2+ hour, 41+ min ago   (1495+ words) The 'moonish thingy' also restarts an old fight among astronomers over what qualifies as a planet A newly spotted object about the mass of Jupiter (illustrated in the middle) orbits a brown dwarf (foreground). That brown dwarf — or “failed star…...

4+ day, 2+ hour ago   (1427+ words) Theoretical physicist Ronald Gamble uses math to study how black holes warp the shape of spacetime. Sometimes, he pictures himself as Marvel’s Iron Man. “I feel like Tony Stark every other day.” When Ronald Gamble first learned about black holes…...

2+ week, 4+ day ago   (977+ words) These Jupiter-sized worlds are our galaxy’s puffiest planets Two “superpuff” planets are illustrated orbiting a sunlike star more than 1,000 light-years from Earth. Each is as big as Jupiter and as dense as cotton candy. A pair of newly found planets…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago   (575+ words) This is the black hole’s point of no return The first image of a black hole was released in April 2019. It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope. The image shows the black hole at the center of the Messier…...

2+ mon, 1+ week ago   (944+ words) This mind-bending math focuses on morphing families of shapes The shapes of a donut and a mug are similar. Both have a single hole. If you made these shapes from clay, you could mold one into the other without breaking…...

2+ mon, 1+ week ago   (907+ words) If so, it’s the most distant solar-system body known to have one Observations in January 2024 showed a distant solar-system body — 2002 XV93 (illustrated) — pass in front of a star. As it did, the star’s light gradually faded and then brightened again. That…...

2+ mon, 2+ week ago   (984+ words) Studying changes in the space rocks’ motion could help protect Earth from future asteroid hits NASA’s DART spacecraft took this picture of asteroid Didymos (bottom left) and its smaller companion Dimorphos some 2.5 minutes before crashing — on purpose — into Dimorphos. Now,…...

3+ mon, 1+ week ago   (1118+ words) Such black holes in the early universe may explain why matter is common and antimatter is rare Tiny black holes (illustrated) could explain how the universe came to be mostly made of matter, while antimatter is rare. NASA’s Goddard Space…...

3+ mon, 6+ day ago   (1806+ words) A quest to understand the most bizarre objects in the universe unveils many surprises Using powerful telescopes, astrophysicists can see bright flares coming from faraway black holes. This artist’s illustration depicts the black hole at the center of the Milky…...

4+ mon, 1+ day ago   (1668+ words) Some branches of physics suggest we may live in a multiverse In the 2022 film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Doctor Strange traveled across the multiverse and even fought one of his doppelgängers. In the real world, hopping between…...