16+ hour, 49+ min ago   (378+ words) The small moons inside Neptune’s rings may be the surviving debris of a much larger moon system destroyed when Triton was captured billions of years ago. Neptune’s smallest moons look like minor members of the solar system. They are difficult…...

18+ hour, 19+ min ago   (603+ words) The enormous Cygnus Bubble is usually linked to a busy star-forming region. A new study argues that the microquasar Cygnus X-3 may be the more natural source of its highest-energy gamma rays. Cygnus X-3 is a microquasar, a binary system containing a…...

3+ day, 13+ hour ago   (1203+ words) Twenty-seven faint objects beyond Neptune are giving astronomers a rare look at the planet-building material that survived when the outer solar system stopped growing. The outer solar system is not empty. Beyond Neptune, in the cold region known as the…...

3+ day, 13+ hour ago   (1153+ words) The objects are unusually soft in X-rays but bright in extreme ultraviolet light—exactly the combination that makes them difficult to find and potentially important to the history of stars and galaxies. A galaxy can be full of powerful objects…...

3+ day, 16+ hour ago   (374+ words) What might happen when the ingredients of life have an entire landscape in which to react? On Titan, NASA hopes to investigate that question by flying from one patch of ground to another. The update also highlighted the name of…...

4+ day, 14+ hour ago   (556+ words) A brilliant X-ray source is not automatically a black hole. Matter falling toward a neutron star can also become intensely luminous, and some neutron stars have surprised astronomers by producing far more radiation than expected. Identifying the object requires evidence…...

4+ day, 17+ hour ago   (495+ words) giving astronomers a new counterpart to the planet’s famous northern hexagon. The southern pattern appears to be evolving, raising a question that a single striking image cannot answer: will it become another enduring feature of the planet’s weather? A study…...

4+ day, 17+ hour ago   (493+ words) Twenty-seven faint objects beyond Neptune have emerged from a deep James Webb Space Telescope survey, extending the search for the solar system’s building blocks to worlds only kilometres across. Hubble observations of part of the sample add a second clue:…...

6+ day, 19+ hour ago   (624+ words) A neutron star is what remains after the core of a massive star collapses. It is not a small ordinary star. It is the crushed core of a dead one, compressed until protons and electrons are forced together and most…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago   (752+ words) A parsec is a distance defined by parallax. Here is how astronomers use the unit to measure the space between stars and galaxies. What is a parsec? It is a unit of distance used by astronomers to describe the space…...