SUNSET: 
Planets Around Planets?
Astronomers have found disks surrounding planetary-mass objects, as this artist's rendition depicts. Evidence continues to mount that planets can form around very-low-mass objects. In fact, planets might even form around objects that are so low in mass that they themselves could be considered "planets." The latest results, reported at this…
Black Hole–Galaxy Link Extended
Spiral galaxy M33 has a small, compact stellar nucleus. The masses of such nuclei scale to the mass of the host galaxy. Click to view a larger image.Courtesy Travis Rector / M. Hanna / NOAO / AURA / NSF. Over the past decade, astronomers have established the remarkable fact that…
Amateurs Help Discover Transiting Exoplanet
Artist Greg Bacon created this impression of the extrasolar planet XO-1b, recently discovered by a team of professional and amateur astronomers. Click on the image to view a larger version.Courtesy NASA / ESA / Greg Bacon. For the first time, amateur astronomers have made a major contribution to the discovery…
Galaxy Merger Movies
A color view from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the Antennae, two spiral galaxies in Corvus in the process of merging. This system gets its nickname from the long tidal tails visible in the accompanying ground-based, black-and-white image. The Antennae give us a sneak preview of what will happen when…
A Supernova's Backwash May Form Planets
Astronomer-artist Robert Hurt depicts the disk around the neutron star 4U 0142+61. The disk contains about 10 Earth masses of material and orbits very close to the star. Click on the image for a larger view.Courtesy NASA / JPL / Caltech / R. Hurt (SSC). For many years astronomers have…
Cosmic Explosion Mystery Deepens
Artist Dana Berry depicts the short gamma-ray burst (GRB) that occurs when a neutron star falls into a black hole. Astronomers are beginning to realize that other violent events can also cause short GRBs.Courtesy NASA / GSFC / Dana Berry. Just when astronomers thought they had solved one of astronomy's…
Astro Image in the News:
M101: A Hubble Mosaic
A 192-megapixel Hubble view shows the spiral galaxy M101 in more detail than astronomers once thought possible.
Astronomers Agog Over Stellar Explosion
This artist's conception depicts the violent pair of jets emitted by a typical gamma-ray burst (GRB). Astronomers now think that some supernovae channel some of their energy into jets of material traveling at near light speed. The GRB arises from shock waves within the jets. Click on the image for…
Galactic Glow Gleaned
The perfect match between an X-ray image obtained by the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite (contours) and a near-infrared image of the galaxy taken by the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (color coded) indicates that X-ray emission traces the distribution of stars. This result, in turn, suggests that the galactic X-ray…
A Stripped-Down Globular
The Very Large Telescope (VLT) captures the central region of globular cluster M12 (also known as NGC 6218). VLT observations show that the cluster is extremely deficient in low-mass stars. The image covers an area of sky 3.5 arcminutes on each side, which translates to a physical size of 23…
Asteroids from the Kuiper Belt
Artist Lynette Cook depicts the Trojan asteroid 617 Patroclus and its companion, which has been tentatively named Menoetius. The two bodies are 122 and 112 kilometers (76 and 70 miles) wide, respectively, and orbit each other every 4.3 days. They are separated by about 680 km. Click on the image…
Surprise! Most Star Systems Are Single
An artist's conception of the outer giant planet orbiting the red-dwarf star Gliese 876. The inner planet is the tiny dot close to the star. Though redder and dimmer than the Sun, red dwarfs still have temperatures and surface brightnesses great enough to make them appear as dazzlingly white as…
Going Deep in Virgo
Astronomers found the boxed dwarf galaxy in the Virgo IntraCluster Stars (VICS) deep field. The image was taken by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys over the course of 37 orbits. The box is about 3,000 light-years across. The small red objects are background galaxies. You can click on all of…
Low-Mass Exoplanet
Astronomers have no direct information about the composition of the newly discovered exoplanet OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb. But based on its low temperature and its mass, the planet probably consists mostly of ice and rock with a thin atmosphere. This artist's rendering depicts the planet as an overgrown version of Pluto. Click on…
Spinning Pulsar Smashes Record
New pulsar picks-up first place as the fastest spinning object yet.
Vega Mystery Solved; Red Dwarf Mystery Grows
Hidden in plain sight. Familiar Vega, one of the brightest stars in the sky, has just yielded up a surprising secret about its true nature.Photo by Akira Fujii. Astronomers have finally figured out the long-standing mystery of why Vega, the fifth-brightest star in the night sky, is brighter than it…
More Evidence that Black Holes Are For Real
A team of astronomers announced on Monday compelling new evidence that black holes do exist in nature.
Feeding the Monster
An international team has peered deep into the heart of an active galaxy, giving astronomers their best view yet of how streams of gas feed black holes in galactic cores.
Milky Way Supernova Rate Confirmed
This image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows detailed structures in the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. The supernova that produced this remnant was probably the one observed by John Flamsteed in 1680 — the last observed supernova in the Milky Way Galaxy. Click on the image to view a larger…
A Creator's Possible Calling Card
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is leftover radiation from the Big Bang redshifted (stretched) by the universe's expansion into the microwave region of the spectrum. In this image NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) records minuscule temperature fluctuations in the CMB as different colors. In principle, an advanced civilization could…
