with the help of images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.
Astronomy
Jan 5, 2016
11
1065
