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Astronomers combing NASA's public Chandra X-ray Observatory archive have picked out 84 objects in six galaxies that glow in the faintest X-rays and then vanish from images taken at higher energies.…
In May 2023, astronomers pointed the Very Large Array at a galaxy whose black hole had just begun doing something it had never been seen to do. Every radio look at 1ES 1927+654 before that year had…
An X-ray survey has turned up fully grown galaxies whose central black holes hold more than 5% of the mass of all their stars, several times the share seen in most galaxies. Johannes Buchner of the…
The Chandra X-ray Observatory pointed at one patch of sky more than a hundred separate times, chasing other targets entirely. Stacked together, they come to 6.6 million seconds of observing, a total…
Astronomers have identified four candidate pairs of "little red dots" in the James Webb Space Telescope's COSMOS-Web survey, and follow-up spectroscopy places both members of two of those pairs at…
A handful of supermassive black holes have been caught doing something no textbook asked them to do. Every few days they switch on, flood their surroundings with X-rays, then switch off again. Days…
In June a camera on the Gran Telescopio Canarias stared for two nights at a patch of sky beside the spiral galaxy M94. Ignacio Trujillo, who led the observation from the Instituto de Astrofísica de…
In 2023, the German astrophotographer Marcel Drechsler was working through online hydrogen-alpha sky-survey images of a patch of Sagittarius, far off the plane of the Milky Way, when he noticed a…
A laboratory group led by Arvind Paunikar reports the first measurement of the infrared absorption spectrum of naphthalene in its lowest excited triplet state, in a preprint posted to arXiv on Aug.…
Tucked inside a glowing bubble of gas roughly 26,000 light-years away, in a crowded patch of the Milky Way called Sagittarius C, a faint blue smudge of X-rays has caught astronomers' attention. They…
The Hills mechanism leaves two fossils, and astronomers have never been able to point at both halves of the same pair. A binary drifts too close to Sagittarius A*, the black hole of about four…
Simulations of a star repeatedly stripped by a supermassive black hole reproduce a pattern astronomers have observed but models had not, provided the star was already spinning rapidly before its…