NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible light photo of a pair of back-to-back planetary smashups in the debris belt around Fomalhaut, giving stargazers a mobile trip for our future Milky Way–held solar system.
Astronomers…
When massive stars die, they go out in fiery explosions called supernovas. On rarer occasions, two nearly dead stars collide to create dimmer yet similarly intense kilonovas. On even rarer occasions, the supernovas and kilonovas…
Supermassive black holes have been found at the center of almost every galaxy, sucking up anything unlucky to fall into its maw — including light itself — through unfathomable gravitational forces.
Even at the center of our own galaxy,…
Celestial happenings are surely a feast for skygazers, and this particular fraternity is what NASA’s NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify…
If you have teenagers — or were once a teenager yourself — you’ve probably experienced this: Your kid’s jeans fit perfectly in September, but by December they’re showing ankle. The adolescent growth spurt can feel astonishingly fast, with…
Astronomers hoping to observe a planet around a nearby star have witnessed a much rarer “unprecedented celestial event,” the team said: The violent aftermath of not one, but two collisions between the rocky building blocks of planets.
Over the…
Astronomers have found a strange world outside the solar system that is ripe for science fiction — but it’s all real.
The exoplanet, dubbed PSR J2322-2650 b, has a helium-and-carbon…
Deep inside stars, giant planets, and even Earth’s core, matter exists in a strange in-between state—neither solid nor fully plasma. Known as warm dense matter, this extreme form of matter shapes how planets generate magnetic fields and how…