Tag Archives: astronomers

It wasn’t so long ago that exoplanets were technically only hypothesized and had never been directly observed. Today, it seems like every other week produces an amazing new observation and an exciting new insight.This week’s breakthrough comes from the Very Large Telescope in Chile, used by a team from Ireland’s …

The Earth of today is a lush garden that supports countless living organisms, but give it a few billion years, and Earth will be swallowed up by the Sun. Or maybe not. Astronomers have discovered an Earth-like world 4,000 light-years away that shows another way forward. This world remains intact, …

For the last few thousand years, a star known as Polaris has hovered above Earth’s North Pole, which is why it’s commonly called the North Star. Explorers have long used this astronomical marker to find their way home, but today astronomers are using the North Star a little differently. A …

Black holes have a reputation as ravenous monsters that tear apart stars and planets, but most of them are very placid—they’re all but invisible out there in the emptiness of space. That can make black holes tough to identify, but astronomers have just spotted a big one. The newly discovered …

The universe doesn’t always cooperate. Science has puzzled over gamma-ray bursts since they were first detected in the 1960s, and just when we think we have the basics solidified, something happens to upend conventional wisdom. Astronomers have spent the last year studying a gamma-ray burst dubbed GRB 211211A. Based on …

Digital imaging technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last few decades. You can buy a smartphone that fits in your pocket with a whopping 200MP of camera resolution, but sometimes you just have to go big. Engineers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California are putting …

Most galaxies in the observable universe have a comfortable buffer from their neighbors, but that’s not the case for NGC 4568 and NGC 4567. A new image from the Gemini North observatory in Hawaii shows these enormous spiral galaxies barreling into each other in a preview of what may await …

  The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been in space for about six months, which is just a fraction of the time NASA spent designing and building it. All that effort is about to pay off, though. Webb will begin science operations this summer, and some of its first …

When we talk about astronomers spotting something in the far-off corners of the cosmos, it’s usually a galaxy, a star, or some other celestial object. Not this time. A team from South Africa has discovered an ultra-powerful radio-wave laser, a phenomenon known as a megamaser. At more than five billion …

In the last few decades, astronomers have slowly but surely added to the number of known exoplanets. Even the largest planets can be hard to spot, though, and moons are even smaller. Well, usually. A team working with data from the dearly departed Kepler space telescope has reported a possible …