Open with CtrlK — press Esc to close
A massive star serves the universe in two ways, and they arrive in order. While it lives, it floods its surroundings with ultraviolet light energetic enough to tear the electron off a hydrogen atom.…
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…
The CHIME radio telescope in British Columbia has picked out the faint radio glow of hydrogen gas spread through the distant universe using only its own observations. Earlier detections of that…
Oxygen, carbon and silicon were already streaming out of galaxies when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, according to a study published Sept. 24 in the journal Nature Astronomy.…
Cosmological simulations published Sept. 16 in Nature propose that JWST's so-called Little Red Dots are an early, short-lived phase in the formation of supermassive black holes, one explanation among…
On September 1, 2026, the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Collaboration reported an unusual event that its underground detector had recorded on June 16, 2023. The detector is designed to search for WIMPs:…
Astronomers have measured how much helium the universe made in its first minutes to a precision of about 0.5%, using 54 gas clouds observed with the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona. Erik Aver of…
Astronomers have mapped, in three dimensions, the earliest and most distant forerunner of a galaxy supercluster yet found, NSF NOIRLab said on Sept. 8. The clump, designated COSMOS-z3.1-A, is seen as…
A fast radio burst lasts about a thousandth of a second, and then it is gone. What survives the trip is a smear: the burst's low frequencies arrive slightly behind its high ones, delayed in…
The universe is building stars at well under half the rate it managed 4.5 billion years ago, and the obvious suspect has long been the supply: run a galaxy short of gas and it stops making stars. The…
Nine massive galaxies that stopped making stars long ago hold far more small, faint stars than the Milky Way's mix would predict, astronomers report — enough that the earliest big galaxies found by…
Most of the galaxies we know live in company. They cluster along luminous filaments, tug on their neighbors, merge, get stripped of gas, and are shaped as much by their surroundings as by anything…