1+ day, 1+ hour ago   (603+ words) The enormous Cygnus Bubble is usually linked to a busy star-forming region. A new study argues that the microquasar Cygnus X-3 may be the more natural source of its highest-energy gamma rays. Cygnus X-3 is a microquasar, a binary system containing a…...

1+ day, 1+ hour ago   (663+ words) The cosmic microwave background is the oldest light we can observe. Here is where it came from, what its tiny patterns reveal, and why it still matters. About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the expanding universe had cooled enough for…...

2+ day, 15+ min ago   (516+ words) An ancient star cluster is slowly coming apart in a galaxy 115 million light-years away. The thin trail it left behind is giving astronomers a new way to study dark matter beyond the Milky Way. Astronomers have identified the first stellar…...

3+ day, 20+ hour ago   (1153+ words) The objects are unusually soft in X-rays but bright in extreme ultraviolet light—exactly the combination that makes them difficult to find and potentially important to the history of stars and galaxies. A galaxy can be full of powerful objects…...

3+ day, 23+ hour ago   (374+ words) What might happen when the ingredients of life have an entire landscape in which to react? On Titan, NASA hopes to investigate that question by flying from one patch of ground to another. The update also highlighted the name of…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago   (752+ words) A parsec is a distance defined by parallax. Here is how astronomers use the unit to measure the space between stars and galaxies. What is a parsec? It is a unit of distance used by astronomers to describe the space…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (387+ words) Astronomers have catalogued more than 120 molecular species in a cloud near the centre of the Milky Way. The finding matters because the cloud contains several compounds associated with the chemical building blocks of life, and it closely resembles another unusually…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (453+ words) Astronomers often treat the thin streams of stars around the Milky Way as sensitive tracers of dark matter. A new University of Washington simulation shows why that evidence needs to be read carefully: the visible structure of a galaxy can…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (447+ words) Two stars once considered promising Dyson sphere candidates have now been removed from the list. Follow-up observations with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope showed that the infrared glow did not come from enormous artificial structures around the stars. It came…...

2+ week, 5+ day ago   (671+ words) The method begins with atoms. Hydrogen, oxygen, calcium and other elements absorb or emit light at particular wavelengths. Those lines are the same wherever the atoms are found. If a galaxy is moving, the lines arrive at slightly different positions…...