Astronomy, features and articles | Educational Science

May 12, 2022

Distant 'galaxy' isn't a galaxy at all — but one of the brightest pulsars ever detected

A speck of light that scientists once wrote off as a distant galaxy may actually be the brightest pulsar ever detected outside the Milky Way. Named PSR J0523−7125 and located about 160,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud (a satellite galaxy that orbits the Milky Way), the newly-defined...

Jun 7, 2022

Massive, unknown radio structure detected around the universe's brightest quasar

Astronomers have discovered two large, mysterious objects blasting out of the brightest black hole in the known universe. Discovered in a 1959 survey of cosmic radio-wave sources, the supermassive black hole 3C 273 is a quasar — short for quasi-stellar object, because the light emitted by these behemoths is bright...

Jun 20, 2022

Bizarre spiral object found swirling around Milky Way's center

As if cracking open a cosmic Russian nesting doll, astronomers have peered into the center of the Milky Way and discovered what appears to be a miniature spiral galaxy, swirling daintily around a single large star. The star — located about 26,000 light-years from Earth near the dense and dusty...

Aug 1, 2022

Webb space telescope has just imaged another most-distant galaxy, breaking its record after a week

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted what they think may be the farthest galaxy ever seen — a distant red smudge 13.5 billion light-years away. The galaxy, named CEERS-93316, was pictured as it existed just 235 million years after the Big Bang, using Webb's Near Infrared Camera,...

Aug 3, 2022

Monstrous ‘Kilonova’ Explosions May Be Showering a Nearby Galaxy in Gold

Mergers of this magnitude are so violent they rattle the fabric of space-time, releasing gravitational waves that spread through the cosmos like ripples on a pond. These mergers also fuel cataclysmic explosions that create heavy metals in an instant, showering their galactic neighborhood in hundreds of planets' worth of gold...

Aug 12, 2022

Giant voids of nothingness may be flinging the universe apart

Gigantic deserts of almost complete nothingness that make up most of the universe may be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up, new research suggests. That means these vast tracts of nothingness could explain dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to be flinging the universe apart. Welcome...

Sep 20, 2022

How heavy is the universe? Conflicting answers hint at new physics.

Two entirely different ways of weighing the cosmos are producing disparate results. If more precise measurements fail to resolve the discrepancy, physicists may have to revise the standard model of cosmology, our best description of the universe. If this really is a glimpse of the standard model breaking down, that...

Oct 14, 2022

If We Live in a Multiverse, Where Are These Worlds Hiding?

WASHINGTON — By some estimates, the known universe may contain as many as 2 trillion galaxies, with the average galaxy holding approximately 100 million stars and untold numbers of planets. But could there be multiple copies of the entire universe as we understand it? The concept of a multiverse —...

Oct 14, 2022

Stephen Hawking's Final Paper Cuts the Multiverse Down to Size

Stephen Hawking's final paper, which aims to test a theory that proposes parallel universes, appeared today (May 2) in the Journal of High Energy Physics. As Live Science reported at length in March, before the paper was peer-reviewed and officially published, it shares Hawking's final look at one of his...

Oct 14, 2022

Stephen Hawking's Last Paper (Probably) Doesn't Prove We Live in a Multiverse

A few months before physicist Stephen Hawking died, he published a paper that several media outlets touted as a way to finally prove (or disprove) the existence of parallel worlds. But that claim may be a bit of cosmic inflation, said several physicists who were not involved in Hawking's research....

Feb 10, 2023

James Webb telescope finds Milky Way's long-lost twin 9 billion years in the past

A sparkling cannibal galaxy discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope appears to be a very early mirror image of the Milky Way, and it could help astronomers understand how our galaxy took shape, a new study has revealed. Located 9 billion light-years from Earth, the galaxy is named the...

Mar 7, 2023

Galaxy-size shock waves found rattling the cosmic web — the largest structure in the universe

For the first time, astronomers have spotted enormous, galaxy-scale shock waves rattling the cosmic web that connects nearly all known galaxies. These cosmic waves could reveal clues about how the largest objects in the universe were sculpted. The discovery was made by stitching and stacking thousands of radio telescope images...

Mar 22, 2023

China is hunting the world's most elusive particles a mile beneath the ocean floor

China is building a detector deep beneath the ocean surface to hunt for the world's most elusive subatomic particles. Every second, tens of trillions of these ghostly neutrinos stream through Earth (and your body) without interacting with anything. Occasionally, these neutrally charged particles will collide with a stray atom's nucleus,...

Mar 28, 2023

Brightest gamma-ray burst ever detected defies explanation

The brightest gamma-ray burst ever detected is revealing new mysteries as scientists study it in greater detail. In two new papers – one published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and another published on the preprint server arXiv and submitted for publication in the journal Nature Astronomy – astronomers found...

Mar 30, 2023

Extremely flat explosion dubbed 'the Cow' defies explanation

A weird cosmic explosion that stunned scientists in 2018 just got even stranger. A new analysis of the polarized light from the first recorded fast blue optical transient (FBOT) explosion — officially known as AT2018cow and nicknamed the Cow — revealed that the blast is the most asymmetrical explosion ever...