Astronomy, features and articles | Educational Science

Aug 17, 2023

10 dazzling photos of the Perseid meteor shower, 2023

The peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower may have passed (this year, peak activity fell overnight from Aug. 12 to Aug. 13), but the skies of Earth are still ablaze with shooting stars. The Perseids began on July 14 and run through Sept. 1, 2023, as Earth passes through...

Jan 2, 2022

'Cosmic monster' star spits energy with the force of a billion suns

A dense, magnetic star violently erupted and spat out as much energy as a billion suns — and it happened in a fraction of a second, scientists recently reported. This type of star, known as a magnetar, is a neutron star with an exceptionally strong magnetic field, and magnetars often...

Jan 7, 2022

Bizarre cloud of gas is one of the longest structures in the Milky Way

Astronomers have discovered what may be the longest structure in the Milky Way: an unusual cloud of hydrogen. The gigantic structure, which is more than 3,900 light-years long and around 150 light-years wide, is located roughly 55,000 light-years away from the solar system, according to a statement by researchers. (Previously,...

Jan 24, 2022

The Higgs boson could have kept our universe from collapsing

The Higgs boson, the mysterious particle that lends other particles their mass, could have kept our universe from collapsing. And its properties might be a clue that we live in a multiverse of parallel worlds, a wild new theory suggests. That theory, in which different regions of the universe have...

Jan 26, 2022

Astronomers detect powerful cosmic object unlike anything they've seen before

Astronomers have discovered a mysterious, flickering object in the Milky Way that belches enormous amounts of energy toward Earth three times an hour. This strangely powerful object — located about 4,000 light-years from the sun — is unlike any cosmic structure ever observed, researchers wrote in a study published Jan....

Jan 29, 2022

Astronomers discover 1,000 strange 'filaments' of radio energy bursting from the galaxy's center

Researchers gazing into the center of the Milky Way with one of the world's largest radio telescope arrays have discovered thousands of mysterious strand-like structures never seen before. These structures, known as radio filaments, jut out of the galactic center in long, thin tendrils — some of which stretch up...

Feb 17, 2022

Largest galaxy ever discovered baffles scientists

Astronomers just found the largest galaxy ever discovered, and they have no idea how it got so big. At 16.3 million light-years wide, the Alcyoneus galaxy has a diameter 160 times wider than the Milky Way and four times that of the previous title holder, IC 1101, which spans 3.9...

Feb 18, 2022

Three galaxies are tearing each other apart in stunning new Hubble telescope image

Corkscrewing through the cosmos, three distant galaxies collide in a stunning new image captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. This cosmic crash is known as a triple galaxy merger, when three galaxies slowly draw each other nearer and tear each other apart with their competing gravitational forces. Mergers like these...

Feb 27, 2022

Largest shock wave in the universe is '60 times larger than the Milky Way,' new study finds

What happens when two of the largest objects in the universe collide? Simple, says a new study: They create one of the largest shock waves in the universe. Located about 730 million light-years from Earth, Abell 3667 is a galaxy cluster in chaos. Actually composed of two clusters (or groups)...

Mar 28, 2022

The Milky Way's 'thick disk' is 2 billion years older than scientists thought

Misjudging someone's age can be awkward… especially when you're off by a few billion years. That may be the case with our Milky Way galaxy, research published March 23 in the journal Nature suggests. In the new study, scientists inferred the ages of roughly 250,000 stars in the Milky Way...

Apr 7, 2022

Astronomers just discovered the farthest object in the known universe — but what is it?

A possible galaxy that exists some 13.5 billion light-years from Earth has broken the record for farthest astronomical object ever seen. That age places this collection of stars, now dubbed HD1, between a time of total darkness — about 14 billion years ago the universe was a blank slate devoid...

Apr 8, 2022

Galactic bones inside Milky Way's skeleton are a magnetic mess

Astronomers have produced the most detailed map yet of the magnetic field within a part of one of the Milky Way's spiral arms called a galactic bone — a long filament of dense gas and dust that forms down the middle of the arm of a spiral galaxy. The new...

Apr 22, 2022

Cosmic 'angel wings' emerge from violent galactic collision in Leo constellation

An angel gets its wings as two distant galaxies collide in a stunning new image snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope. The galactic smashup took place in the VV689 system in the constellation Leo. The delicate wings formed as the two gravitationally bound objects collided and merged, deforming each other....

May 2, 2022

The universe could stop expanding 'remarkably soon', study suggests

After nearly 13.8 billion years of nonstop expansion, the universe could soon grind to a standstill, then slowly start to contract, new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests. In the new paper, three scientists attempt to model the nature of dark energy —...

May 3, 2022

What is the universe?

The universe is literally everything, the sum of all existence. It includes all matter, like stars and galaxies. The universe also includes all radiation and all other forms of energy. No matter where or when you exist, you are a part of the universe, as is everything you experience. There...