12+ hour, 14+ min ago   (504+ words) New simulations suggest the moon may have formed almost instantly after a giant impact, not slowly from a debris disk....

3+ day, 17+ hour ago   (900+ words) Little red dots should shine in X-rays if black holes power them. None did, until Chandra found one 11.8 billion light-years away that does. Astronomers have found a single object in the constellation Ursa Major that behaves like nothing else in…...

4+ day, 9+ hour ago   (1013+ words) Star formation has fallen by more than half over 4.5 billion years, even as the universe’s supply of atomic hydrogen has barely declined. Stars are being born across the universe at less than half the rate they were 4.5 billion years ago....

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (1231+ words) Physicists have spent six decades believing that high-energy particles trapped around Earth spread out through random scattering. A new paper just flipped that assumption on its head. For over 60 years, scientists believed high-energy particles in Earth’s radiation belts were scattering…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (1240+ words) Some ancient San star stories have faded, but practical knowledge of Venus, the Moon, and the seasons still survives in South Africa's Karoo. In the Karoo, a dry and thinly settled part of South Africa, the Milky Way has an…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (1090+ words) One exploded star left behind six Earth masses of rocky planet material just 100 million years after the Big Bang, a simulation finds. Rocky planets are built largely from material forged inside earlier stars. Carbon, oxygen, and iron didn’t exist when…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago   (1001+ words) Astronomers have found a strange black hole wrapped in dense gas that could explain how giant black holes grew so quickly after the Big Bang. Nearly every large galaxy keeps a giant black hole at its center. Some of those…...

2+ week, 17+ hour ago   (873+ words) The group of five galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet are also called the Hickson Compact Group 92 (HCG 92). "Quintet” is a misnomer, as only four of the galaxies are truly close together. Credit: NASA/ESA The early universe was supposed to…...

2+ week, 18+ hour ago   (901+ words) Moon dust contains an ancient cosmic record, and a new mathematical model could help scientists read the stardust buried deep in its scrambled layers. When a massive star runs out of fuel, it blows itself apart and flings its guts…...

2+ week, 1+ day ago   (1105+ words) Astronomers found that the mix of stars changes across the Milky Way, challenging a basic assumption used to measure distant galaxies. Astronomers can’t see most of the stars in a distant galaxy. The faint ones give off almost none of…...