Scientists may need to rethink their estimates for how many planets outside our solar system could host a rich diversity of life.
In a new study, a UC Riverside–led team discovered that a buildup of toxic gases in the atmospheres...
If astronomers want to learn about how supermassive black holes form, they have to start small—really small, astronomically speaking.
In fact, a team including University of Michigan astronomer Elena Gallo has discovered that a black hole at the center of a nearby dwarf...
A mysterious large mass of material has been discovered beneath the largest crater in our solar system—the Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin—and may contain metal from the asteroid that crashed into the Moon and formed the crater, according to a...
Evidence for the ancient, 1.2 billion years old, meteorite strike, was first discovered in 2008 near Ullapool, NW Scotland by scientists from Oxford and Aberdeen Universities. The thickness and extent of the debris deposit they found suggested the impact...
The supermassive black holes in the centres of many galaxies seem to have a major influence on their evolution. This happens during a phase in which the black hole is consuming the material of the galaxy in which it...
An international team has constructed the most detailed, highest resolution simulation of a black hole to date. The simulation proves theoretical predictions about the nature of accretion disks—the matter that orbits and eventually falls into a black hole—that have...
Isolated for billions of years, a galaxy with more dark matter packed into its core than expected has been identified by astronomers using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
The galaxy, known as Markarian 1216 (abbreviated as Mrk 1216), contains...
It's one of the greatest and longest-running mysteries surrounding, quite literally, our sun—why is its outer atmosphere hotter than its fiery surface?
University of Michigan researchers believe they have the answer, and hope to prove it with help from NASA's...
Astronomers have directly imaged two exoplanets that are gravitationally carving out a wide gap within a planet-forming disk surrounding a young star. While over a dozen exoplanets have been directly imaged, this is only the second multi-planet system to...
A group of researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has clarified a 2018 mystery in the field of extragalactic astrophysics: The supposed existence of a galaxy without dark matter.
Galaxies with no dark matter are impossible to understand in...
A group of researchers has identified and characterized for the first time in a complete way a powerful eruption in the atmosphere of the active star HR 9024, marked by an intense flash of X-rays followed by the emission...
