Space Telescopes News

December 21, 2024

Top Headlines

Dark Energy 'Doesn't Exist' So Can't Be Pushing 'Lumpy' Universe Apart

Dec. 20, 2024 — One of the biggest mysteries in science -- dark energy -- doesn't actually exist, according to researchers looking to solve the riddle of how the Universe is expanding. For the past 100 years, physicists have generally assumed that the cosmos is ...

Supermassive Black Holes Halt Rapid Construction in an Ancient Celestial City

Dec. 18, 2024 — Galaxy clusters -- the big cities of the universe -- are home to many giant elliptical galaxies that have completed their growth and are not forming stars. However, it is still unclear what has shut ...

Event Horizon Telescope: Moving Towards a Close-Up of a Black Hole and Its Jets

Dec. 17, 2024 — After taking the first images of black holes, the groundbreaking Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is poised to reveal how black holes launch powerful jets into space. Now, a research team has shown that ...

Binary Star Found Near Our Galaxy's Supermassive Black Hole

Dec. 17, 2024 — An international team of researchers has detected a binary star orbiting close to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. It is the first time a stellar pair has been found in the vicinity of a supermassive black ...

Latest Headlines

updated 10:06am EST

Astrophysicists Capture Astonishing Images of Gamma-Ray Flare from Supermassive Black Hole M87

Dec. 13, 2024 — The galaxy M87, located in the Virgo constellation, provided the first-ever photo of a black hole in 2019, when the Event Horizon Telescope captured ...

Superflares Once Per Century

Dec. 12, 2024 — Stars similar to the Sun produce a gigantic outburst of radiation on average about once every hundred years per star. Such superflares release more energy than a trillion hydrogen bombs and make all ...

A New Galaxy, Much Like Our Own

Dec. 11, 2024 — Stunning new photographs by a team of astronomers have revealed a newly forming galaxy that looks remarkably similar to a young Milky Way. The extraordinary images give us an unprecedented picture of ...

NASA's Hubble Celebrates Decade of Tracking Outer Planets

Dec. 9, 2024 — A NASA Hubble Space Telescope observation program called OPAL (Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy) obtains long-term baseline observations of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in order to understand ...

Universe Expansion Study Confirms Challenge to Cosmic Theory

Dec. 9, 2024 — New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope suggest that a new feature in the universe -- not a flaw in telescope measurements -- may be behind the decade-long mystery of why the universe is ...

Astronomers Find the Smallest Asteroids Ever Detected in the Main Belt

Dec. 9, 2024 — Astronomers have found a way to spot the smallest, 'decameter,' asteroids within the main asteroid belt. They used their approach to detect more than 100 new asteroids, ranging from the size of a bus ...

Astronomers Witness the in Situ Spheroid Formation in Distant Submillimetre-Bright Galaxies

Dec. 5, 2024 — Researchers have used the ALMA telescope and found old elliptical galaxies in the universe can form from intense star formation within early galaxy ...

Astronomers Close to Solving Mystery of How Universe's Giant Galaxies Formed

Dec. 4, 2024 — Astrophysicists find the birth sites of gigantic elliptical galaxies which they say gives new clues about how they were formed. The galaxies look ...

New Planet in Kepler-51 System Discovered Using James Webb Space Telescope

Dec. 3, 2024 — An unusual planetary system with three known ultra-low density 'super-puff' planets has at least one more planet, according to new ...

Astronomers May Have Discovered the Answer to a Mysterious Stellar Event

Nov. 26, 2024 — Researchers have made a record-breaking astrophysical discovery while simultaneously uncovering a possible explanation for the rare and extreme astrophysical event known as long-period radio ...

Magnetic Tornado Is Stirring Up the Haze at Jupiter's Poles

Nov. 26, 2024 — Dark ovals in Jupiter's polar haze, visible only at UV wavelengths, were first noticed 25 years ago, then ignored. A new study shows that these dark UV ovals are common, appearing at the south ...

Most Energetic Cosmic-Ray Electrons and Positrons Ever Observed

Nov. 25, 2024 — Scientists have recently identified electrons and positrons with the highest energies ever recorded on Earth. They provide evidence of cosmic processes emitting colossal amounts of energy, the ...

3.2 Million Km/h Galaxy Smash-Up

Nov. 22, 2024 — A massive collision of galaxies sparked by one travelling at a scarcely-believable 2 million mph (3.2 million km/h) has been seen in unprecedented detail by one of Earth's most powerful ...

A Nearby Supernova Could End the Search for Dark Matter

Nov. 21, 2024 — Axions are the most likely candidate for enigmatic dark matter that dominates the universe. Astrophysicists are searching for evidence of high-mass axions produced during supernovae. Scientists ...

Astronomers Take the First Close-Up Picture of a Star Outside Our Galaxy

Nov. 21, 2024 — While astronomers have taken about two dozen zoomed-in images of stars in our galaxy, unveiling their properties, countless other stars dwell within other galaxies, so far away that observing even ...

Astronomers Discover First Pairs of White Dwarf and Main Sequence Stars in Clusters, Shining New Light on Stellar Evolution

Nov. 19, 2024 — Astronomers have discovered the first pairs of white dwarf and main sequence stars -- 'dead' remnants and 'living' stars -- in young star clusters. This breakthrough offers new ...

Scientists Compile Library for Evaluating Exoplanet Water

Nov. 14, 2024 — By probing chemical processes observed in the Earth's hot mantle, scientists have started developing a library of basalt-based spectral signatures that not only will help reveal the composition ...

Three Galactic 'Red Monsters' in the Early Universe

Nov. 13, 2024 — Astronomers have identified three ultra-massive galaxies -- nearly as massive as the Milky Way -- already in place within the first billion years after the Big Bang. This surprising discovery was ...

Astronomers' Theory of How Galaxies Formed May Be Upended

Nov. 12, 2024 — The standard model for how galaxies formed in the early universe predicted that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would see dim signals from small, primitive galaxies. But data are not confirming ...

Einstein's Equations Collide With the Mysteries of the Universe

Nov. 11, 2024 — Why is the expansion of our Universe accelerating? Twenty-five years after its discovery, this phenomenon remains one of the greatest scientific mysteries. Solving it involves testing the fundamental ...

Astrophysicists Use Echoes of Light to Illuminate Black Holes

Nov. 7, 2024 — Researchers have developed an innovative technique to search for black hole light echoes. Their novel method, which will make it easier for the mass and the spin of black holes to be measured, ...

Dance of Electrons Measured in the Glow from Exploding Neutron-Stars

Nov. 4, 2024 — The temperature of elementary particles has been observed in the radioactive glow following the collision of two neutron stars and the birth of a black hole. This has, for the first time, made it ...

Astronomers Discover the Fastest-Feeding Black Hole in the Early Universe

Nov. 4, 2024 — Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang that is consuming matter at a phenomenal rate -- over 40 times the ...

NASA's Hubble, Webb Probe Surprisingly Smooth Disk Around Vega

Nov. 1, 2024 — Teams of astronomers used the combined power of NASA's Hubble and James Webb space telescopes to revisit the legendary Vega ...

New ESO Image Captures a Dark Wolf in the Sky

Oct. 31, 2024 — For Halloween, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) reveals a spooktacular image of a dark nebula that creates the illusion of a wolf-like silhouette against a colourful cosmic backdrop. Fittingly ...

One of the Fastest-Spinning Stars in the Universe

Oct. 30, 2024 — New research in our Milky Way has revealed a neutron star that rotates around its axis at an extremely high speed. It spins 716 times per second, making it one of the fastest-spinning objects ever ...

Evidence Mounts for Dark Energy from Black Holes

Oct. 30, 2024 — Researchers have strengthened the case that matter becomes dark energy when massive stars collapse and become black ...

Seeing a Black Hole's Jet in a New Light

Oct. 28, 2024 — Researchers have pored over more than two decades' worth of data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory to show there's new knotty science to discover around black ...

Scientists Discover Molecules That Store Much of the Carbon in Space

Oct. 24, 2024 — A distant interstellar cloud was found to contain an abundance of pyrene, a type of large carbon-containing molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). This suggest pyrene may have ...

Dandelion-Shaped Supernova and Zombie Star

Oct. 24, 2024 — A historical supernova documented by Chinese and Japanese astronomers in 1181 has been lost for centuries, until very recently. Yet, the newly found remnant shows some stunning characteristics that ...