AstroPhysics & Cosmology

Nearly a millennium ago, astronomers witnessed a brilliant new star blazing in the sky—a supernova so bright it was visible in daylight for weeks. Today, its expanding remnant, the Crab Nebula, continues to evolve 6,500 light-years away. First linked to historical records by Edwin Hubble, the nebula has since been studied in exquisite detail by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which has now revisited this ancient explosion to trace its ongoing expansion and transformation.

To understand the Universe we see around us today, we have to understand its past. Some hard-to-find ancient stars, called Population II stars, preserve evidence from the ancient Universe. Astronomers finally found one.

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We can now use the gravitational waves of black holes to test general relativity and look for evidence of alternative theories of gravity.

Astronomers captured a colorful new portrait of the Triangulum Galaxy, revealing complex clouds of gas in between the galaxy's 40 billion stars.

Catching a comet in the process of falling apart is difficult, but a coincidence let astronomers see one in more detail than ever before using the Hubble Space Telescope – and revealed a mystery

What if the mysterious 'Little Red Dots' aren't baby black holes, but rather globular clusters in their messy, glorious formation?

A team of astronomers led by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian have for the first time used galactic archaeology, the study of detailed chemical fingerprints in deep space, to trace the history of a galaxy outside the Milky Way. The study, published in Nature Astronomy, demonstrates a new way to reconstruct the evolution of distant galaxies, and opens up a new field of astronomy, called "extragalactic archaeology."

Did primordial black holes born during the Big Bang swallow the universe's antimatter, allowing matter to dominate the cosmos?

The ancient and rare star PicII-503 is helping astronomers understand how carbon became so abundant in the universe.

In an incredibly lucky cosmic accident, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured a comet breaking apart in real time—something astronomers have long tried and failed to observe. The comet, C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), wasn’t even the original target, but when researchers pivoted to it, they unknowingly caught it mid-disintegration into multiple pieces.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has observed a nearby spiral galaxy known as NGC 628. Results of the observational campaign, published March 10 on the arXiv pre-print server, shed more light on the population of emerging young star clusters in this galaxy.

This week, among a lot of other important findings, we learned that emperor cichlid fish have gaze sensitivity and dislike it if you look at them—or especially their children. England is looking for a solution to its 5-billion-liter water deficit. And a high-fiber diet isn't only healthy for you—it also benefits your parasitic tapeworms!

Extreme exomoons with tidal heating and thick, hydrogen-rich atmospheres may be able to create billions of years of potentially habitable surface conditions.

The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS will soon leave our solar system, never to return, but the observations of the

In a happy twist of fate, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope just witnessed a comet in the act of breaking

"Project Hail Mary," the Ryan Gosling-led adaptation of the best-selling sci-fi novel from Andy Weir, is being praised for putting the science in science fiction. Although aliens, sun-draining microorganisms and galaxy-spanning spaceflight are all a part of the story of a scientist sent on a suicide mission to save Earth, the film and its source material are not afraid to delve into the kind of astrophysics that would make most people's heads spin.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a rare cosmic moment: a comet breaking apart in real time.

Just how big can a star become? The answer depends on when in cosmic history you’re asking the question

A nearby galaxy is behaving strangely—and now scientists know why. The Small Magellanic Cloud’s stars move in chaotic patterns because it slammed into its larger neighbor millions of years ago. That collision disrupted its structure and even created the illusion that its gas was rotating. The discovery means this once “textbook” galaxy may not be as typical as astronomers believed.

As an astrophysicist, my world revolves around the wonders of space and the mysteries of the universe. This means I can be a tough critic of science fiction books and films that explore these topics.

These worlds are among the least dense ever found, and all attempts to probe their atmospheres have been blocked by a mysterious smog.

Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars. The Crab Pulsar, an often studied supernova remnant, is known for its unusual radio emission patterns. New researchs says it's because of a "tug-of-war" between magnetism and gravity. Gravity acts as a focusing lens and plasma in the magnetosphere acts as a defocusing lens.

A team of astronomers were fortunate when their original comet target couldn't be observed with the Hubble. They quickly pivoted to a different target, and caught Comet K1 in the process of breaking apart. This gave them an excellent opportunity to learn more about the doomed object.

Learn more about L 98‑59 d, an exoplanet 35 light‑years away with a deep global magma ocean

Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime produced by violent cosmic events, such as the merging of black holes. So far, direct detections have relied on measuring tiny distance changes over kilometer-scale instruments. In a new theoretical study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers at Stockholm University, Nordita, and the University of Tübingen propose an unconventional approach: tracking how gravitational waves reshape the light emitted by atoms. The work describes a possible detection route, but an experimental demonstration remains for the future.

Astronomers have detected strange "wobbles" in the light curve of a super bright supernova, hinting that a magnetar was born inside the extreme stellar explosion.

Astronomers discover PicII‑503, a 14-billion-year-old star carrying primordial elements, challenging theories of early star formation and cosmic evolution

In a stroke of luck, astronomers saw the comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) break into four or five fragments in November after it passed close to the sun.

In a stroke of luck, astronomers saw the comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) break into four or five fragments in November after it passed close to the sun.

"Cosmic archaeologists" have discovered an iron-deficient second-generation star, which provides evidence of how ancient stars enriched their successors.

In a happy twist of fate, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope witnessed a comet in the act of breaking apart. The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule. The findings are published in the journal Icarus.

Learn more about the Kepler-51 star system and some of the ''oddball" planets that reside there. 

How fast can a galaxy build ordered magnetic fields spanning thousands of light-years? Existing theories say several billion years, but observations of galaxies in our universe imply shorter timescales. In a study published in the Physical Review Letters and highlighted in the Physics magazine, scientists propose an explanation that resolves this contradiction. They say that the collapse of plasma clouds during the formation of galaxies could significantly accelerate the growth of these magnetic fields.

Greek mythology has given a name to a great many objects in our solar system. But perhaps one of the least well understood are the Trojans, named after the people of Troy featured in "The Iliad." When astronomers refer to them, they are normally talking about a group of more than 10,000 confirmed asteroids orbiting at the Lagrange points both in front of and behind Jupiter on its orbit around the sun.

Greek mythology has given a name to a great many objects in our solar system. But perhaps one of the least well understood are the Trojans, named after the people of Troy featured in The Iliad. When astronomers refer to them, they are normally talking about a group of over 10,000 confirmed asteroids orbiting at the Lagrange points both in front of and behind Jupiter on its orbit around the Sun. But, more generally, astronomers can now use the term to refer to any co-orbital setup - indeed almost every planet in our solar system has Trojans, though not as many as Jupiter. Which also leads to the belief that “exotrojans” must exist around other stars. Despite our best efforts with initiatives like the TROY project, so far we have yet to find one. But a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal by Jackson Taylor of West Virginia University and an abundance

Spring in the Northern Hemisphere is the time to explore and capture breathtaking deep-sky galaxies, from bright showpieces to faint cosmic challenges.

An international collaboration, including Northwestern University, has reached a critical milestone in the search for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up about 85% of all matter in the universe. Located two kilometers below ground in Canada, the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) at SNOLAB has cooled to its operating temperature, the collaboration announced on March 17.

Kepler-51d is a giant, ultra-light “super-puff” planet wrapped in an unusually thick haze that’s blocking scientists from seeing what it’s made of. Observations from JWST revealed that this haze may be one of the largest ever detected, possibly stretching as wide as Earth itself. The planet’s low density and close orbit don’t match existing models of how gas giants form or survive. Now, researchers are left with more questions than answers about how such a strange world came to be.

Astronomers have identified a strange new kind of exoplanet that challenges how scientists classify worlds beyond our Solar System. The planet, L 98-59 d, appears to contain a vast ocean of molten rock beneath its surface that traps large amounts of sulfur deep inside. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope revealed unusual sulfur-rich gases in its atmosphere and a surprisingly low density for its size.

The research could shed light on how black holes vomit out matter and how this influences their home galaxies.

The WHAT? Yeah, the vortons. It’s not an anime monster-hunting show. It’s not some AI startup company. It’s a…it’s a thing. I think.

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A new data release more than doubles the number of gravitational-wave candidate events—and reveals unexpected complexities of merging black holes

From phone boxes and flux capacitors to black holes and hot tubs, sci-fi has created plenty of ways to explore the fourth dimension.

Astronomers may have found an exciting new clue about dark energy—the mysterious force driving the universe’s accelerating expansion. They discovered an extraordinarily bright supernova from more than 10 billion years ago whose light was bent and magnified by a foreground galaxy, creating multiple images through gravitational lensing. Because the light from each image traveled slightly different paths, it arrived at Earth at different times, letting scientists effectively watch different moments of the same cosmic explosion simultaneously.

Bizarre objects that seem to lack all dark matter present a cosmic mystery

Lurid headlines don’t give American children enough credit

The levels of a heavy form of hydrogen in 3I/ATLAS are 30 to 40 times higher than in Earth's oceans, suggesting the comet has a cold and distant origin

Scientists studying a mysterious effect called cosmic birefringence—a subtle twist in the polarization of the universe’s oldest light—have developed a new way to reduce uncertainty in how it’s measured. This faint rotation in the cosmic microwave background could point to entirely new physics, including hidden particles such as axions and clues about dark matter or dark energy.

Europa is not supposed to look the way it does. Jupiter's icy moon is scarred by a chaotic patchwork of fractured terrain, crisscrossed ridges, and disrupted surface regions that suggest something dynamic is happening beneath its frozen shell. Scientists have long suspected that a vast liquid ocean, kept warm by the gravitational kneading of Jupiter's enormous gravity, lies hidden beneath that ice. Now, a new study using the James Webb Space Telescope is adding a crucial piece to the puzzle, and the implications reach right to the heart of astrobiology.

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbors—a small, gas-rich galaxy visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere, and bound to our galaxy by gravity, alongside its companion, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). All three galaxies have been interacting for hundreds of millions of years.

The local universe may be expanding more slowly than previously thought, a discovery that could relieve a pesky discrepancy known as the Hubble tension.

A radical idea that resolves many quantum paradoxes suggests there is no objective view of reality. How can the cosmos be stitched together from interlocking perspectives?

Discovered in the Pictor II dwarf galaxy, star PicII-503 has an extreme deficiency in iron—less than 1/40,000th of the sun. This signature makes it the clearest example of a star within a primordial system that preserves the chemical enrichment of the universe's first stars. PicII-503 also has an extreme overabundance of carbon, providing the missing link to connect carbon-enhanced stars observed in the Milky Way halo to an origin in ancient dwarf galaxies.

And yeah, we have a problem.

Science in the modern era is increasingly reliant on enormous datasets and automated analysis. In astronomy, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)—a ten-year survey covering the entire southern sky almost a thousand times over the next decade—will test the limits of this reliance.

Using data from the Magellan Clay telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), astronomers have investigated a galactic globular cluster known as NGC 5824. Results of the new study, available in a paper published March 5 on the arXiv pre-print server, suggest that the cluster is embedded in a dark matter halo.

Dimensions beyond the four we’re familiar with could solve a host of problems in physics and cosmology. Columnist Leah Crane explores what a higher-dimensional universe might be like – and how we could find out if we live in one

But here’s the thing about these defects. They can’t just go away. They’re stuck.

Astronomers have employed the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) to investigate a peculiar pulsar wind nebula known as Vela X. Results of the new observations, published March 2 on the arXiv pre-print server, provide more hints about the properties and nature of this nebula.

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Astronomers combined Hubble's small-scale details of stellar death with Euclid's wide view of cosmic environments to take a closer look at the iconic Cat's Eye Nebula.

As binary neutron stars spiral around each other to merge, their gravitational tidal forces distort each other's shape and structure, potentially revealing clues as to what lies within them.

Every time you flip a light switch, or check the time, or feel the sodium ions wiggling in your brain — don’t think about that one too much—you’re assuming something fundamental. You’re assuming the universe is a finished product. A completed work. You think the Big Bang happened, the forces of nature settled into their seats, and we’ve been cruising on a smooth, predictable ride ever since.

Every planet with a magnetic field has a radiation belt, a region of space where charged particles get trapped and flung around at extraordinary speeds. Earth has two of them, and they've been puzzling scientists for decades. Now, a physicist at the University of Helsinki has built a model that defines a universal upper limit to just how energetic those belts can ever get. The answer applies not just to Earth, but to every planet in the Solar System, every gas giant, and even the strange objects sitting halfway between planets and stars.

Spring skies reveal some of the best galaxies visible to backyard telescopes.

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An international team from China and Italy has reported a possible cosmic encore to the landmark 2017 multi-messenger discovery. In November 2024, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observatories detected gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger, designated S241125n. Remarkably, just seconds later, satellites recorded a short gamma-ray burst (GRB) from the same region of the sky.

Astronomers have tracked a powerful blast of radiation back to its source, finding a neutron star collision within colliding galaxies.

So that's all nice. But why now? That's the question everyone asks. We went decades — centuries, millennia really — without seeing a single rock that didn't have a "Made in the Solar System" sticker on it. Then, in the span of less than ten years, we get the Big Three: 'Oumuamua, Borisov, and now 3I/ATLAS.

A powerful "gamma-ray burst" has been seen exploding from merging neutron stars hidden within a previously unknown mini-galaxy leftover from an ancient cosmic crash. The "collision within a collision" could help answer multiple astrophysics questions, researchers say.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are helping to pave a path for the

Despite years of debate and follow-up studies, an odd streak of cosmic light still defies a final explanation. Is it a giant black hole screaming through intergalactic space?

Scientists analyzing a gravitational-wave signal have discovered that a neutron star and black hole spiraled together on an oval-shaped orbit just before merging. This unusual motion, detected in the event GW200105, contradicts the long-held expectation that such pairs settle into nearly perfect circles before collision. The eccentric orbit suggests the system likely formed in a chaotic stellar environment with strong gravitational interactions.

A research team is using astrophysical explosions to understand the mysterious forces at work in some of the smallest building blocks in nature: atomic nuclei. In new research published in Nature Communications, the team uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to decipher the data from astrophysical observations to better understand how neutrons and protons interact in dense matter at the quantum level.

Two powerful instruments of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope joined forces to create this scenic galaxy view. This spiral galaxy is named NGC 5134, and it is located 65 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. Though 65 million light-years may seem like a huge distance—the light that Webb collected to create this image has been journeying to us from NGC 5134 since soon after Tyrannosaurus rex went extinct—NGC 5134 is fairly close by as far as galaxies go. Because of the galaxy's relative proximity, Webb can spot incredible details in its tightly wound spiral arms.

A neutron star merger is an extraordinary event. It features extremely powerful, chaotic magnetic fields that generate extremely energetic photons. Supercomputer simulations show that the extreme gamma-ray photons created in the mayhem can't even escape the chaos.

So why should we expect interstellar comets like 3I/ATLAS and 'Oumuamua and even to some extent Borisov to be different-different?

The comet formed in a cold and distant part of the early Milky Way up to 12 billion years ago, potentially putting it just under 2 billion years the age of the universe.

MIT physicists have observed the first clear evidence that quarks create a wake as they speed through quark-gluon plasma, confirming the plasma behaves like a liquid.

This interstellar visitor is “bursting with methanol,” according to one scientist

Astronomers have discovered that the birth of neutron stars with magnetic fields trillions of times stronger than Earth's magnetosphere is the "magic trick" behind superbright supernovas.

Astronomers have discovered a strange new signal coming from an exploding star — a “chirp” that speeds up over time, similar to the signals seen when black holes collide. The unusual pattern appeared in a superluminous supernova about a billion light-years away and revealed clues about what’s happening deep inside the blast.

When the densest objects in the universe collide and merge, the violence sets off gravitational waves that reverberate

Researchers have uncovered evidence for our sun joining a mass migration of similar "twins" leaving the core regions of our galaxy, 4 to 6 billion years ago. The team created and studied an unprecedentedly accurate catalog of stars and their properties using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite. Their discovery sheds light on the evolution of our galaxy, particularly the development of the rotating bar-like structure at its center.

Merging black holes and neutron stars have unusual oval orbits prior to colliding and merging, which challenge the laws of physics.

Neutron star collision in merging galaxies reveals how cosmic destruction forges heavy elements like gold, offering clues to the universe's chemical evolution.

Scientists have uncovered the first robust evidence of a black hole and neutron star crashing together but orbiting in an oval path rather than a perfect circle just before they merged. This discovery challenges long-standing assumptions about how these cosmic pairs form and evolve.