What do you do when the observation you need comes around once a year? Well, preparation is key, but this is the awkward truth about finding another Earth. When a planet crosses the face of its star, a sliver of starlight passes through its atmosphere on the way to us, and the gases there absorb […]

For decades, astronomers lumped brown dwarfs into a single category defined by mass alone—too big to be classified as planets but too small to become stars. However, this definition ignores the two very different mechanisms that can form them: the direct collapse of gas clouds and formation within the accretion disks of massive stars.

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A popular myth about black holes is that they act like giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, sucking in everything around them. But Wladimir Lyra’s research found a new mechanism around supermassive black holes that is more like a cosmic nursery, giving birth to planets more massive than Jupiter.

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The building blocks of rocky planets may have begun forming just 100 million years after the Big Bang—long before the first galaxies even existed—according to new research from the University of Portsmouth.

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In the image above, a faint trail of stars can be seen stretching across the galaxy. These structures, known as globular cluster stellar streams, are coherent stellar structures that retain a record of their dynamical history and can provide unique insights into the evolution of galaxies and the nature of dark matter.

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To date, close to 30,000 satellites have been launched into Earth’s orbit, leading to mounting concerns over the debris created when they collide. In a new analysis posted to the preprint server arXiv, Hugh Lewis of the University of Birmingham shows that satellite constellations can grow so large that they cross a critical size beyond […]

More than 70% of massive stars are born in close binary systems, where gravitational tugs and mass transfer between companions dramatically alter their evolution. Yet once the interaction ends—whether through mass transfer, merger or the supernova explosion of one partner—the surviving star often appears as a solitary object, hiding its turbulent past. For decades, astronomers […]