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Interstellar space is a graveyard of lost souls. Adrift far from any star, these planets float in the darkness like ghost ships in the night. Catching sight of one requires patience, and a good eye. But a new approach based on tens of thousands of images collected by the European Southern Observatory’s facilities has resulted … Read more
Astronomers have discovered dozens of new “rogue” planets, roughly doubling the known number of these mysterious free-roaming worlds. A team of researchers found a collection of at least 70 exoplanets without parent stars — the largest single group of rogue planets ever found — in a patch of space about 420 light-years from Earth, a … Read more
Astronomers have found yet another ghostly galaxy that appears to be devoid of dark matter. Researchers have reported several such sightings over the past few years, each time flagging so-called ultradiffuse galaxies that can be as large as the Milky Way but relatively bereft of stars. This latest object, known as AGC 114905, is similar … Read more
A vast system of canyons that dramatically scars the face of Mars could be harboring reserves of hidden water. An unusually high quantity of hydrogen has been detected in the heart of the 4,000 kilometers (2,485 miles) of canyons known as Valles Marineris, nicknamed the Grand Canyon of Mars. We know this thanks to new … Read more
Astronomers have captured the deepest and sharpest images of the Milky Way’s center ever, enabling scientists to estimate the mass of the giant black hole at our galaxy’s heart with unmatched precision. The Milky Way observations, made with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, also revealed a … Read more
Astronomers may have, for the first time, detected a sunlike star erupting with a giant outburst 10 times larger than anything similar ever seen from our sun, a new study finds. The new results may shed light on the effects such powerful outbursts may have had on the early Earth when life was born, and … Read more
Christopher Intagliata: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Christopher Intagliata. If you’ve ever looked up at the Milky Way, you’ve seen what’s known as cosmic dust. Pascal Oesch: When you see this band of the Milky Way, you can see these dark patches. So that’s really just dust that is obscuring the stars behind it. Intagliata: Pascal … Read more
The beautiful birth of a star has produced an exquisitely ethereal structure in interstellar space. It’s called the Chamaeleon Infrared Nebula, located about 520 light-years away, and in a new image from the NSF NOIRLab’s International Gemini Observatory in Chile, it appears in the sky like a pale gossamer butterfly wing. At its core, … Read more