Astronomers Catch a Supernova Explode Almost in Realtime
Catching a supernova in action is tricky business. There is no way to predict them, and they don’t occur very…
Neutron Stars are Jetting Material Away at 40% the Speed of Light
It’s a well known fact that black holes absorb anything that falls into them. Often before material ‘vanishes’ inside it…
Lunar Night Permanently Ends the Odysseus Mission
On February 15th, Intuitive Machines (IM) launched its first Nova-C class spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a…
Webb Joins the Hunt for Protoplanets
We can't understand what we can't clearly see. That fact plagues scientists who study how planets form. Planet formation happens…
This Supernova Lit Up the Sky in 1181. Here’s What it Looks Like Now
Historical astronomical records from China and Japan recorded a supernova explosion in the year 1181. It was in the constellation…
Hubble Sees a Star About to Ignite
This is an image of the FS Tau multi-star system taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The bright object at…
This Black Hole is a Total Underachiever
Anyone can be an underachiever, even if you're an astronomical singularity weighing over four billion times the mass of the…
Someone Just Found SOHO's 5,000th Comet
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was designed to examine the Sun, but as a side benefit, it has been…
Astronomers Only Knew of a Single Binary Cepheid System. Now They Just Found Nine More
Measuring the distance to far away objects in space can be tricky. We don't even know the precise distance to…
DART Changed the Shape of Asteroid Dimorphos, not Just its Orbit
On September 26th, 2022, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) collided with the asteroid Dimorphos, a moonlet that orbits the…