It is common knowledge that the Sun is the center of the Solar System. Around him, planets orbit, along with a thick asteroid belt, a few meteor fields, and a handful of far distant comets. But that is not the whole story. “Instead, everything orbits around the center of mass …
Read More »
A faint, ghostly galaxy 10 million light-years away has delivered one of black hole astronomy’s holy grails. At the bottom is a black hole that appears to belong to an elusive middleweight class of intermediate-mass black holes, a discovery that could help us understand how some of the more massive …
Read More »
A star discovered at full speed by the Milky Way is so strange that astronomers can only conclude that it was ejected during a very unusual supernova event. The star, a white dwarf about 1,430 light-years away called SDSS J1240 + 6710, and nicknamed Dox, advances at 250 kilometers per …
Read More »
Finding a potentially habitable exoplanet is not as easy as you might think. Orbiting at a warm distance from the host star is only the first step. Size and composition also play a role, as does the level of flare activity in the star. And all of that doesn’t mean …
Read More »
About 730 light years away, around a star that closely resembles our Sun, astronomers have found a really strange exoplanet. It is only slightly smaller than Neptune, which could indicate a gaseous planet … but it is more than twice as massive as Neptune, with a density comparable to Earth …
Read More »