Astrophysics

Illustration of a hot Jupiter planet in the Messier 67 star cluster. Hot Jupiters are so named because of their close proximity — usually just a few million miles — to their star, which drives up temperatures and can puff out the planets.

What Astronomers Can Learn From Hot Jupiters, the Scorching Giant Planets of the Galaxy

Many of the planets that are roughly the size of Jupiter orbit right next to their stars, burning at thousands of degrees

James Peebles, Michael Mayor and Didier Queloz

Three Win Physics Nobel for Showing Our Place in the Cosmos

Half goes to cosmologist James Peebles for work on cosmic background and dark matter and half goes to the team that discovered the first exoplanet

New Organic Compounds Found in Plumes From Saturn's Icy Moon Enceladus

Analysis of data from the late, great Cassini spacecraft reveals the moon is spurting oxygen and nitrogen-bearing organic compounds into space

Artist's conception of a watery Venus.

Venus Could Have Been Habitable for Billions of Years

New simulations show the planet could have maintained moderate temperatures and liquid water until 700 million years ago

Charlotte Moore Sitterly made huge strides in our understanding of how atoms are structured and what stars, especially our sun, are made of.

How Charlotte Moore Sitterly Wrote The Encyclopedia of Starlight

The "world’s most honored woman astrophysicist" worked tirelessly for decades to measure the makeup of the sun and the stars

Recently Discovered Neutron Star Is Almost Too Massive to Exist

The star J0740+6620 is 2.14 times the mass of our sun but just 12 miles in diameter, approaching the density of a black hole

The green blob of X-rays in the lower left quadrant of the Fireworks galaxy lasted about 10 days before disappearing.

Astronomers Puzzle Over Short-Lived Glowing Green Light Bursts

The ultra luminous X-rays lasted about 10 days in the aptly named Fireworks galaxy

New 3-D Map Shows Milky Way's Big Twist

By mapping the distance of Cepheid stars, researchers reveal that our galaxy is warped

An artist's visualization of the star S0-2 as it passes by the supermassive black hole at the galactic center. As the star gets closer to the supermassive black hole, it experiences a gravitational redshift that is predicted by Einstein's general relativity. By observing this redshift, we can test Einstein's theory of gravity.

A Star Orbiting in the Extreme Gravity of a Black Hole Validates General Relativity

The star S0-2 gets so close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy that it can be used to test our fundamental understanding of gravity

First Moon-Forming Disk Detected Swirling Around an Exoplanet

Telescope observations suggest that a cloud of gas and dust around a planet 370 light-years away may be coalescing into planet-sized moons

Artist's rendering of the planets orbiting PDS 70.

Astronomers Snap a Rare Picture of Two Baby Planets

The Very Large Telescope imaged Planets PDS 70b and PDS 70c about 370 light years away creating a gap in the gas and dust disk around their star

The sixty Starlink satellites before being deployed.

Astronomers Worry New SpaceX Satellite Constellation Could Impact Research

The first of SpaceX's 12,000 Starlink broadband satellites launched last week, raising fears they could interfere with ground-based telescopes

One-Third of Exoplanets Could Be Water Worlds With Oceans Hundreds of Miles Deep

A new statistical analysis suggests seas hundreds of miles deep cover up to 35 percent of distant worlds

Exoplanet Core Orbiting a Dying Star May Help Astronomers Understand What Lies in Store for Our Solar System

It's likely the planetesimal orbiting a white dwarf 410 light years away was the core of a minor planet caught in its immense gravity

Illustration of the GRAPES-3 Muon telescope in a lightning storm.

How Much Electricity Can Thunderstorms Produce?

Researchers used a cosmic ray detector to clock one storm in at a shocking 1.3 billion volts

An ultraviolet image of the Andromeda galaxy, the closest major galaxy to the Milky Way, taken by NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer space telescope. Like our own galaxy, Andromeda is a spiral galaxy with a flat rotating disk of stars and gas and a concentrated bulge of stars at the center.

Streams of Stars Snaking Through the Galaxy Could Help Shine a Light on Dark Matter

When the Milky Way consumes another galaxy, tendrils of stellar streams survive the merger, containing clues about the universe's mysterious unseen matter

The positions of the globular clusters used to estimate the mass of the Milky Way.

How Much Does the Milky Way Weigh?

Measurements from the Gaia satellite and Hubble Space Telescope show our galaxy tips the scales at about 1.5 trillion solar masses

That's so metal.

Planetary Smash-Up May Have Produced This Distant Iron Exoplanet

Computer simulations suggest Kepler 107c could have been formed when two rocky planets collided, stripping it down to its metal core

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Astrophysicist Mercedes Lopez-Morales Is Grooming the Next Generation of Planet Hunters

"The Daily Show" correspondent Roy Wood, Jr. talks with the astrophysicist about adrenaline, fear, curiosity and attracting younger generations to science

We Finally Know How Long a Day on Saturn Is

By studying oscillations in the planet's iconic rings, researchers have determined it takes Saturn 10 hours, 33 minutes and 38 seconds to rotate once

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