astronomers

For decades, scientists and science fiction authors have speculated about whether Barnard’s star, the fastest moving star in the night sky and…

An international team has spotted a remote blast of cosmic radio waves lasting less than a millisecond. This 'fast radio burst' (FRB) is the most distant ever detected. Its source was pinned…

In a solar system about 1,800 light-years from Earth, two planets smacked into one another in an impact that vaporized them both. And astronomers caught them in the act. An…

Names have significance, especially when they’re written in the stars. A group of astronomers is coalescing around an idea to rename two neighbors of the Milky Way, the Large…

Galaxies from the early Universe are more like our own Milky Way than previously thought, flipping the entire narrative of how scientists think about structure formation in the Universe,…

With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers are now able to peer so far back in time that we are approaching the epoch where we think that the first galaxies were created.…

One of a telescope operator’s primary jobs is to keep any stray light out of the instrument. Earthly and other unwelcome photons can swamp the cosmic light from distant stars and…

More than 15 years after the discovery of fast radio bursts (FRBs) -- millisecond-long, deep-space cosmic explosions of electromagnetic radiation -- astronomers worldwide have been combing…

Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe, with features that sound like they come straight from a sci-fi movie. Stellar-mass black holes with masses of roughly 10 suns,…

Astronomers have found evidence that some stars boast unexpectedly strong surface magnetic fields, a discovery that challenges current models of how they evolve. In stars like our sun,…