20+ hour, 1+ min ago   (603+ words) The enormous Cygnus Bubble is usually linked to a busy star-forming region. A new study argues that the microquasar Cygnus X-3 may be the more natural source of its highest-energy gamma rays. Cygnus X-3 is a microquasar, a binary system containing a…...

20+ hour, 46+ min ago   (663+ words) The cosmic microwave background is the oldest light we can observe. Here is where it came from, what its tiny patterns reveal, and why it still matters. About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the expanding universe had cooled enough for…...

3+ day, 15+ hour ago   (1153+ words) The objects are unusually soft in X-rays but bright in extreme ultraviolet light—exactly the combination that makes them difficult to find and potentially important to the history of stars and galaxies. A galaxy can be full of powerful objects…...

6+ day, 21+ hour ago   (624+ words) A neutron star is what remains after the core of a massive star collapses. It is not a small ordinary star. It is the crushed core of a dead one, compressed until protons and electrons are forced together and most…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (373+ words) Researchers have completed one of the largest computer simulations of cosmic history yet assembled. Called ASTRID, it follows the growth of galaxies and black holes from the universe’s early days to the present, giving astronomers a virtual laboratory for testing…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (821+ words) A quasar is a distant galaxy with a brilliant active centre. Here is how a feeding supermassive black hole can outshine every star around it. What is a quasar? The short answer is a distant galaxy with an extraordinarily bright…...

3+ week, 3+ day ago   (758+ words) Black holes are invisible until something gives them away. A disk of hot gas can light up around one. A jet can cross a galaxy. And, in the most violent cases, a black hole can tear apart a star and…...

3+ week, 6+ day ago   (861+ words) When the James Webb Space Telescope began finding tiny, intensely red sources in the early universe, astronomers were not looking at ordinary galaxies. The objects were so compact that, in some images, they looked almost like red points of light....

3+ week, 6+ day ago   (546+ words) The James Webb Space Telescope has found the clearest example yet of an object that looks like a star but is powered by a black hole. Before your next upload Clean image metadata before you share. Remove EXIF, GPS and…...