2+ week, 5+ day ago   (376+ words) Betelgeuse, a true celebrity in the constellation Orion, has been captivating stargazers forever (or at least since telescopes became a thing). Its enormous radius – about 700 times that of our Sun – makes it the nearest red supergiant to Earth, and at…...

4+ week, 21+ hour ago   (792+ words) “Out of the half million flashes ZTF detects each night, our new artificial intelligence algorithm automatically recognized a flare that looked a lot like a tidal disruption event, despite its unusual location in the outskirts of a galaxy,” Stein said....

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (379+ words) Visible light shows a galaxy’s familiar framework of stars, dust, and gas clouds. X-rays, however, reveal gas heated to millions of degrees by supermassive black holes, exploding stars, and scorching stellar winds. When researchers combine Chandra’s high-energy X-ray data with…...

4+ week, 1+ day ago   (427+ words) The Futura Team represents the pulse of Futura’s editorial department, bringing together a collective expertise dedicated to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Rather than the work of a single author, every article published under this signature is the result of…...

3+ week, 4+ hour ago   (321+ words) A press release from Leiden University (corresponding to the Nature Astronomy article, freely available via arXiv) breaks it down: galaxies previously believed to be massive early in the story of the observable Universe—which is a headache for the standard…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago   (535+ words) The Futura Team represents the pulse of Futura’s editorial department, bringing together a collective expertise dedicated to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Rather than the work of a single author, every article published under this signature is the result of…...

2+ week, 6+ day ago   (312+ words) The clip showed a bright streak crossing the sky right beside the darkened solar crescent. The timing coincided with the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower, leading millions of viewers online to assume the camera had caught a rare…...

4+ week, 21+ hour ago   (169+ words) Lead author Lukas Böhme and cosmologist Dominik Schwarz at Bielefeld University evaluated the solar system’s motion using distant radio galaxies. Rather than measuring direct velocity vectors, they mapped the spatial distribution of these celestial radio sources. As an observer moves…...

6+ day, 2+ hour ago   (428+ words) The stone defeated a rock saw, a drill and a sledgehammer, and that resistance was the first real clue to what it was. In May 2015, a prospector named David Hole was sweeping a metal detector through open box-ironbark forest about…...