Astrophysics Stories

An oval-shaped galaxy seen tilted at an angle. It glows brightly at its core and radiates outward, dimming toward the edge of the oval. Reddish-brown, patchy dust spreads out from the core and covers much of the galaxy’s top half, as well as the outer edge, obscuring some of its light. Stars are visible around and in front of the galaxy.

Hubble Observes a Peculiar Galaxy Shape

2 min read

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the galaxy, NGC 4694. Most galaxies fall into one of two basic types. Spiral galaxies are young and energetic, filled with the gas needed to form new stars and sporting spiral arms that…

Article22 hours ago
Two lightning strikes are visible in the distance at night with city lights along the left of the image along the coastline of the bay that occupies the lower right and curves into the landscape on the lower left. The majority of the image is occupied by dark gray cloudcover.

Via NASA Plane, Scientists Find New Gamma-ray Emission in Storm Clouds

4 min read

There’s more to thunderclouds than rain and lightning. Thunderclouds can produce intense bursts of gamma rays.

Article3 days ago
Artist’s concept of Centaur 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 as seen from the side against a dark, mostly starless swath of space. The rocky, bilobed nucleus is toward the right and resembles the simplified shape of a peanut. The left side of the centaur is partially illuminated by the Sun, which is off-screen, revealing the nucleus’ light brown surface. Four jets of gas, depicted as translucent cones of white, emanate from various points on the Centaur’s surface and extend beyond the frame: two emanate upward from the top, one jet spews from the bottom and extends downward, and one jet emanates from the left side of the nucleus and extends toward the left. A label in the bottom left corner reads “Artist’s Concept.”

NASA’s Webb Reveals Unusual Jets of Volatile Gas from Icy Centaur 29P

7 min read

Inspired by the half-human, half-horse creatures that are part of Ancient Greek mythology, the field of astronomy has its own kind of centaurs: distant objects orbiting the Sun between Jupiter and Neptune. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has mapped the…

Article3 days ago

NASA’s TESS Spots Record-Breaking Stellar Triplets

6 min read

Professional and amateur astronomers teamed up with artificial intelligence to find an unmatched stellar trio called TIC 290061484, thanks to cosmic “strobe lights” captured by NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite).  The system contains a set of twin stars orbiting…

Article3 days ago
A spiral galaxy seen tilted diagonally. It has two large, curling arms that extend from the center and wrap around. Thick strands of dark reddish dust follow behind these arms. The galaxy’s arms and disk are speckled with glowing patches of gas — some are blue in color, others are pink — illuminated by new stars. A faint glow surrounds the galaxy, which lies on a dark, nearly empty background.

Hubble Captures Stellar Nurseries in a Majestic Spiral

2 min read

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy IC 1954, located 45 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Horologium. It sports a glowing bar in its core, majestically winding spiral arms, and clouds of dark…

Article1 week ago
An artist's concept looks down into the core of the galaxy M87, which is just left of center and appears as a large blue dot. A bright blue-white, narrow and linear jet of plasma transects the illustration from center left to upper right. It begins at the source of the jet, the galaxy’s black hole, which is surrounded by a blue spiral of material. At lower right is a red giant star that is far from the black hole and close to the viewer. A bridge of glowing gas links the star to a smaller white dwarf star companion immediately to its left. Engorged with infalling hydrogen from the red giant star, the smaller star exploded in a blue-white flash, which looks like numerous diffraction spikes emitted in all directions. Thousands of stars are in the background.

NASA’s Hubble Finds that a Black Hole Beam Promotes Stellar Eruptions

6 min read

In a surprise finding, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that the blowtorch-like jet from a supermassive black hole at the core of a huge galaxy seems to cause stars to erupt along its trajectory. The stars, called…

Article1 week ago
A black background sprinkled with small, colorful galaxies in orange, blue, and white. On the left, a third of the way down from the top of the image, a very faint dot of a galaxy is outlined with a white square and pulled out in a graphic to be shown magnified. In the pullout square to the right, the galaxy is a hazy white dot edged in orange, with faint blue projections opposite each other at the 11 o’clock and 5 o’clock positions.

In Odd Galaxy, NASA’s Webb Finds Potential Missing Link to First Stars

4 min read

Looking deep into the early universe with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found something unprecedented: a galaxy with an odd light signature, which they attribute to its gas outshining its stars. Found approximately one billion years after the…

Article1 week ago
This is an artist’s concept of exoasteroids in space, featuring rocky asteroids of various sizes orbiting around a distant star. The scene depicts a dense asteroid belt, illuminated by the bright light of a star in the background, with dust and debris scattered throughout the space between the asteroids.

Find Exoasteroids and Peek into the Future

1 min read

What will remain of our solar system a few billion years from now?  We’re launching the Exoasteroids project to gather some clues. Join this new citizen science project, and help search for variable white dwarfs – bizarre objects that we…

Article2 weeks ago
A spiral galaxy, tilted at an angle, with irregularly-shaped arms. It appears large and close-up. The center glows in a yellowish color, while the disk around it is a bluer color, due to light from older and newer stars. Dark reddish threads of dust cover the galaxy, and there are many large, shining pink spots in the disc, where stars are forming.

Hubble Lights the Way with New Multiwavelength Galaxy View

2 min read

The magnificent galaxy featured in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is NGC 1559. It is a barred spiral galaxy located in the constellation Reticulum, approximately 35 million light-years from Earth. The brilliant light captured in the current image offers…

Article2 weeks ago
Illustration of a large planet with a grayish atmosphere partially illuminated by a distant bright star in space, surrounded by a dark sky dotted with small stars.

When Will That Star Dim? Amateur Planet-Chasers Got You!

2 min read

A planet swings in front of its star, dimming the starlight we see. Events like these, called transits, provide us with bounties of information about exoplanets–planets around stars other than the Sun. But predicting when these special events occur can…

Article2 weeks ago