Astronomers think that many star systems actually contain multiple stars. There are doubles, triples and even quadruple groupings of stars locked together in a gravitational embrace. Astronomers recently discovered a system with 4 stars orbiting within the orbit of Jupiter. It’s a surprising discovery considering no telescope on Earth is powerful enough to separate them [...]

 
An Einstein Ring happens when two galaxies are perfectly aligned. The closer galaxy acts as a lens, magnifying and distorting the view of a more distant galaxy. But today astronomers announced that they’ve discovered a double Einstein Ring: three galaxies are perfectly aligned, creating a double ring around the lensing galaxy. The odds of finding [...]

Enough of this small stuff, let’s look at the big picture. The really really big picture. In this case, one of the largest patches of the sky ever observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. A new detailed survey was released today that combines 80 separate Hubble images together. In addition to a framework of galaxy [...]

Before Neptune was discovered in the 1840s, astronomers predicted its location based on how it was interacting with Uranus. Once again, this technique was used to find a planet, but this time orbiting a star 200 light-years away. It turns out planets like to be packed together in star systems. Find a gap, and you [...]

Newly forming planetary systems follow a routine. They collapse down from a cloud of gas and dust to form a central star and orbiting planets. But astronomers have found two unusual stars that went through a second phase of planetary formation, hundreds of millions or even billions of years after the first.
The announcement was made [...]

Bring matter and anti-matter together, and you get a potent explosion. Since antimatter is annihilated almost as soon as it forms, you wouldn’t think you could find any out there in the Universe. But you’d be wrong. There’s a giant cloud of the anti-stuff in the central regions of the Milky Way. Oh, and the [...]

Uh oh, this doesn’t sound good. It turns out there could be hundreds of rogue black holes, each weighing thousands of times the mass of the Sun, hurtling though the Milky Way. Oh, and they’d be almost impossible to spot.
Vanderbilt astronomer Kelly Holley-Bockelmann presented the results of a supercomputer simulation at the Winter meeting of [...]

Our early Solar System was a violent place. For hundreds of millions of years, large planetoids smashed together, forming larger and larger planets. This same process is happening in other star systems right now. In fact, astronomers have discovered a system where a Neptune-sized object and a Jupiter-sized object might have just smashed together. Ouch.
This [...]

Our home planet has been often described in glowing, nurturing terms. A cradle for life, right in the goldilocks zone. But our planet is actually right on the edge of habitability. If it were any smaller, and a little less massive, plate tectonics might never have gotten started. It turns out, life needs plate tectonics.
Astronomers [...]

 
Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the Universe. Just a single quasar can blaze more than a hundred times more brightly than our entire Milky Way galaxy. It turns out, though, that some of the brightest quasars in the Universe are hidden, cloaked behind a shroud of gas and dust. But now researchers [...]