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Because they emit nothing we can detect, there are many things about black holes we simply do not know. Amongst the most perplexing are supermassive black holes, millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun. Since black holes form from the cores of massive dead individual stars, how do supermassive behemoths grow so … Read more
Most Universe Today readers are familiar with nebulae. They’re gaseous structures lit up with radiation from nearby stars, and they’re some of nature’s most beautiful forms. With the help of amateur astronomers who laid the groundwork, an international team of astronomers has discovered a new type of nebulae around binary stars that they’re calling galactic … Read more
We’re seeing many spectacular sights out in space as our telescopes become more powerful, but there’s a new contender for the most exciting one yet: According to researchers, we’ve observed a red supergiant star exploding into a supernova for the first time. Supernova (SN) 2020tlf, to give it its technical name, was watched for … Read more
Stretching thousands of light-years across the Milky Way, a newly discovered filament of hydrogen named Maggie is one of the biggest structures ever discovered in our galaxy, and researchers think there could be others like it. A group of astronomers led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy (MPIA) in Germany has spotted … Read more
The universe is full of mysteries. In observations gathered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers stumbled on yet another mystery, and a dusty one at that. In new research, a team of scientists examines potential causes of strange signals emitted by an object dubbed TIC 400799224. Based on what astronomers have seen so … Read more
Roughly 13.8 billion years ago, our Universe was born in a massive explosion that gave rise to the first subatomic particles and the laws of physics as we know them. About 370,000 years later, hydrogen had formed, the building block of stars, which fuse hydrogen and helium in their interiors to create all the heavier … Read more
A dense, magnetic star violently erupted and spat out as much energy as a billion suns — and it happened in a fraction of a second, scientists recently reported. This type of star, known as a magnetar, is a neutron star with an exceptionally strong magnetic field, and magnetars often flare spectacularly and without warning. But even though … Read more
There are a lot of unexplained objects out there in the Universe, and astronomers have just found another one – a strange, dusty object that may be causing its host star to dim by up to 75 percent. Often, when we see something block out the light of its star it’s an exoplanet or … Read more
Astronomers have captured a breathtaking radio wave image, showing our closest radio active black hole spewing out massive jets of plasma that span more than 16 times the size of the full moon in our sky. The supermassive black hole in question is located in the center of the galaxy Centaurus A around 12 … Read more
NASA’s most expensive telescope ever is in space at last. The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, an instrument expected to revolutionize astronomy by gathering light from the atmospheres of alien worlds and the universe’s first galaxies, launched at 7:20 a.m. Eastern Time on a sultry Christmas morning from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana. Some … Read more