Described as the world’s largest and most advanced superconducting camera, a new instrument dubbed DARKNESS is designed to filter out the blinding light of stars to see orbiting exoplanets in more detail than ever before.
Continue Reading
With the James Webb Space Telescope promising to capture pictures of universe with a degree of detail never before seen, we take a look back at some of the most breathtaking intergalactic images humanity has snapped.
Continue Reading
Thanks to a rare cosmic alignment, astronomers have been able to view the most distant individual normal star ever observed. Located some 9 billion light years from Earth, the star was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope thanks to gravitational lensing amplifying the star’s feeble glow.
Continue Reading
A new study on the density of the seven planets in the nearby TRAPPIST-1 system has found that these worlds may have even more water than Earth does – but in a cruel case of having too much of a good thing, that might be enough to drown out any hopes of finding life there.
Continue Reading
Red dwarf stars are of particular interest to astronomers hunting down distant worlds. The latest study of Kepler data has now identified 15 new exoplanets around red dwarfs, including a system of three “Super-Earths” – one of which appears to be orbiting within the host star’s habitable zone.
Continue Reading
When it was first discovered in 2016, Proxima b looked like a prime spot to hunt for extraterrestrial life. More recent studies have painted a bleaker picture, and now the final nail in the coffin could be a huge stellar flare detected last year, which would have baked the surface of the planet.
Continue Reading
Amateur astronomers have made some pretty amazing observations in the past. Now, an Argentinian amateur astronomer named Victor Buso is thanking his lucky stars, after capturing on camera the very moment a star went supernova.
Continue Reading
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory in Chile have imaged a very active black hole at the center of spiral galaxy M77, which is apparently feasting on the universe’s largest donut.
Continue Reading
Astronomers at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) have calculated that the Andromeda galaxy is roughly the same size as the Milky Way.
Continue Reading
As of January 2018, well over 3,500 exoplanets have been confirmed in the Milky Way, and it was basically a given that planets were pretty common across the universe. Now astrophysicists from the University of Oklahoma (OU) have confirmed the first detection of extragalactic exoplanets.
Continue Reading
See the stories that matter in your inbox every morning