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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…
A chemist who wants to know what is dissolved in a jar of seawater has to take the sample apart first: separate the salts, concentrate each one, then put it in front of an instrument on its own. On…
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…
NASA has switched the gamma-ray detector on its Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory back on and allowed the spacecraft to start pointing itself at new cosmic explosions again. Swift team members confirmed…
The scenario is decades old and mostly drawn from simulations. A young gas giant plows through the disk of gas and dust it was born in, and the gas closest to it stops moving the way the rest of the…
The Milky Way ate its neighbors, and the meals left traces. Stars pulled in from galaxies that fell into ours billions of years ago still thread through the outer Galaxy on orbits far more stretched…
A team led by Maria Schönbächler of ETH Zurich reports that iron and titanium isotopes in samples of the asteroid Bennu are indistinguishable from those in samples of the asteroid Ryugu and in a rare…
Two physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen report that letting neutrinos switch from one type to another as they stream out of a dying star changes which stars explode and which…
NASA published a radar time-lapse on Sept. 24 showing lava spreading from the northern crater of Krasheninnikov, a pair of volcanoes on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. The 17 frames came from the…
Comets are chemistry with a long memory. The ices in one were frozen out of the disk of gas and dust that built its planets, and they have sat in the cold ever since; bring one close to a star and…
Researchers at ETH Zurich report that a dense, strongly magnetized rock body lies buried beneath the Dewar region on the Moon's far side, and that magnetizing it would have taken a field of at least…