Space

Stellar evolution models in which the young Sun swallowed a rocky planet about five times the mass of Earth match measurements of the Sun's interior better than standard solar models do, Mutlu Yıldız…

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.…

The two rings around Chariklo, an icy body that orbits between Saturn and Uranus, have changed since astronomers last watched them cross in front of a star, and they have changed in opposite ways.…

A search for a moon around a rocky planet in another star system has come up empty. Astronomer David Kipping stacked 12 James Webb Space Telescope observations of LP 890-9c, a rocky planet in the…

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…

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…

Saskia Hekker of the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies and Heidelberg University has put forward an explanation for what starts the luminosity bump, the short stretch in which an aging…

Freeze a bucket of seawater and the salt does not freeze with it. Ice crystals grow out of nearly pure water and shove everything dissolved (salt, minerals, whatever organic molecules happen to be…

Astronomers have detected five kinds of electrically charged molecules at once in the tail of 3I/ATLAS, the third object known to have entered the Solar System from interstellar space, and used them…

NASA said Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope were pointed at the same patch of sky and picked out 27 previously unknown icy bodies orbiting beyond Neptune, the smallest of them about 3 miles…

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…

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…