In celebration of the 34th anniversary of the launch of NASA's legendary Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, astronomers took a snapshot of the Little Dumbbell Nebula (also known as Messier 76, M76, or NGC 650/651) located ...
For most stars, neutron stars and black holes are their final resting places. When a supergiant star runs out of fuel, it expands and then rapidly collapses on itself. This act creates a neutron star—an object denser than ...
Thanks to the dizzying growth of cosmic observations and measurement tools and some new advancements (primarily the "discovery" of what we call dark matter and dark energy) all against the backdrop of General Relativity, ...
A nearby supernova in 2023 offered astrophysicists an excellent opportunity to test ideas about how these types of explosions boost particles, called cosmic rays, to near light-speed. But surprisingly, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray ...
When faraway stars explode, they send out flashes of energy called gamma-ray bursts that are bright enough that telescopes back on Earth can detect them. Studying these pulses, which can also come from mergers of some exotic ...
The idea that the universe is expanding dates from almost a century ago. It was first put forward by Belgian cosmologist Georges Lemaître (1894–1966) in 1927 and confirmed observationally by American astronomer Edwin Hubble ...
After a journey lasting about two billion years, photons from an extremely energetic gamma-ray burst (GRB) struck the sensors on the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope on October 9th, 2022. ...
In October 2022, an international team of researchers, including Northwestern University astrophysicists, observed the brightest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever recorded, GRB 221009A.
Creating multiple universes to see how they run might be tempting to scientists, but it's obviously not possible. That is, as long as you need physical universes. If you can make do with virtual ones, there are far more options.
While the upcoming total solar eclipse is a special moment to reflect on our place in the universe, scientists have been studying the birth of the sun and the formation of our solar system for a long time.
