Milky Way over sand dunes in Cervantes, Australia. Credit: Nik Coli/Shutterstock The European Space Agency (ESA) recently announced a new mission of its science program: a small telescope orbiting the…
Category: Space
A bizarre gamma-ray burst breaks the rules for these cosmic eruptions
Astronomers have spotted a bright gamma-ray burst that upends previous theories of how these energetic cosmic eruptions occur. For decades, astronomers thought that GRBs came in two flavors, long and…
In 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope brought us new views of the cosmos
This year marked the end of a decades-long wait for astronomers. The James Webb Space Telescope is finally in action. The telescope, which launched in December 2021, released its first…
A new supercomputer simulation animates the evolution of the universe
The infant universe transforms from a featureless landscape to an intricate web in a new supercomputer simulation of the cosmos’s formative years. An animation from the simulation shows our universe…
Here’s why some supermassive black holes blaze so brightly
For the first time, astronomers have observed how certain supermassive black holes launch jets of high-energy particles into space — and the process is shocking. Shock waves propagating along the…
These are our top space images of all time
We’ve never seen images of space as astounding as those from the James Webb Space Telescope, which shared its first cosmic vistas in July. The pictures have left us dazzled,…
Astrophysicists chronicle the history of mathematical cosmology
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain RUDN University astrophysicists have gathered the most important discoveries of modern cosmology from 1917 to our time. The collected data became an introduction to Philosophical Transactions…
The pristine Winchcombe meteorite suggests that Earth’s water came from asteroids
Late in the evening of February 28, 2021, a coal-dark space rock about the size of a soccer ball fell through the sky over northern England. The rock blazed in…
Part of a lost, ancient star catalog has now been found
Fragments of a star catalog from the second century B.C. have turned up in a manuscript that had been erased and written over centuries later. A new analysis of the…
