An astronomy lesson on binary stars could begin with a series of complex diagrams and data or with a clip from the movie Star Wars where Luke Skywalker looks up at the sky of his home planet, Tatooine, and sees two suns shining. Which will more easily awaken the interest of a sleepy high school class?...
The Breakthrough Listen search for intelligent life is, to date, the most extensive technosignature search of nearby celestial objects. We present a radio technosignature search of the centers of 97 nearby galaxies, observed by Breakthrough Listen at the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. We performed a narrowband Doppler...
The Breakthrough Listen search for intelligent life is, to date, the most extensive technosignature search of nearby celestial objects. We present a radio technosignature search of the centers of 97 nearby galaxies, observed by Breakthrough Listen at the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. We performed a narrowband Doppler...
Stars this small shouldn't make planets this big.
In 2009 a giant star 25 times more massive than the sun simply vanished. OK, it wasn't quite that simple. It underwent a period of brightening, increasing in luminosity to a million suns, just as if it was ready to explode into a supernova. But then it faded rather than exploding. And when astronomers tried to see the star using...
A large, gaseous planet orbits a red giant star that should have destroyed it. It's 530 light-years from Earth.
Study reveals how magma oceans may affect the evolution of hot exoplanets. Lava worlds, massive exoplanets home to sparkling skies and roiling volcanic seas called magma oceans, are distinctly unlike the planets in our solar system. To date, nearly 50% of all rocky exoplanets yet discovered ha
Region at centre of Messier 87 galaxy captured by the Event Horizon Telescope in motion
In 1960, Freeman Dyson proposed how advanced civilizations could create megastructures that enclosed their system, allowing them to harness all of their star's energy and multiplying the habitable space they could occupy.
Astronomers have spotted a gigantic void they believe to be a baryon acoustic oscillation — a relic from when the universe was a fiery plasma soup
Of all the objects in the Solar System, perhaps the most spectacular are the great comets that occasionally grace our skies. If you’ve been on social media in the past few days, you’ve probably seen articles proclaiming we have such a comet in our skies right now: C/2023 P1 (Nishimura).
Scientists studied the Squid Galaxy, Messier 77, to determine how chemicals swirl around its shrouded central black hole.
In the spring of 1999, NASA was in the midst of building the modern age of space exploration. The space agency was ferrying astronauts to and from orbit in a small fleet of partially reusable spacecrafts and the organization used those Space Shuttles to help construct the International Space Station. It was a time when the dream...
The sun’s outer atmosphere is vastly hotter than its surface. Scientists may be close to figuring out why.
Planning is underway for NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory In early August, scientists and engineers gathered in a small auditorium at Caltech to discuss how to build the first space telescope capable of detecting life on planets like Earth. The proposed mission concept, called the Habitable Worl
The curvature of space-time around a colossal mass has yielded the most detailed measurement of the cosmic distribution of dark matter yet.
Triton orbits to the beat of its own drum.
Queen’s researchers lead the discovery of two potential polar ring galaxies. A group of international astronomers, including researchers from Queen’s University, has identified two potential polar ring galaxies, according to results published on September 13 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal As
NASA's Small Bodies Assessment Group wants the agency to send spacecraft to visit the asteroid Apophis before it makes a close approach to Earth in 2029.
The decadal survey has highlighted such investigations as the effects of space on biology as being key to NASA's next 10 years and to the Artemis mission.
Quick note - publishing items that are 'scifi-adjacent' to /m/scifi to serve those who are scifi professionals in their quest to writing science fiction that reflects our understanding of STEM....
Approximately every 80 years, a faint 10th magnitude star in the constellation of Corona Borealis dramatically increases its brightness. This star, T CrB, is known as a recurrent nova and last flared in 1946, peaking at magnitude 2.0, temporarily making it one of the 50 brightest stars in the night sky.
Astronomers have discovered the first "bubble of galaxies," an almost unimaginably huge cosmic structure thought to be a fossilized remnant from just after the Big Bang sitting in our galactic backyard.
Astronomers uncover details of a massive star, ASASSN-14li, devoured by a black hole, challenging previous theories and hinting at new methods for cosmic exploration.
