Philosopher Nicholas Rescher once wrote, "Scientific discoveries are often made not on the basis of some well-contrived plan of investigation, but through some stroke of sheer luck."
For a team of researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL)...
What astronomers thought was a planet beyond our solar system has now seemingly vanished from sight, suggesting that what was heralded as one of the first exoplanets to ever be discovered with direct imaging likely never existed.
Two University of...
Observations made with ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have revealed for the first time that a star orbiting the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way moves just as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity....
An international team of astronomers has shown in a laboratory at Leiden University (the Netherlands) that methane can form on icy dust particles in space. The possibility had existed for quite some time, but because the conditions in space...
A team of transatlantic scientists, using reanalyzed data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, has discovered an Earth-size exoplanet orbiting in its star's habitable zone, the area around a star where a rocky planet could support liquid water.
Scientists discovered this...
When a fire extinguisher is opened, the compressed carbon dioxide forms ice crystals around the nozzle, providing a visual example of the physics principle that gases and plasmas cool as they expand. When our sun expels plasma in the...
A nova, or stella nova, the Latin word for "new star," is an explosion on the surface of a star that can produce enough energy to increase the star's brightness by millions of times. Sometimes a nova, which occur...
Researchers using the Gemini North telescope on Hawai'i's Maunakea have detected the most energetic wind from any quasar ever measured. This outflow, which is travelling at nearly 13% of the speed of light, carries enough energy to dramatically impact...
Using data from the CALIFA Integral Field Spectroscopy (IFS) survey and advanced modeling tools, researchers from Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA) have obtained important results about the central spherical component (the bulge) in spiral galaxies like...
Since its discovery in 2017, an air of mystery has surrounded the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, an elongated, cigar-shaped body named 'Oumuamua (Hawaiian for "a messenger from afar arriving first").
How was it formed, and...
A supernova at least twice as bright and energetic, and likely much more massive than any yet recorded has been identified by an international team of astronomers, led by the University of Birmingham.
The team, which included experts from Harvard,...
