Every large galaxy harbors a supermassive black hole at its center, each one emitting powerful winds of hot gas from its event horizon. Our galaxy should be no exception. Yet for the last 50 or so years, astronomers have been searching for winds coming from the black hole at the Milky Way’s center, and in […]
‘Failed Star’ Mimics a Key Sign of Life, Complicating Our Search for Aliens
For scientists, the urgent problem with phosphine—a molecule famously touted as a potential sign of life—isn’t so much about where it came from, but why it’s not where we think it should be. After a decade of searching, a long-awaited result has confirmed that our astronomical models aren’t a total bust. At least, for now. […]
Turns Out the First Supermassive Black Holes Weren’t So Supermassive, Research Suggests
All galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center. A new finding doesn’t contradict that observation, but it does suggest that we’ve been overestimating just how heavy some of these black holes actually are. Astrophysicists using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile found evidence that the black hole of an infant galaxy was […]
‘Dead’ Star Caught Snacking on Pluto-Like Object
Nature can get brutal. On a cosmic scale, things get even more destructive—leaving behind carnage made of stellar dust the size of an entire planet. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a white dwarf—the remnant of a dying star’s core—enjoying a meal of some fragment researchers later identified as coming from a Pluto-like object. […]
Something Extremely Strange Is Happening at the Event Horizon of This Supermassive Black Hole
In 2019, scientists unveiled the first-ever images of a black hole, M87*. Those observations kickstarted a wave of new investigations into how black holes work, how they grow, and how they change. And now, after a few upgrades, the Event Horizon Telescope network is back with another bombshell centered on M87*—finding tantalizing evidence of previously […]
Astronomers Revisit the Mysterious Wow! Signal—and Find a Big Surprise
Nearly 50 years ago, astronomers searching the cosmos for evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life detected a strong radio signal emanating from deep space. Today, scientists still aren’t sure where—or what—the Wow! Signal came from. It remains one of the most perplexing phenomena in the history of radio astronomy. A new study has brought scientists closer […]
Most Powerful Fast Radio Burst Ever Detected Hits Telescopes Across North America
For almost two decades, astronomers have detected extremely powerful, millisecond-long flashes of radio waves known as fast radio bursts (FRBs) from beyond our galaxy—and had no clue where they came from. Now, a team of scientists has detected the brightest-ever FRB and finally pinpointed its origin to a nearby galaxy. Researchers have long suspected that […]
This Bright Dot May Be an Entirely New Type of Space Object
At first, the dot looked like any other star. Then the astrophysicists switched to polarized light and found themselves looking at an entirely unexpected sight. “Everything else disappeared, even the bright central black hole, and only this little dot remained,” Elena Shablovinskaia, an astrophysicist at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile and the Max Planck Institute […]
Deepest-Ever Field Image of Giant Galaxy Cluster Is a Brutal Reminder of Your Cosmic Insignificance
When it comes to deep space observations, our cosmological insignificance seems to grow with the resolution of our telescopes’ cameras. In the latest advance, astronomers constructed the deepest-ever images of Abell 3667, a massive galaxy cluster located 700 million light-years from Earth—and most of the tiny dots you see represent entire galaxies. But the latest […]
Neptune Dances in Sync With a Rare Distant Object, Astronomers Find
For lovers of newly identified space objects, July has indeed been an exciting month. Last week, astronomers described Ammonite, a potential dwarf planet beyond Pluto. Yesterday, astronomers announced the existence of BetelBuddy, a small companion star orbiting Betelgeuse. And now we have another exciting discovery to share. In a Planetary Science Journal paper published earlier […]