In this artist's rendering, a thick accretion disk has formed around a supermassive black hole following the tidal disruption of a star that wandered too close. Stellar debris has fallen toward the black hole and collected into a thick...
Inside the Cats's Paw Nebula as seen in an infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (left), ALMA discovered that an infant star is undergoing an intense growth spurt, shining nearly 100 brighter than before and reshaping its stellar...
Schematic representation of rotating disc galaxies in the early Universe (right) and the present day (left). Observations with ESO's Very Large Telescope suggest that such massive star-forming disc galaxies in the early Universe were less influenced by dark matter...
Faint compact galaxies of the early universe.Credit: NASA, ESA, and L. Infante (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile)
A study of the internal sound waves created by starquakes, which make stars ring like a bell, has provided unprecedented insights into conditions...
About 700 million years ago, runaway glaciers covered the entire planet in ice. Harvard researchers modeled the conditions that may have led to this so-called 'snowball Earth.'Credit: Image courtesy of NASA
What caused the largest glaciation event in Earth's history,...
The massive black hole shown at left in this drawing is able to rapidly grow as intense radiation from a galaxy nearby shuts down star-formation in its host galaxy.Credit: John Wise, Georgia Tech
The appearance of supermassive black holes at...
Astronomers have found evidence for a star that whips around a black hole about twice an hour. This may be the tightest orbital dance ever witnessed for a black hole and a companion star.Credit: Courtesy of NASA
Astronomers have found...
An artist's illustration of a light-sail powered by a radio beam (red) generated on the surface of a planet. The leakage from such beams as they sweep across the sky would appear as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), similar to...
The bright spots in the center of Occator Crater on Ceres are shown in enhanced color in this view from NASA's Dawn spacecraft. Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/PSI/LPI
The bright central area of Ceres' Occator Crater, known as Cerealia Facula, is approximately 30 million...
Credit: University College London
A huge mass of glowing stardust in a galaxy seen shortly after the Universe's formation has been detected by a UCL-led team of astronomers, providing new insights into the birth and explosive deaths of the very...
The microlensing object in the foreground galaxy could be a star (as depicted), a primordial black hole, or any other compact object. Credit: NASA/Jason Cowan (Astronomy Technology Center).
The nature of the dark matter which apparently makes up 80% of...
