Stars

The gravitational waves we’ve detected so far have been like tsunamis in the spacetime sea. Now, a 13-year survey of light from pulsars scattered across the galaxy may have revealed the first hints of gentle gravitational wave background signals.

Despite their name, black holes can give off bright flares of light, usually as they shred stars. Most of those are one-off events, but now astronomers have discovered an extragalactic Old Faithful that fires up like clockwork every 114 days.

How many galaxies are there in the observable universe? Not as many as we thought, according to a new study. NASA’s New Horizons probe has measured the blackness of the sky and found that there’s probably “only” a few hundred billion faint galaxies.

Curing cancer is a noble goal, but sometimes scientists just want to give octopuses ecstasy. From medical marvels to wild speculations about time travel, aliens and the end of the universe, New Atlas revisits some of 2020’s strangest science stories.

Dark matter should outnumber regular matter five to one, yet it remains frustratingly elusive. But there might be ways to spot it, and now astronomers have scanned neutron stars for telltale signals of a proposed dark matter particle called an axion.

Space is an incredibly weird place. From extreme exoplanets to stars with strange fates, clues to an old mystery and the beginnings of a brand new one, here are 10 of the weirdest astronomical discoveries that blew our minds this year.

NASA has released a collection of 50 stunning Hubble images to celebrate the veteran telescope’s 30th anniversary, which took place earlier this year. The images show 30 cosmic objects, visible to amateur astronomers across the globe.

Astronomers have released a stunningly detailed image captured by the by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, revealing the structure of a massive sunspot as it temporarily darkened the Sun’s surface on January 28, 2020.

Planetary nebulae are basically slow-motion explosions in space, expected to expand and then fade over tens of thousands of years. But in an unprecedented show, Hubble has witnessed a nebula fading and shrinking dramatically within just 20 years.

Borexino, a huge underground particle detector in Italy, has picked up a never-before-seen type of neutrino coming from the Sun. These neutrinos confirm a 90-year-old hypothesis and complete our picture of the fusion cycle of the Sun and other stars.

A new NASA release has converted astronomy data into sounds, allowing the listener to hear musical compositions derived from the structure of the cosmos. The process takes data points in images such as galaxies or stars, and assigns them sounds.

Astronomers are a step closer to solving a cosmic mystery, thanks to new Hubble data. Observations show a dwarf galaxy previously found to be missing most of its dark matter is being stripped and slowly torn apart by a larger nearby galaxy.