Spot the Hyades star cluster near Taurus constellation tonight. Here’s where to look.

Look up tonight (March 15) to see the Hyades star cluster light up the Taurus constellation in the night sky. The Hyades star cluster is the closest star cluster to Earth, located only 150 light-years away. Viewers can spot the star cluster by looking for the tall, Y-shaped constellation Taurus, the bull, which is situated … Read more

What’s it like inside a massive galaxy cluster? Scientists used 196 lasers to find out.

An Earthbound experiment is replicating the extreme heat found in galaxy clusters located in deep space using nearly 200 lasers. The hope is the experiment series will reveal more about the conditions within giant groups of galaxies. Here, hydrogen gas can burn at roughly the same temperatures as it does the center of our sun, … Read more

Colossal Shock Wave Rippling Across Space Is Bigger Than Our Entire Galaxy

A billion years ago, an absolutely monstrous collision of two clusters of galaxies produced a pair of shock waves of absolutely epic proportions. Today, the structures gleam brightly in radio wavelengths, so huge they could easily engulf the Milky Way galaxy’s estimated 100,000 light-year diameter, stretching up to 6.5 million light-years through intergalactic space.   … Read more

Mysterious Repeating Fast Radio Burst Traced to Very Unexpected Location

A recently discovered repeating fast radio burst (FRB) named FRB 20200120E is deepening the mystery of these already deeply mysterious space signals. Astronomers have tracked its location to a galaxy 11.7 million light-years away, which makes it the closest known extragalactic fast radio burst, 40 times closer than the next-closest extragalactic signal.   But it … Read more

How to spot the Double Cluster and the Carina Nebula this week

By Abigail Beall Cristian Cestaro/Alamy IN THE northern hemisphere, winter is still with us. That means dark nights and plenty of opportunity to look for fainter targets in the sky. In the southern hemisphere, nights are short, but stargazing is still possible. This week, we have two activities, one for the amateur astronomers of each … Read more

Astronomers Detect Rare ‘Missing Link’ Black Hole in Our Closest Galactic Neighbor

A rare treasure that could shed light on the evolution of black holes has been discovered in the Milky Way’s closest large galactic neighbor. In a cluster of stars in the Andromeda galaxy, aka M31, astronomers studied changes in light to identify a black hole clocking in at almost 100,000 times the mass of the … Read more

Hubble Space Telescope spots star cluster glittering in a nearby galaxy (photo)

This small cluster of stars packs quite a visual morsel. On Dec. 20, 2021, the team behind the Hubble Space Telescope published an image taken by the iconic observatory when it was looking towards the constellation Dorado in the southern sky.  Astronomers refer to this stellar gathering as NGC 1755. The open star cluster “resembles … Read more

Mysterious Object That Survived a Close Encounter With a Black Hole Is Unmasked

A mysterious cloud that somehow survived a close encounter with a supermassive black hole has now been unmasked. According to a new study of the object, called G2, it’s actually three baby stars, shrouded in a thick cloud of the gas and dust from which they were born. This interpretation offers a very tidy solution … Read more