Timing a Sextuple Quasar
Quasars are galaxies with massive black holes at their cores around which vast amounts of energy are being radiated. Indeed, so much light is emitted that the nucleus of a quasar is much ...
Inferring the Star Formation Rates of Galaxies
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Our Milky Way galaxy produces on average a few new stars every year across the entire system. Massive young stars emit large amounts of ultraviolet radiation which heats the local dust, ...
Tiny, Ultracool Star is Super Stormy
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Our Sun is a relatively quiet star that only occasionally releases solar flares or blasts of energetic particles that threaten satellites and power grids. You might thi...
To Find Alien Worlds, First Look at Our Sun
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One well-trusted method of finding an exoplanet is to see how much wobble it induces in its parent star. Right now, the state of the art precision for detecting planets a few dozen light-...
Discovery Measures "Heartbeats" of a Distant Galaxy's Stars
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In many ways stars are like living beings. They're born; they live; they die. And they even have a heartbeat. Using a novel technique, astronomers have detected thousan...
Unveiling the Active Galactic Nucleus of a Quasar
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3C 273 is the nearest high-luminosity quasar to Earth, about two billion light-years away, and shining with the power of more than about three thousand Milky Way galaxies. Since its disc...
The Giant Magellan Telescope Organization Breaks Ground in Chile
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Astronomers Eager to Get a Whiff of Newfound Venus-like Planet
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The collection of rocky planets orbiting distant stars has just grown by one, and the latest discovery is the most intriguing one to date. The newfound world, although ...
A Hot Jupiter Around a Sun-Like Star
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There are almost 1800 confirmed exoplanets known today, and over 4000 exoplanet candidates. Astronomers have obtained estimates for the masses and radii (and hence the average densities) ...
Disk Gaps Don't Always Signal Planets
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When astronomers study protoplanetary disks of gas and dust that surround young stars, they sometimes spot a dark gap like the Cassini division in Saturn's rings. It ha...