Pity the poor brown dwarf; a star wannabe. With as little as 3% the mass of the Sun, brown dwarfs don’t have the gravitational pressure needed to ignite fusion in their cores. Instead of blazing bright, they’re dim little objects that smolder quietly for eons. They’re small and dim, and this makes them almost impossible […]

Most of the planets found to date have been massive and orbiting their parent stars at a fraction the orbit of Mercury - the hot jupiters. They’re interesting to astronomers, but the big goal is going to be finding Earth-mass planets orbiting other stars. To do this, astronomers are looking for less massive stars, where […]

As space telescopes get larger and more sensitive, the search for Earth-sized worlds surrounding other stars is about to get rolling. But astronomers are going to need to know where to look. A team of researchers are working on a survey of nearby stars, calculating the habitable zones around them. When the search begins, astronomers […]

Don’t panic, but there’s a giant cloud of hydrogen gas on a collision course with the Milky Way. When it hits, 40 million years from now, it should generate vast regions of star formation. In fact, we don’t even need to wait; the leading edge of this gas cloud is already starting to interact with […]

Supermassive black holes are thought to lurk at the heart of most galaxies. Scientists have long believed that only the galaxies with thick central bulges could pull together enough mass for a supermassive black hole to form. But NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has turned up evidence that even skinny galaxies, with no central bulge, can […]

 
When a star like our Sun dies, it’ll end up as a white dwarf. And if a star contains 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, it’ll have enough gravity to turn into a neutron star. Much bigger stars turn into black holes. But now it turns out, neutron stars can be much more massive […]

As galaxies rotate, their spiral arms usually sweep back, trailing behind the rotation of the galaxy. But astronomers have found a galaxy that defies this convention, with its arms opening outward in the same direction as the rotation of the galaxy’s disk.
The galaxy, known as NGC 4622, lies 200 million light years away in the […]

Greedy black holes can only consume so much material. The leftover matter backs up into an accretion disk surrounding the black hole. The pull of the black hole is so strong that flashes of radiation emitted from this accretion disk might need to make several orbits around the black hole before it can actually escape […]

The supermassive black holes that lurk at the hearts of the most massive galaxies might be spinning faster than astronomers ever thought. In fact, they might be spinning at the very limits predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Perhaps it’s this extreme rotational speed that generates the energetic jets that blast out of the most […]

We live in a beautiful grand spiral galaxy. But how did we get from the primordial elements after the Big Bang to the intricate and complex structure we live in today? Astronomers have found some of the earliest galactic building blocks; the ancestors of galaxies like our own Milky Way.
The discovery was made by researchers […]