In an international collaboration between Japan and Sweden, scientists clarified how gravity affects the shape of matter near the black hole in binary system Cygnus X-1. Their findings, which were published in Nature Astronomy this month, may help scientists...
Observations made with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have, for the first time, detected the effects of general relativity predicted by Einstein, in the movement of a star passing into the intense gravitational...
A team of astronomers has discovered a new way to unlock the mysteries of how the first galaxies formed and evolved.
In a study published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters, lead author Dawn Erb of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and...
The discovery of a dark ribbon of weak hydrogen ion emissions that encircles Jupiter has overturned previous thinking about the giant planet's magnetic equator.
An international team of scientists led by the University of Leicester has identified the weakened ribbon...
A massive underground lake has been detected for the first time on Mars, raising the possibility that more water—and maybe even life—exists there, international astronomers said Wednesday.
Located under a layer of Martian ice, the lake is about 12 miles...
New comprehensive mapping of the radiation pummeling Jupiter's icy moon Europa reveals where scientists should look—and how deep they'll have to go—when searching for signs of habitability and biosignatures.
Since NASA's Galileo mission yielded strong evidence of a global ocean...
Scientists at the University of Michigan have deduced that the Andromeda galaxy, our closest large galactic neighbor, shredded and cannibalized a massive galaxy two billion years ago.
Even though it was mostly shredded, this massive galaxy left behind a rich...
An international team of astronomers has discovered an ancient and dramatic head-on collision between the Milky Way and a smaller object, dubbed the "Sausage" galaxy. The cosmic crash was a defining event in the early history of the Milky...
An international research team, with participation from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, has found the same type of interstellar dust that we know from the Milky Way in a distant galaxy 11 billion light years...
Einstein's understanding of gravity, as outlined in his general theory of relativity, predicts that all objects fall at the same rate, regardless of their mass or composition. This theory has passed test after test here on Earth, but does...
Scientists have found that molecular oxygen around comet 67P is not produced on its surface, as some suggested, but may be from its body.
The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft escorted comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on its journey round the sun from...
