Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

800 billion degrees Celsius: temperatures as they occur in star collisions measured in the laboratory

An international group of researchers has succeeded for the first time in measuring the so-called black-body radiation.

August 9, 2019 Read more

Dark matter may be older than the Big Bang, study suggests

Dark matter, which researchers believe make up about 80% of the universe?s mass, is one of the most elusive mysteries in modern physics. What exactly it is and how it came to be is a mystery, but a new study now suggests that dark matter may have existed before the Big Bang.

August 8, 2019 Read more

Astronomers reveal true colours of evolving galactic beasts

Astronomers have spotted what they suggest is a 'brief transition phase in the development of these galactic giants that could shed light on how quasars and their host galaxies evolve.

August 7, 2019 Read more

Scientists resolve the nature of powerful cosmic objects

At the center of certain galaxies are objects of such tremendous brightness they outshine the rest of their galaxy by four orders of magnitude. Our understanding of these active galactic nuclei has progressed by leaps and bounds over the past several decades, though recently debate has centered on the identity of some of these objects.

August 6, 2019 Read more

Repeating outflows of hot wind found close to black hole

An international team of astrophysicists have detected a very hot, dense outflowing wind close to a black hole at least 25,000 light-years from Earth.

August 6, 2019 Read more

Dead planets can 'broadcast' for up to a billion years

Astronomers are planning to hunt for cores of exoplanets around white dwarf stars by 'tuning in' to the radio waves that they emit.

August 6, 2019 Read more

Astronomers discover a new type of pulsating star

A team of scientists recently discovered a new class of pulsators that vary in brightness every five minutes.

August 1, 2019 Read more

Hubble uncovers a 'heavy metal' exoplanet shaped like a football

How can a planet be 'hotter than hot'? The answer is when heavy metals are detected escaping from the planet's atmosphere, instead of condensing into clouds.

August 1, 2019 Read more

Confirmation of toasty TESS planet leads to surprising find of promising world (w/video)

A piping hot planet discovered by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has pointed the way to additional worlds orbiting the same star, one of which is located in the star's habitable zone. If made of rock, this planet may be around twice Earth's size.

July 31, 2019 Read more

At the edge of chaos: New method for exoplanet stability analysis

Starting with observational data and scalar time series, this method uses complex network topology to deduce the underlying dynamics of systems in a fast, efficient way without the need for n-body simulations.

July 30, 2019 Read more

Astronomers map vast void in our cosmic neighborhood

Astronomers have published a new study that reveals more of the vast cosmic structure surrounding our Milky Way galaxy.

July 23, 2019 Read more

The early days of the Milky Way revealed

New study puts a sequence to the events which gave rise to our Galaxy.

July 22, 2019 Read more

Chemistry of the cosmological dark ages studied in the lab

New measurements imply dramatically higher abundance of helium hydride ions in the early universe.

July 18, 2019 Read more

'Moon-forming' circumplanetary disk discovered in distant star system

Astronomers have made the first-ever observations of a circumplanetary disk, the planet-girding belt of dust and gas that astronomers strongly theorize controls the formation of planets and gives rise to an entire system of moons, like those found around Jupiter.

July 12, 2019 Read more

Galaxy clusters caught in a first kiss

For the first time, astronomers have found two giant clusters of galaxies that are just about to collide. This observation can be seen as a missing 'piece of the puzzle' in our understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe.

July 12, 2019 Read more

Hubble uncovers black hole disk that shouldn't exist

As if black holes weren't mysterious enough, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found an unexpected thin disk of material furiously whirling around a supermassive black hole at the heart of the magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 3147, located 130 million light-years away.

July 11, 2019 Read more

Astronomers expand cosmic 'cheat sheet' in hunt for life

Using nature's color palette from early Earth, astronomers have created a cosmic 'cheat sheet' in order to understand where discovered exoplanets may fall along their own evolutionary spectrum.

July 10, 2019 Read more

Exactly how fast is the universe expanding?

The collision of two neutron stars (GW170817) flung out an extraordinary fireball of material and energy that is allowing a team of astrophysicists to calculate a more precise value for the Hubble constant, the speed of the universe's expansion.

July 9, 2019 Read more