Astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes to show that a recently-discovered galaxy is undergoing an extraordinary boom of stellar construction. The galaxy is 12.7 billion light years from ...
Astronomy
Dec 8, 2016
15
733
Astronomers Aaron Smith and Volker Bromm of The University of Texas at Austin, working with Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have discovered evidence for an unusual kind of black hole born extremely ...
Astronomy
Jul 6, 2016
0
261
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 team of astronomers at the Friedrich Alexander University led by Péter Németh has discovered a binary star moving nearly at the escape velocity of our galaxy. There are about two dozen so-called hypervelocity stars known ...
Astronomy
Apr 12, 2016
31
3186
Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all, they are huge conglomerations of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity.
Astronomy
Oct 1, 2015
11
105
The center of our Milky Way galaxy is a mysterious place. Not only is it thousands of light-years away, it's also cloaked in so much dust that most stars within are rendered invisible. Harvard researchers are proposing a ...
Astronomy
Sep 22, 2015
1
203
Who left the deep scars on the heart of our Milky Way? In their hunt for elusive clues that might reveal the culprit, an international team of astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics has been ...
Astronomy
Aug 20, 2015
36
361
Two undergraduates at San José State University have discovered two galaxies that are the densest known. Similar to ordinary globular star clusters but a hundred to a thousand times brighter, the new systems have properties ...
Astronomy
Jul 27, 2015
11
222
Most if not all galaxies are thought to host a supermassive black hole in their nuclei, a finding that is both one the most important and amazing in modern astronomy. A supermassive black hole grows by accreting mass, and ...
Astronomy
Jun 22, 2015
9
82
In 2013, astronomers announced they had discovered a magnetar exceptionally close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way using a suite of space-borne telescopes including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Astronomy
May 14, 2015
9
2000
