7+ hour, 35+ min ago  (733+ words) A cloaked alien invasion force is approaching Earth and coming up on Mars. The first officer looks through a viewfinder and says, "Captain, the fourth planet's atmosphere is behaving strangely. As though it were trying to block incoming energy." The…...

15+ hour, 21+ min ago  (190+ words) Granules-like structure of surface of sun and sunspots are thought to reveal the activity on the Sun but this new research suggests there may be other ways to measure it using helioseismology (Credit: NASA/JAXA) Solar cycle superimposed against an…...

22+ hour, 40+ min ago  (175+ words) We live in a golden age of astronomical imaging. Telescopes are capturing billions of galaxy images, painting the universe in breathtaking detail. But there's a problem, and it's a big one. A photograph tells you what something looks like but…...

22+ hour, 59+ min ago  (329+ words) Illustration of the "lighthouse" effect produced by a pulsar. In reality the pulses of light repeat far more rapidly than the animation shows (Credit: Michael Kramer) The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, a small satellite of the Milky Way that is leaving…...

1+ day, 11+ hour ago  (59+ words) There's a planet out there called LHS 3844 b, orbiting a star about 48 light-years away. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) found it in 2018 when the planet transited across the face of its star. The James Webb Space Telescope zxeroed in…...

1+ day, 10+ hour ago  (801+ words) Astronomers know that stars can sometimes eat planets. This is expected in our own Solar System when the Sun leaves the main sequence in a few billion years. It will swell and become first a subgiant, then a full-blown red…...

1+ day, 12+ hour ago  (253+ words) The N159 star-forming complex in the Large Magellanic Cloud is a stunning example of an active star formation region. Though its much larger neighbour, the Tarantula Nebula, captures more attention (thanks to stunning images like the one from the JWST) N159 is…...

1+ day, 14+ hour ago  (565+ words) Open star clusters are some of the most dazzling objects in the sky. The small ones contain a few dozen stars, while the largest contain several thousand. The stars cluster together because they all formed from the same giant molecular…...

2+ day, 7+ hour ago  (315+ words) Said Christopher Berry of the University of Glasgow's Institute for Gravitational Research (IGR): Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime that stretch and squeeze space. They are tiny by the time that they reach the Earth, millions of years after the…...

2+ day, 9+ hour ago  (87+ words) In December 2019, astronomers detected a one hour brightening of a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a classic gravitational microlensing event. These occur when a compact object bends a distant the light of a distant star as it passes in…...