A year ago, a puzzling gap existed between black holes and neutron stars. With nearly a year of new data, LIGO solves the puzzle. On Monday, March 16, 2020, astrophysicist Carl […]

We’ve never found eight stars bound together in the same stable system. But nature might make it so. The Universe that we have is often more wondrous and bizarre than even […]

Ever wonder, exactly, how stars form from molecular gas and dust? So do scientists. One of the great challenges for astronomy is to determine, in gory detail, how stars are […]

All supernovae are not created equal. After a 14 year investigation, the brightest ones have a surprising explanation. In 2006, astronomers witnessed a supernova that defied conventional explanation. Typically, supernovae […]

The closest star to our own doesn’t just host one rocky planet, but a second, larger ‘super-Earth’ much farther out. Of all the stars in the Universe, the closest one to […]

Within the next billion years, the Magellanic Clouds might merge with our galaxy. But the new stars are already here. Within the Milky Way, there are only a few instances of […]

After 13.8 billion years, there’s still a whole lot that’s changing as time goes on. With each new year that comes upon us, there are a slew of new events awaiting […]

The Eagle Nebula, complete with the Pillars of Creation, tells a mini-version of the story of how all the Universe’s stars formed. The Eagle Nebula, found 7,000 light-years away, demonstrates how […]

If you’re wondering whether the blast wave or the radiation would kill us first, you’re asking the wrong question. As far as raw explosive power goes, no other cataclysm in […]

It’s a supergiant star in the final stage of its life, and it just dimmed by an enormous amount. What’s going on? When you take a look at the stars in […]

In the middle of a great cosmic void, a single, isolated galaxy persists amidst the darkness. It’s about to get a lot lonelier. Here in our own cosmic backyard, the […]

The NICER experiment, designed to measure neutron stars as never before, just released their first pulsar map, and it’s amazing. After typical supernovae, remnant collapsed cores of matter are left behind. […]

The most famous ‘supernova impostor’ of all could have died back in the 1840s. Here’s what we think kept it alive. In all of astronomy, no stellar event releases more energy […]

If this discovery came in a pre-LIGO era, maybe it would have been a surprise. But in 2019, there’s no mystery at all. Did you hear that astronomers had recently […]

Young galaxies are bright and blue; old galaxies are red and dead. So how did this old, red galaxy form so early? The observable Universe contains two trillion distinct galaxies, but […]

Our Universe is 13.8 billion years old, and our Sun formed about 2/3rds of the way through. Here’s what came before it. When it comes to the great cosmic question of […]

We know a lot about what else is out there, but we still don’t know everything. In the quest for life in the Universe, it makes sense to look at […]

Every object in the Universe is constrained by the laws of physics. Does this mean there are any black holes that shouldn’t exist? When it comes to the objects that […]

What’s more massive than the heaviest known neutron star but lighter than the lightest known black hole? LIGO may be about to solve that mystery. Whenever a star is born in […]

Many of them are spinning at nearly the speed of light. When you do the math, there’s no other way it could have been. Take a look out there at the […]

At the core of the largest star-forming region of the Local Group sits the biggest star we know of. Mass is the single most important astronomical property in determining the lives […]

An entire Universe of possibilities await stars like our own, even after they run out of fuel. One of the most profound rules in all the Universe is that nothing lasts […]

If we could see in three dimensions instead of two, we’d never have thought otherwise. Perhaps the most famous sight of a dying star is the Ring Nebula, discovered in […]

13.8 billion years isn’t close to enough time, but if we wait long enough, even our Sun will become one. The Big Bang happened approximately 13.8 billion years ago, and it […]

Everything on Earth is made of atoms and their building blocks. Without this one rule, they’d never make anything interesting. Take a look around you at everything on Earth. If […]

A 1060-hour amateur exposure of a nearby galaxy does what even Hubble couldn’t do. The Universe is full of astronomical wonders, but it’s up to humanity to observe and analyze them. […]

Depending on how you measure it, there are two different answers that could be right. If you want to see what’s out there in the Universe, you first have to be […]

Our Sun will someday run out of fuel. Here’s what it will look like when that happens. The fate of our Sun is unambiguous, determined solely by its mass. If all […]

Our outer Solar System, from Jupiter to Neptune, isn’t unique after all. In the early 1990s, scientists began detecting the first planets orbiting stars other than the Sun: exoplanets. The easiest […]

If a star spins and then collapses, what happens to its angular momentum? The most common way to form a black hole in the Universe is to have a massive […]