Brian Koberlein
The Large Magellanic Cloud Survived its Closest Approach to the Milky Way
The Large Magellanic Cloud is the closest, brightest dwarf galaxy to the Milky Way—20 times bigger than the full Moon…
Detecting Primordial Black Hole Mergers Might be Within Our Grasp
One explanation for dark matter is that it's made out of primordial black holes, formed in the earliest moments of…
The Best Way to Find Planet Nine Might Be Hundreds of Tiny Telescopes
Although the outer Solar System is mostly empty, there are icy objects drifting within the very limits of detection by…
A New Look a the Most Ancient Light in the Universe
About 370,000 years after the Big Bang, the Universe had cooled down so light could escape, traveling for billions of…
Two Supermassive Black Holes on the Verge of a Merger
Researchers have been keeping an eye on the center of a galaxy located about a billion light-years away. Every few…
Astronomers Map the Shape of a Black Hole's Corona for the First Time
The Sun is surrounded by the corona, a region of superheated gas above the surface that can be millions of…
Astronomers Defy the Zone of Avoidance to Find Hundreds of New Galaxies
The Zone of Avoidance is a region of the sky that's obscured by the disk of the Milky Way. The…
How Webb Stays in Focus
JWST's primary mirror consists of 18 individual segments, each of which can be moved on 6 different axes of freedom.…
Using Light Echoes to Find Black Holes
The speed of light gives astronomers a special trick when examining the tangled-up gravitational well around a black hole. Researchers…
An Explanation for Rogue Planets. They Were Eroded Down by Hot Stars
WST recently turned up hundreds of free-floating rogue planets in the Orion Nebula, 42 in binary configurations. How two Jupiter-mass…