Astronomers

Captured by Webb’s NIRCam, composite images use infrared filters to sample light wavelengths. Monochromatic exposures were assigned the colors red, green and blue for clarity. - NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Dale Kocevski/Colby CollegeLike tiny…

Earth has a particularly strong magnetosphere—a bubble-shaped capsule of magnetism—shielding the planet and its inhabitants from solar weather and other space badness. These protective perks extend to the Moon, whose…

A newly discovered planet orbiting the nearby star GJ 887 is being hailed as one of the most promising candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life. This super-Earth, with a mass over six times that of our own planet, lies…

Nearly a century ago, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that almost all galaxies are receding from the Milky Way. This observation became a cornerstone of modern cosmology because it provided key evidence that the universe is expanding…

Despite sounding like something out of pulpy '50s sci-fi, 'space lasers' are real – and astrophysicists have now spotted the brightest and most distant one yet.This 'gigamaser' is blasting out of a gigantic galactic collision some 8…

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory spent the night staring at the dark cosmos, alerting astronomers of ongoing changes in the skies in real-time. The observatory fired off its first wave of notifications from its new alert…

The scientific community is celebrating the cancellation of a project which would have threatened the clearest skies in the world in Chile’s Atacama Desert.The proposed $10bn, 3,000-hectare green hydrogen and ammonia production facility,…

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are intense sources of high-energy radiation that scientists detect on Earth in the form of gamma rays. They were first detected in the 1960s by US military satellites looking for nuclear detonations on Earth,…

An incredibly energetic "impossible" particle that hit Earth in 2023 may have been debris from an exploding primordial black hole formed during the Big Bang. If that is the case, then it could prove the existence of primordial black…

Using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), astronomers have tracked a 3,000 light-years-long cosmic blowtorch back to its source, the supermassive black hole M87*, which bears the distinction of being the first black hole imaged by…