Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

Stars need a partner to spin Universe's brightest explosions

Gamma-ray bursts are the Universe's brightest explosions, caused by massive collapsing stars. Stars need to be in binary systems to create gamma-ray bursts.

January 13, 2020 Read more

On the hunt for primordial black holes

The theory that dark matter could be made of primordial black holes a fraction of a millimetre in size has been ruled out by a team of researchers.

January 9, 2020 Read more

Stellar heavy metals can trace history of galaxies

Astronomers have cataloged signs of 9 heavy metals in the infrared light from supergiant and giant stars.

January 9, 2020 Read more

Hubble detects smallest known dark matter clumps

Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and a new observing technique, astronomers have found that dark matter forms much smaller clumps than previously known. This result confirms one of the fundamental predictions of the widely accepted 'cold dark matter' theory.

January 8, 2020 Read more

Astronomers uncover first world with two stars

The TOI 1338 system lies 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Pictor. The two stars orbit each other every 15 days. One is about 10% more massive than our Sun, while the other is cooler, dimmer and only one-third the Sun's mass.

January 7, 2020 Read more

NASA planet hunter finds its 1st Earth-size habitable-zone world

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered its first Earth-size planet in its star's habitable zone, the range of distances where conditions may be just right to allow the presence of liquid water on the surface.

January 7, 2020 Read more

Fast radio burst observations deepen astronomical mystery

Astronomers have pinpointed the origin of a repeating Fast Radio Burst to a nearby spiral galaxy, challenging theories on the unknown source of these pulses.

January 6, 2020 Read more

Astronomers find wandering massive black holes in dwarf galaxies

Astronomers seeking to learn about the mechanisms that formed massive black holes in the early history of the Universe have gained important new clues with the discovery of 13 such black holes in dwarf galaxies less than a billion light-years from Earth.

January 6, 2020 Read more

Massive gas disk raises questions about planet formation theory

Astronomers found a young star surrounded by an astonishing mass of gas. The star, called 49 Ceti, is 40 million years old and conventional theories of planet formation predict that the gas should have disappeared by that age.

December 23, 2019 Read more

Fermi Mission links nearby pulsar's gamma-ray 'halo' to antimatter puzzle (w/video)

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a faint but sprawling glow of high-energy light around a nearby pulsar. If visible to the human eye, this gamma-ray 'halo' would appear about 40 times bigger in the sky than a full Moon. This structure may provide the solution to a long-standing mystery about the amount of antimatter in our neighborhood.

December 20, 2019 Read more

New space image reveals cosmic 'candy cane'

Deep in our Milky Way galaxy's center, a candy cane emerges as the centerpiece of a new, colorful composite image from a NASA camera, just in time for the holidays.

December 19, 2019 Read more

Of harps, Christmas trees, a wandering star and the mysterious streams of cosmic rays

Astronomers have investigated galactic radio objects that adopt shapes such as Christmas trees and harps. They were able to answer the old question of the transport of cosmic rays.

December 19, 2019 Read more

The 'cores' of massive galaxies had already formed 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang

A distant galaxy more massive than our Milky Way -- with more than a trillion stars -- has revealed that the 'cores' of massive galaxies in the Universe had formed already 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.

December 19, 2019 Read more

Distant Milky Way-like galaxies reveal star formation history of the universe

Thousands of galaxies are visible in this radio image of an area in the Southern Sky, made with the MeerKAT telescope. The numerous faint dots are distant galaxies like our own Milky Way, that have never been observed in radio light before.

December 17, 2019 Read more

CHEOPS, the profiler of exoplanets

A quarter of a century after the discovery of the first extrasolar planet, the CHEOPS space telescope will finally enable researchers to determine what exoplanets are made of.

December 16, 2019 Read more

Carbon cocoons surround growing galaxies

ALMA spots earliest environment pollution in the universe.

December 16, 2019 Read more

A galactic dance

Galaxies lead a graceful existence on cosmic timescales. Over millions of years, they can engage in elaborate dances that produce some of Nature's most exquisite and striking grand designs. Few are as captivating as the galactic duo known as NGC 5394/5, sometimes nicknamed the Heron Galaxy.

December 13, 2019 Read more

Simulations attempt to reconstruct one of the most explosive events in the universe: A neutron star merger

Scientists are getting better at modeling the complex tangle of physics properties at play in one of the most powerful events in the known universe: the merger of two neutron stars.

December 12, 2019 Read more