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Carnegie’s Scott Sheppard and his colleagues—Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo, and the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen—are once again redefining our Solar System’s edge. They discovered a new extremely distant object far beyond Pluto with an orbit that supports the presence of an even-farther-out, Super-Earth or larger Planet X. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

A team of Leiden astronomers used the latest set of data from ESA’s Gaia mission to look for high-velocity stars being kicked out of the Milky Way, but were surprised to find stars instead sprinting inwards – perhaps from another galaxy. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

NASA’s Kepler team has received data showing that the spacecraft’s ability to point precisely has degraded. In order to preserve high-value science data collected during its latest observation campaign, the Kepler team has placed the spacecraft in a stable, no-fuel-use sleep mode. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

Deep observations made with the MUSE spectrograph on ESO’s Very Large Telescope have uncovered vast cosmic reservoirs of atomic hydrogen surrounding distant galaxies. The exquisite sensitivity of MUSE allowed for direct observations of dim clouds of hydrogen glowing with Lyman-alpha emission in the early Universe—revealing that almost the whole night sky is invisibly aglow. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

Using ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope, two researchers have observed the symbiotic star AG Pegasi after the end of its outburst in 2015. The observations, detailed in a paper published September 24 on the arXiv pre-print server, could reveal the real nature of this peculiar object. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

Ultra-faint dwarf galaxies are the smallest, most dark matter dominated, and least chemically enriched stellar systems in the universe, and are important targets for understanding dark matter and galaxy formation. They comprise by number the majority of galaxies in the universe, and not least, dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way provide crucial empirical input for verifying formation scenarios of our own galaxy. There are currently about sixty dwarf galaxies associated with the Milky Way and closer than about one million light-years; the Andromeda Galaxy, our closest large neighbor spiral galaxy, is two and one-half million light-years away. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

For decades, the search for life in outer space has focused on finding tiny microbes that would do little to satisfy a growing appetite for connection with beings that more closely resemble us. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image contains a veritable mix of different galaxies, some of which belong to the same larger structure: At the middle of the frame sits the galaxy cluster SDSS J1050+0017. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), believe clouds of dust, rather than twin black holes, can explain the features found in active galactic nuclei (AGNs). The team publish their results today (14 June) in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

Why haven’t we found evidence of life anywhere but Earth? A trio of astrophysicists has revisited this question by taking a closer look at the “needle in a haystack” analogy. Their analysis involved creating a model to assess the amount of work that has been done searching for extraterrestrial life, the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, compared to how much is required before scientists can rule out the possibility that there is none. Jason Wright, Shubham Kanodia and Emily Lubar have written a paper describing their efforts and uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

Since the first detection of gravitational waves by LIGO and VIRGO, black holes have aroused widespread discussion and interest. For scientists, black holes play a unique role in connecting quantum mechanics and general relativity. The microscopic structure of black holes has always been a huge problem for scientists. A recent study reveals the microscopic mystery of black holes from the viewpoint of thermodynamics. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

Astronomers have used data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to capture a dramatic image of an enormous tail of hot gas stretching for more than a million light years behind a group of galaxies that is falling into the depths of an even-larger cluster of galaxies. Discoveries like this help astronomers learn about the environment and conditions under which the Universe’s biggest structures evolve. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →