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A radio burst from a distant galaxy can help us understand the structure of the Universe. How? On its way to Earth, the signal passes through diffuse gas that is difficult to detect through its own…
Infrared telescopes have handed astronomers something that looks like a rule: the fewer heavy elements a galaxy holds, the less it glows in the infrared bands produced by polycyclic aromatic…
On Nov. 7, 2025, the Hubble Space Telescope spent two orbits pointed at a galaxy about 190 million light-years away. A star there had drifted too close to the black hole at the galaxy's center and…
Hydrogen gas around radio galaxies glows only inside the narrow cone their black hole jets point along, and nowhere else in the same halos. Namrata Roy of Arizona State University and the Raman…
Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to take mid-infrared spectra of large soot-like carbon molecules in five ordinary star-forming galaxies at a redshift of about 1, the era known as…
Photograph the Andromeda galaxy in ordinary starlight and you get the poster image: a calm banded spiral, the nearest giant spiral to our own. Map the same galaxy in the radio glow of neutral…
Water ice leaves the same characteristic fingerprints wherever it is. Point an infrared telescope at it and it takes bites out of the sunlight it reflects: two shallow ones near 1.5 and 2.0…
Astronomers using the NASA and JAXA observatory XRISM have measured gas pouring off a giant star and falling onto the small, collapsed star that orbits it, at about 335,000 miles per hour. The team,…
Astronomers studying stars torn apart by supermassive black holes have found that the trigger for jet formation is the same fraction of a black hole's maximum feeding rate, about 2%, regardless of…
A black hole the mass of a star is, by the standards of this subject, in a hurry. Gas spirals in, the system brightens over weeks and fades over months, and somewhere on the way down a jet of plasma…
Astronomers have mapped the gas in nine nearby galaxies whose central black holes are actively pulling in matter, and found the same arrangement in every one: rings of new stars well out from the…
Between the softest X-rays Chandra can detect and the extreme-ultraviolet light that gas between the stars absorbs lies a slice of the spectrum that has been difficult to survey. Chandra's…